In this podcast, I speak with Dr. Nicole Vane, a holistic and integrative dentistry practitioner, my own dentist in fact, about the links between dental health, chronic fatigue, sleep disorders, nutrition, CBD, obstructed breathing, autoimmune disease, and more.
In this podcast, Dr. Vane covers:
- How your jaw structure affects your airways
- How diet can affect children’s mouth development
- Why doing research on your dentist is essential for your health
- Can bad teeth make you sick? (The link between dental health and autoimmune disease)
- Her personal experience with CBD oil in her clinic
- How the way you breathe affects your sleep, health, and weight
Download or listen on iTunes
Listen outside iTunes
Watch
Dental health, chronic fatigue, sleep disorders, nutrition, CBD, obstructed breathing, autoimmune disease and more, with holistic dentist Dr. Nicole Vane- Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey guys, this is Ari Whitten and welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. As you can see if you’re watching this video, this is a unique episode. We’re actually in my house and this is my personal dentist and she’s been on the Podcast before. Her name is doctor Nicole Vane. She is an expert in holistic and integrative dentistry, and she’s been texting me recently and she’s like, “Hey, you got to have me back on your show because I have all this cool new stuff that I want to talk about.” So here you see all this, all these notes that she has bombarded me with about all these, you know, all these books and things that she is like highlighting and excited to show me. So, we’re going to be sharing with you a bunch of great new information related to dental health, but more broadly to all aspects of your health and to fatigue and some unique causes of fatigue that not a lot of people are talking about. So welcome back Dr. Nicole Vane.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Thank you for having me back.
What is Holistic and Integrative Dentistry?
Ari Whitten: Yeah, it’s such a pleasure. So, first of all, let’s talk about what holistic and integrative dentistry is. So, what’s the difference between a regular dentist and somebody who is like you specializing in holistic and integrated dentistry?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, that’s a great question because it took me a long time to figure it out myself. But it’s understanding the relationship between each tooth and the body. So, each tooth is on a meridian and each tooth links to different organ structures in the body. So, if a tooth is mistreated, it can cause a trigger of misinformation in terms of energy flow to organ systems, which can manifest in many different ways. So, it’s not something we’re ever taught about in dental school, but it’s very similar to the way acupuncture works in that you can get a needle in your hand that’s actually going to help the liver work better. Or a chiropractor who makes an adjustment in your neck or spine to get the energy to flow better to your kidney. It actually has the same messenger system within our body related to the teeth.
And the second part of it is that we’re trained… I mean, I’ve been practicing over 15 years, but even now in dental school we still learn mercury fillings, gold crowns. The standard is 30 years ago and a lot of those materials we have found to be toxic. And all the new sexy, beautiful white materials we use are fancy plastics and much of them have, or many of them have BPA in them and different resin cascades that are also super toxic. So, we’re trading mercury for another one that can cause a lot of problems in patients. So, especially patients that are already autoimmune, they are very sensitive and can’t clear or don’t know what to do with these foreign materials. And so, their body starts reacting and there’s no dentist out there who will tell it’s their tooth causing it because we’re not trained on it. So, we have a lot of separate academies. We’re our own people so to speak – International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, International Academy of Biologic Medicine. There is a Holistic Dental Association where we meet a lot on how to get people to detox some of these toxic materials out of their body or how these patients present and how we can make them better.
Ari Whitten: Got you.
Dr. Nicole Vane: So, it’s pretty, pretty complex.
The Relationship Between Your Teeth and Your Other Organs and Body Systems
Ari Whitten: Yeah, excellent. And, you know, the integrative part, I just want to emphasize that a little bit more. Which is kind of that you’re looking, you know, a lot of what you’re doing is procedures on the mouth, but it is with this understanding of how that is relating to so many other aspects of health. And we have research linking what’s going on in the mouth to obviously things like heart disease, neurological diseases, what else? You know, leaky gut and a variety of others.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right, right. Like the big thing that has really hit in the past 10 years is the relationship between getting your teeth cleaned and getting heart disease, like you said, or triggers for heart attacks. There’s a lot of C-reactive proteins and different bugs that come from our mouth that we know now go throughout our body. So, if you’re going to get your hip replaced or you’re going to undergo major surgery they want dental clearance because there is a lot of bacteria that goes from our mouth throughout the body.
So, there is that understanding. And holistically done is knowing it at a greater level of how to address it. It’s more than just scraping teeth. There’s a lot of things to look for on 3D x-rays. We look at the airway. And you and I had a side conversation earlier. I was telling you how we can often see gut dysbiosis and different issues in the GI by seeing how inflamed the mouth is. Because the gut is the second brain, right, of our immune system.
But so is the mouth. Everything in the mouth literally mirrors the gut. So even though I can’t see down their throat into their intestine, I can tell by the type of bacteria in their mouth and how their tissues are responding what the bleeding is from. It’s not just as simple as not flossing. It can really be like a core inflammation that’s manifesting in the mouth.
The other thing we’re really seeing a lot of, and it’s intriguing me and one of the reasons I’m like, “You have to have me back” is the acidity I’m seeing in the mouth and the amount of grinding and things that we would attribute just in dentistry to stress or you having a wrong bite, is actually acidity from your GI that’s manifesting in the mouth. Some of the excessive erosion and things.
A dentist will just say, “You’re brushing too hard or you’re grinding your teeth” and it’s actually a core issue coming from gut issues or autoimmune issues. So, you can’t solve one without solving the other. And these pieces of the puzzle are just so fascinating to me. And then the more you learn about it, the more cases you see and the more questions you start asking, you know, your patient interviews get more detailed. But it’s really interesting to see them unraveled. Some of them take a while, but to see patients get better has been like phenomenal.
How Your Dental Health and Jaw Structure Affects Your Airways and More
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, I want to jump right into this topic that you’ve been super excited about, which is airways. You have this book sitting over here on the table called, “Gasp.” So, what have you been researching? And I know it’s not just that you just read a book, but you’ve actually been applying this with patients for a while now and your findings have been, I think, quite shocking to not only your patients but you as well. So, talk to me about what you’ve discovered when it comes to the airways.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, it kind of started actually with my own mouth that as a dentist who wanted to be a dentist because of the way my orthodontics were done. When I became a dentist, I’m like, “Wow. The orthodontist that I loved so much that inspired me totally messed up my bite, my health”. There’s so many things that, because they pulled several teeth when I was growing and shoved my arches back. It’s left me with a lot of issues that I can’t fix anymore because I’m no longer growing.
So TMJ, headaches, postural issues, I have to go to the chiropractor to compensate for the way my bite is, from the way my braces were done. So, all these pieces of the puzzle that I saw on myself has made me very intrigued. And as you dive into it more, you start learning more about how tongue ties develop and why the arches are constricted and it all relates to diet.
So, when you start learning more about the diet and how our modern day western diet and the nutritional deficiencies that have developed from having these softer foods and highly processed foods, how it has misshapen our jaws, which then leads to no room for our tongue, which leads to breathing issues and sleep disordered breathing, which then makes our body more acidic and triggers more autoimmune. So all these pieces coming in are just fascinating to me. And so I’ve been diving in a lot more into what we would typically think of as sleep apnea. But it’s actually not just that. It’s sleep disordered breathing in different forms and ways that I’m seeing it manifest in the mouth. So…
Ari Whitten: I want to jump back just a little bit to something you were saying 30 seconds ago, which is just the fact that there are all of these sort of weird abnormalities occurring in our mouths and in our jaw structure. And, you know, I think there are sort of two ways of looking at that or two theories that you can have when it comes to just the reason that we have so much of those issues. Like why do people need braces and retainers and so much work, structural work on their mouths?
Why are humans being born with those issues? And you can say, I guess one theory could be, “Hey, that’s just how we are supposed to be. And, you know, we just have a sense of aesthetics where, you know, we want to fix all those things to make them look a certain way. But really everything is as it should be from an evolutionary perspective.”
And then the other way of looking at it would be, you know, I think to go look at some of these tribes and traditional peoples who are existing in a more historically sort of native and traditional way that humans have existed for most of evolution and see if they also have the same dental issues that we have. And then from there you can kind of get more clarity on that. I know we’re going to get more into that, but basically it’s the latter, right? It’s that in the modern world we have all kinds of abnormalities in the jaw structure and the way the teeth come in that then we require dental work to fix those things.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right. Right. So the Price/Pottenger studies… Like Dr. Price, Weston Price, in the 1920s was traveling around looking at all these skulls and skulls of just a hundred years before and also skulls of the initial Homo sapiens with these broad wide arches and wide open airways, by the way. Our ability to speak dropped our voice box and let the ability of Homo erectus to be upright actually is what initially led to the constriction of our airway, also. But, having these diets where we were eating meat off the bone, eating raw, crunchy carrots, not having these soft cooked foods. And then the advent of the industrialized wheat, all the wheat products and processed flours and hot dogs and all these other things. If you go to a tribe, and back then in the 1920s he went to several tribes for… Literally like loin cloth, not touched by society, and there’s wide broad arches, broad open airways, broad open nasal passages and no decay. So you’re finding these skulls and they can date them. People were still living to their sixties, eighties with no decay and all the wisdom teeth in them. And one generation of them being touched by a western diet and they had decay, cavities and gum disease in their children. So it’s amazing it would manifest that fast.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, just to play devil’s advocate, if somebody didn’t want to be, you know, a believer in the idea that we’re having all these abnormalities in our jaw structure and the way our teeth are coming in as a result of, you know, just one generation or a few generations of the modern western diet, are there any other layers of evidence to support this? Like have they done experiments in animals showing that, you know, you can take some kind of animal, subject them to a different kind of diet and then all of a sudden see totally different jaw structures and the way the teeth are coming in?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, one of the most common ones, referenced is Pottenger’s cats, right? So Pottenger had cats and he had this theory that food was affecting the way arches are developing. And so he took the cats and had one control study of cats that were given the regular… They all nursed and were breastfed and then given raw meats.
And then he took another set of kittens from the same litter and gave them pasteurized milk and cooked, processed, canned, soft food. And all of those kittens developed with narrow arches, narrow airways and crowded teeth that were given the pasteurized milk. In one generation. And their kittens, of that same control, not the control group that was breastfed but the control group that was fed what would be related to our modern day diet. All their kittens, had, of the next generation, more crowded teeth and more narrow… And then the next generation after that, even worse.
Dr. Nicole Vane: So it’s amazing how one shift can lead to three generations of like now what it would take… I don’t even know evolutionarily how you start to undo that. And what we’re seeing is such bad crowding that not only is there not room for the wisdom teeth, but now traditionally, what happened in my case as well is we take out several adult teeth and shove the teeth even further back because there’s no room for them, which further narrows our airway, leaves no room for our tongue, leaves us with odd facial profiles, and also causes a lot of breathing issues.
No room for our adenoids. So that’s what’s leading to a lot of the increases in children with tongue tie. And with ADHD. It’s up 700% since 1970 and a lot of that’s related to breathing issues. And our facial aesthetics, too, have changed even since Robert Redford and Marilyn Monroe are referenced as the beauties of like the 1950s. They have wide, broad jaw forms and no orthodontics. Broad nasal passages.
Dr. Nicole Vane: And then our modern day beauties of Justin Bieber who has a long face, a pointy little pug nose and he mouth breaths and…
Ari Whitten: Whoa. Why judging so harsh on Justin Bieber? That’s messed up.
Dr. Nicole Vane: I know, I know, I know. I’m not a believer. I think he is talented in his own way, but he’s an example of our modern day beauty is really shifting to the narrow face structure. Also because it’s becoming such the norm, I don’t even want to know what it’s going to look like in two generations from now. What the version of beauty is going to be in terms of our facial jaw structure, it’s truly being so deformed. Even if you look at in the 1940s, the shift from 1900 to 1940, you started to see what’s developing. Instead of what’s called a “U” shaped arch, which is essentially the shape of the tongue with a wide vault, you are seeing these narrow “V” shaped arches, with sharp nasal passages by the 40s.
So now, obviously, with more modernized food, the applesauce pouches and the Chicken McNuggets and the Mac ‘N Cheese, kids are not only having food allergies related to the way that we are processing our foods, but they’re also not having room for their tongues. And we’re ending up with all of these tongue ties.
And the trend away from breastfeeding in the 1960s as women came into the workforce, that really also exacerbated the way that arches were being developed. So it’s pretty fascinating to see how in a small time frame how much we’ve changed our facial profiles. And it’s not just in the USA. You know, if you went to China and they introduced the McDonald’s, they too start having extreme obesity, crowding, gum disease. And in just one generation. It’s really interesting.
Ari Whitten: So we are in the McDonald’s/Justin Bieber era now.
Dr. Nicole Vane: We are. Welcome. It’s going to be great. So what I’m seeing a lot, and the reason I reached out to you is these… There is a great book by Dr. Felix Liao, called “Six-Foot Tiger, Three-Foot Cage.”
And he makes the analogy it’s like putting a six foot tiger in a three foot cage that we’ve narrowed the arches so much the tongue has nowhere to go. So what we attribute now to not sleeping well because of stress and everyone’s on the go and they’re drinking coffee and whatever. It’s actually that we’re not getting good REM sleep, where a lot of times we’re either stuck in stage three or not even entering stage three sleep. So there’s no restorative sleep. So we’re seeing this huge, huge surge in autoimmune disorders, which is diet plus how well we are getting oxygenated and nourished. Our bodies are just, they don’t know what to do with all these moderation day insults. So…
Ari Whitten: I want to get back to the autoimmune stuff later and maybe even more specifics on the nutrient stuff. We have kind of the modern lifestyle, the modern diet is affecting jaw structure, dental structure. Going back to airways, what’s going on there?
How Eating Habits in Childhood and Infancy Impact Dental Structure and Ultimately Total Body Health
Dr. Nicole Vane: Okay. So what we’re seeing as these children are being, they are either tongue tied and not diagnosed or they are bottle fed in general for the convenience of the mother. It’s not to shame anyone for bottle feeding, it’s just to let people know that the lack of nursing is leading to automatically the nasal passage, the nasal passage is developing very narrow and the tongue isn’t being brought up to the roof of the mouth to shape it to have enough room for the teeth. So already when the primary teeth are coming in, there’s not enough room for the tongue. So what happens is the tongue over time either starts to fall back and block the throat or the children will shift to getting really large adenoids. So instead of breathing through a pretty broad area, you are breathing through instead a little teeny drinking straw at night.
Ari Whitten: Just tell people what adenoids are…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Adenoids are your tonsils. So having enlarged tonsils in the back of your throat. Having kids sleep with their mouth open, getting what we call allergic shiners, which is having big, baggy eyes in children is a sign that they’re not getting enough air, they’re not able to breath through their nose properly. So if they are mouth breathing a lot, it leads to a lot of inflammation in their throat, tonsils, airway, and a lot of it will manifest as a lack of oxygen.
In children it shows up as ADHD. They’re struggling to stay awake because they’re not sleeping restfully at night, even if their eyes are closed and it looks like they’re sleeping, they’re constantly lethargic. And then what we see in adults is we see them, people who are falling asleep at stoplights, falling asleep at their desk, they’re having 20 cups of coffee to get through the day.
They’re having brain fog, they can’t focus, they’re not performing well at work. They have no motivation to work out because they are so tired all the time and they don’t know why. So there is that subset of population where, you know, everyone’s on their, playing video games at night and comes home and gets fast food and sits on the couch. So those people, obviously we would expect it.
But there’s also people who are trying their hardest to stay healthy, eat right, work out and they can’t lose weight and they don’t know what’s wrong. They don’t feel like themselves anymore. And we’re seeing it in younger and younger subsets. Like what we would think of as sleep disordered breathing or sleep apnea is a big fat 60-year-old who snores like a freight train at night. And that’s what medical doctors think of.
That’s what primary care physicians typically would… you wouldn’t even fall into that category if you went to your doctor and said, “What is wrong with me? I can’t lose weight. I’m working out or I can’t work out. I can’t get motivated.” Then they will even put you a lot of times on antidepressants and then you will start manifesting more with the lack of oxygen with all these wonderful other autoimmune things, thyroid, whatnot.
So then you’re like, “Oh, I must be so tired because of my thyroid.” And the whole issue is you’re not getting restful sleep because you can’t get enough oxygen saturation at night to reach REM sleep. So starting at birth with the bottle feeding and you know… Hey my son, on his, after he goes to his playgroup he’ll have an apple sauce pouch. It may be organic but he’s still not chewing the apple, right? So he has crowded teeth and it drives me crazy.
He is a two year old. I breastfed him but he’s already headed on that path because he was tongue tied and he has my genetics now for a narrow arch and facial form. So, some people are good compensators to a point like, you know, I got through college and dental school on five hours sleep a night with no coffee. I am not that person now. I don’t know how, but I’m a good compensator. So now I have thyroid disease and all these other issues and I’m a good compensator. But essentially if I’m not aware of it and doing everything I can to prevent it, I’m headed for a huge crash myself. And you see it in so many of my patients that are on disability now, they can’t work. They are told they are depressed, they don’t know even where to start. And even if they went to a medical professional, the medical professional doesn’t know where to start either.
Dental Health’s Effects on Breathing and Sleep Disorders
So, I’m seeing all the relationships in the mouth. And so what happens is, is people who had orthodontics, it’s kind of a rite of passage nowadays, right? Everyone has it in junior high. I know I couldn’t wait to get my braces because everyone had them, but they took out four teeth on me. And most people have eight teeth taken out, their wisdom teeth plus their bicuspids. And evolutionarily some people, including actually in my family, it’s a trait, are missing their lateral incisors or initial teeth on top of that because there’s just no room genetically for everything. So now we have this tongue and this airway that should be wide and we’re narrowing it with our orthodontics. We are shoving everything back in the face. So you might be fine as a teenager, but when you’re entering now your 20s and the workforce and then again if you’re not eating well on top of it, you’re going to end up with very, very unrestful sleep.
Dr. Nicole Vane: So what happens is you end up with something that’s not truly sleep apnea but it’s called OSD which is obstructive sleep disorder, or OSA, obstructive sleep apnea, or SDB which is sleep disordered breathing. So if you did a sleep study at night, you would not be categorized as having true apnea, which is a certain amount of stopped breathing for a certain amount of time. So let’s just say there’s 60 episodes in an hour where you stop breathing for 10 seconds each time. You wouldn’t classify as true sleep apnea because the cutoff might be 20 seconds of stopping breathing to be diagnosed.
Ari Whitten: And the way that they do that is not, it’s like basically with hard cut offs. Like you have to meet these criteria to be diagnosed with sleep apnea but they don’t frame it as a spectrum of like you are halfway in the direction of sleep apnea. You know, the optimal breathing pattern is over here, let’s say. And then you know, sleep apnea is over here and you’re about like here.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right. So if you were breathing, let’s call the cut off at 15 seconds. So if you stopped breathing for 11 seconds, you’re not going to be classified as having sleep apnea. But you do have obstructive sleep apnea. So you might not need a CPAP machine, which has forced air which is an appliance we have to do when people truly stop breathing. But you’re going to feel unrested. So what happens is your oxygen saturation drops enough, your tongue falls back and your body will wake itself up from stage four, which is your REM and restful and restorative sleep to stage three.
So your eyes are closed, you’re still relaxed. You might just roll over onto your side, but you’re not getting restorative sleep. So even if you slept 10 hours, you’re not even getting three or four hours worth of quality sleep. You end up with a sleep deficit which then manifests in depression, anxiety, headaches, brain fog, all of these other spectrum of things that are related to how you’re sleeping at night.
Ari Whitten: Right. But you don’t have this very clear sort of objective marker of just the number of hours in bed to cue you to the fact that you are sleep deprived. So like in other words, people can be sleeping eight hours in bed, which is sort of the classic typical recommendation and think, “You know, I’m spending adequate time in bed. Why am I still waking up tired and fatigued and feeling unrested?”
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right. And so they’ll say like, “What’s wrong with me? Like I suck at work. Like I had this presentation and I couldn’t even get it together. Like I’m barely making my way through the day.” Or, again, it becomes dangerous where they are falling asleep at stoplights. Or, you know, if they are a college student in class who is misdiagnosed. They’re falling asleep in the back of the classroom and it’s actually just they are at a sleep deficit.
So people compensate with coffee or trying to exercise or develop better routine and they don’t understand why they’re getting worse and worse and worse. And that’s where they’ll turn to you. Something like, “I want to look into this. Is it adrenal fatigue? Is it my thyroid’s off?” But no one’s really looking at, “What about my airway?” Including your medical doctor or your dentist.
So, I like the analogy of the five blind men looking at an elephant, right? So one is touching the ears and he’s like, “Elephants are really soft and flexible.” And then another one’s holding the tail and they’re like, “No, they’re not. They have really coarse hair and they feel like a paintbrush.” And one’s holding the leg and they’re like, “No, they’re broad and pebbled in texture.” They’re all describing different parts of the elephant, but they’re not able to see the whole elephant, right? And so that’s kind of where people get lost. And…
Ari Whitten: Yeah, and I’ll just add to that, you know, I’ve done a lot of work around sort of debunking adrenal fatigue and understanding the real causes of why somebody has low morning cortisol levels. And you know, just as you’re describing the elephant analogy, one of the things that is actually a real cause of low morning cortisol levels is circadian rhythm disruption and sleep disruption.
So just to add to what you are saying, what is a very, very common and possible scenario is somebody who is showing up with low morning cortisol levels. If they go see somebody who’s a proponent of adrenal fatigue, they’ll say, “Oh, chronic stress is wearing out your adrenal glands. Let’s get you on my adrenal support supplements and fix your adrenals.” But, if the real problem is just sleep disruption as a result of an airway problem and a breathing problem, you can take all the adrenal supplements you want but it’s not going to fix the real underlying cause of that sleep disruption.
Dr. Nicole Vane: That’s exactly it. And it goes even further than that with the inability to lose weight and how your body is processing these things. Simple, simple things can even worsen these conditions, like being pregnant. Having that, the shift of the weight of the baby developing or even just the pregnancy weight. Simple weight gain of even three to five pounds or getting a bad cold and having inflammation in your throat can really exacerbate these things.
And if they get bad enough you actually never recover from that single onset trigger that sends you now into this horrible sleep deficit that develops over the course of a year. So there is not always, it’s not always that you are just born with it. There are small changes. Even again, you know, you start a desk job and you gain an extra 10 pounds, that can shift the way we’re sleeping, shift the pressure on our airway and then lead us into these downward spirals of sleep deficit that then manifests as adrenal fatigue and whatnot.
So what’s so interesting to me, too, is now I’ve added to my health history exam, “How well are you sleeping? Do you snore? Do you sleep on your back?” Because what I’m finding is patients that are clenching and grinding their teeth, what happens is they’re actually jutting their jaw forward at night to bring their tongue forward so it’s not blocking their airway. So their body is trying to do their own CPR. We’re seeing it in the mouth. But what are we taught in middle school? “Oh, you grind your teeth because you’re stressed. So let me make you a mouth guard. There, you are cured.” That doesn’t do anything for them other than keep their teeth apart. But it’s not addressing why are they grinding their teeth. And so a lot of it is again, because the arches are set too narrow and there’s not enough room for their tongue at night.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So I have a question for you. Maybe some people are listening to this thinking, “You know, is this just a really rare thing that, you know, maybe occurs in 0.2% of people but is not at all a common thing.” What, in your experience, how common do you think this is?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, what we’re seeing now is they are saying that if people were truly diagnosed as not sleep apnea but sleep disordered breathing or obstructive sleep apnea and they are being treated for it correctly, they would need, you need things like a sleep study to actually see how many events do you, are having per night where you are having these subtle wake ups and how your oxygen saturation is dropping.
You know, if you truly have a number to correlate with it where people are being diagnosed, it’s 60% of adults and possibly more than that of children. So, and we’re talking young adults now, like a lot of these cases are 24 year olds who just started law school. So again, we always are attributing it to the stress. But it might just be that they are studying more, they put on 10 pounds because they’re always at the library and now that’s affecting their airway.
Dr. Nicole Vane: They are not getting restful sleep. And then it starts to go on from there. And people don’t often seek help until it’s truly a life changing problem. And so, to go back to children, if it’s diagnosed properly, there are countless stories of these mothers whose kids are having huge behavioral disorders, ADHD, they’re flunking out of school. They can’t read, they’re being held back. They’re always acting out. And a lot of times it’s that their tonsils or adenoids are so large they are blocking their throat and they have such crowded arches that they’re not sleeping well. And these kids have such an oxygen deficit they can’t learn. And some of it actually is irreversible at a certain age.
Ari Whitten: Sorry to interrupt, but I’ll just mention that literally two days ago or three days ago, I saw a brand new study showing that ADD symptoms in kids are largely driven by circadian rhythm disruption. So I, you know, it’s funny that I just came across research as you’re talking about this.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right. It’s so fascinating. So I was, I’m not a pediatric dentist but I have been treating kids for a long time. So when I started looking in their throat you’ll see that… And most dentists don’t want us to look in their throat. We look for cavities, we look at the teeth. But now I have started looking there I’m seeing not only kids where I’m asking mom like, “Hey, are they able to, how do they sleep at night? Do they snore? Do they make noise?” “Oh, yeah. You should hear them at night.” Kids should not snore. So that’s a telltale sign. They shouldn’t mouth breath only. They will have these very distinctive facial profiles that are going to cue you off as to how they are, how well they are breathing, how much air they are getting. And again, air is going to affect the circadian rhythms.
Right? But it’s not just that. If you question them further, a lot of these kids are picky eaters. They have a strong gag reflex. Those are again tell tale signs the tongue can’t get where it needs to. It doesn’t have the peristalsis where it can swallow food. They can’t even swallow a Sudafed if you are to give them a little pill. They gag on all their food. It makes them very, very picky. They’re going to trend towards softer carbohydrate foods. They are going to be the kid who wants to eat Goldfish crackers all day and all that ties in to the ADHD. And where do we see that in an adult? Adrenal fatigue, mitochondrial fatigue, lethargy or just a non productive member of society who is really obese and sits around all day watching TV. And it’s…
The Connection Between Obesity, Dental Health, Breathing, and Sleep
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Let’s talk about the link with obesity as well. Because, you know, there’s a link between the quality of sleep or circadian rhythm and brain function as far as cognitive capacity, the ability to learn and focus and that sort of thing, as well as energy levels. Obviously sleep and energy are really two sides of the same coin. But also there’s a link with fat gain. You mentioned just now obesity. So what’s the link there?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. So it’s several fold. The obesity can cause, again, changes in our GI or the extra weight of, a lot of people gain weight in their neck as well that can lead to pressure on our airway. Or the lack of sleep makes their body not metabolize things as well and they will end up getting their hormones imbalanced. And some of the things that get thrown off are leptin and ghrelin, the carbohydrate craving and how we process our satiety center, which leads to actually the obesity getting worse.
They’re going to want to crave sugar and carbs to try essentially wake their body up throughout the day. So people will get fatter essentially and then their airway gets worse. The other interesting thing is when they’re struggling to breathe, again, it doesn’t mean you’re gasping for air at all. It just means you’re not getting enough oxygen saturation to get a true good circadian rhythm.
What we’re seeing is that creates a vacuum pressure as they are essentially trying to struggle to breathe that’s bringing acid up from the stomach into the throat. So what I’m seeing in the mouth is a ton, I mean, these teeth look like they are dissolved in acid. I’m sending them to the ENT to be tested for gastric reflux disease or GERD. And then they’re like, “Nope. He said, I don’t have it. I don’t have heartburn. He said, I’m fine.” Or, “Yeah, I take Pepcid AC. That’s what they told me to do.” It’s actually something different that is called LPRD, so laryngeal pharyngeal reflex disease, which is this suctioning of the acid up the throat at night that…
Ari Whitten: Acid from the stomach…
Dr. Nicole Vane: From the stomach that is part of this struggle to breathe at night. It’s leading to a lot of things that will manifest in the mouth.
Ari Whitten: Right. And it’s easy for that liquid to flow up if you’re on your side, you’re laying down or you’re on your side, you’re on your back, you’re on your stomach.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Typically people with any of these sleep disorder breathings, even if they can sleep on their back or sleep on their back will roll over to the side or on to their stomach because they need to try and keep their tongue from subconsciously falling back and blocking their airway. So, back to the obesity issue is it can be a very layered effect if you are the typical patient with a big pot belly, a big heavy neck, jowls, you’re going to expect to see some sort of airway disorder. But now we’re seeing a lot in very thin people who might just have a little paunch.
Ari Whitten: And that’s less a matter of excess body fat constricting the airways and more a matter of just the structural issues.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, exactly.
Ari Whitten: Okay, excellent. Let’s say somebody suspects they are a snorer and, you know, they are in bed for eight or nine or 10 hours and they wake up unrefreshed and feeling like they haven’t slept much. And so this is, you know, they’re kind of connecting the dots and light bulbs are going off in their head right now. What are practical steps for those people to actually figure out if this is an issue, if you know, constricted airways is an issue for them and what can be done about this?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, there’s a couple of good books. If the lay person wanted to read up more on this, like this is sounding like me, “Sleep Interrupted” by Dr. Steven Park who is an ENT. He talks a lot about this. Or this other book “Gasp” by Doctor Gelb. It really dives into each subsection where you’re going to find out which category you fall into.
You are going to be like, “Whoa, that’s me.” So if you wanted to get informed first on your own, those are some great resources. You could ask your dentist. Some of the things you would look for are typically grinding of your teeth at night, snoring is another one, non restful sleep, frequent headaches. A lot of migraines are triggered by, again, the oxygen deficit. The typical weight gain or inability to lose weight, again, is related to this.
ADHD symptoms or lack of ability to focus and depression. There is a long list of symptoms. Even if you Googled obstructive sleep disorder or OSD, you might find a lot of things that will pop up that would be related to you. So that would be a place to start because it’s a conversation starter, which then the next step would be if you were to seek medical attention for it, would be to see an ENT or to go to a sleep center and have them do a sleep study.
So there’s home sleep studies that will manage, I’m sorry, monitor what your quality of sleep is, how your circadian rhythm cycle… They’ll do sometimes do a several night study, and your oxygen saturation. And some of them that are more severe are hospital based sleep studies where you spend a night hooked up to a bunch of equipment.
But that information is very powerful about what’s going on with you getting enough oxygen at night. If you went to your general dentist and asked them, most would not know what to look for. So you would want to see someone, there’s a lot of people now who are trained in sleep disorders. And it’s on a lot of dentist’s websites. So that might be something you look at as well because they would know how to interpret this information and what to look for.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So let’s say somebody does have an obstructed airway, you know, granted there are certain different subtypes and that sort of thing, but what are we looking at as far as solutions? Is it a CPAP machine? Surgery? Are there any other non CPAP or nonsurgical solutions?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah, so they found, so the most extreme would be a CPAP, right? You have to have forced air at night. The problem with that is it’s usually a 40% success due to compliance based on a mask not fitting right. Or people will improve and then they’ll stop wearing it because it’s not comfortable. So it’s, that’s not a huge range of people that even when truly diagnosed that are compliant with it. If they’re a candidate or they can’t do the sleep CPAP machine again, some people are like, “Nope, not wearing it.” There are things we can do as dentists. There’s one called a MAT, it’s called a mandibular advancement device. So we can actually, it’s like two little mouth guards hooked together to shove your jaw slowly forward at night so that your tongue won’t fall back as far.
Dr. Nicole Vane: And some people can have a huge improvement with that just in terms of getting restful sleep. You could also do your own… There’s different APPs now. Like there is one called Snoreland where it, you can buy the APP, I think it is $9.95, and see how much it will spike your whole night on how much you are snoring or when your sleep is disrupted. There’s some simple ways to kind of see if you are falling in that category yourself.
Ari Whitten: That’s cool.
Dr. Nicole Vane: But again, you can do the mandibular advancement device. The surgeries typically aren’t effective. Very few people are falling into the category of success. And even if you were surgically treated, again, those rates are like 40% success. So it’s hard to go through an aggressive surgery and then feel 5% better.
Ari Whitten: Just real quick story. I met a guy recently who has had extremely severe sleep apnea for I think decades and has just suffered from this, from terrible fatigue as a result of not really getting any restful sleep for decades. And he had a surgery, I’ve never even, I didn’t even know something like this existed. But he had some kind of like restructuring of his jaw that required his mouth to be shut, I think it was, I want to say six months. Like his mouth was shut for six months and he could not speak for six months, which is just mind boggling that somebody could go through that. And I think it only had like a 40% or 60% success rate. So even after you’ve gone through that for six months, you then could find out you’re one of the 40, 50, 60% who it doesn’t even work for.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. So in terms of the narrow arch which is essentially what he had was there’s several different versions of surgeries to advance the jaw by breaking it, cutting it into pieces, screwing it further forward so there’s more room for the tongue. And then you can also do that with the upper jaw and then you’re typically wired shut for about eight weeks and then you’re probably in braces for two to three years.
Ari Whitten: Brutal.
Dr. Nicole Vane: So, I know. There’s different appliances now in dentistry, too. But again, the hardest issue is compliance, expense, and people don’t want to wear big retainers and appliances. There is one I’m actually almost willing to wear myself and it’s a suction cup that goes on your forehead and a suction cup that goes on your chin that connects to a mouthpiece that tries to reactivate stem cells to recapture the growth that was stunted in me by shoving my teeth back. It’s called the DNA Appliance. And there is something called the Vivos Appliance, [inaudible] appliances. It’s very few dentists that will do those, but it’s really exciting with what we can do in children to make sure that we’re trying to maximize their growth. Some kids need, are now needing like three or four expanders and early braces. And again, it’s not to treat the crooked teeth. It is to widen the arches, get room for all the teeth and get room for the tongue and get room for the airway.
Ari Whitten: Wow.
Dr. Nicole Vane: So in adults, when we’re not growing, we’re more limited to just treating the symptoms than trying to improve things. Now what you have said is extreme, having your jaws broken, Another extreme surgery is they inject like a pure alcohol into your soft palate and it creates a chemical burn that lasts about two to three weeks.
I’ve heard it’s one of the most painful procedures you can go through to try and scarify the back of the throat so that the airway opens more so more air can get down your throat. They are removing the adenoids, sometimes the tonsils in adults, but those are, again, extremes. So one of the cool things that’s gotten me even more onto this path is I have a new laser where we can… It actually was discovered for vaginal rejuvenation. So what they found is in the lady parts area, they would use this same type of laser. No, I do not use my laser for that, but…
Ari Whitten: The fact that you brought that up makes me think that you actually do.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes. No, no. Yeah, not my area of expertise. But essentially it would induce enough heat to cause collagen formation that would tighten things up. So now they actually decided to try and use it in the mouth and we can, it’s pretty painless. It feels like drinking a cup of warm coffee at its worst.
We can wand the back of throat. Sometimes it takes about three treatments 21 days apart and it opens up the airways. On every case I have done it on we take before and after pictures. And I’ve done it on some long term sleep apnea patients. They felt leaving that they could breathe better because what happens is, and over the 21 days, the collagen starts to constrict more. I mean you can see some of the before and after pictures of how much wider the airway is. Now it’s not 100% successful on every person, but on the right person it can create a tremendous impact.
Dr. Nicole Vane: And again, at least it’s painless. So, but it does need maintenance. So you would need to have like a yearly touch up. So that’s another option. And then if you went to your ENT, they can address other things because sometimes it’s not just a pharyngeal breathing disorder, it’s a nasal breathing disorder. You know, maybe you’re an athlete who had your nose broken and so you have a deviated septum on top of it. So it’s going to take being able to breathe through your nose. Some people can’t even breathe through their nose. And so it’s really, really interesting. But the problem is again, most people don’t know where to get the information, how to get better. And I can only imagine how debilitating it feels to feel like you can’t do anything throughout the day.
Like for me, I’m a go, go, go person. But Friday nights are my worst. I’ll sit down with a glass of wine and I can’t even drink it. I’ll like out cold. Because I’m usually up until like one in the morning and I get up at six and I’m going all day long. I work 12 hour days and I’m fine. But on Fridays I’m literally drunk tired. Like, I can’t even talk. I’m not a good Friday night date.
My husband’s not happy about it, but it’ll catch up to me. But if I felt that way all the time, I can’t even imagine because I can’t even have a conversation. I’m just done. And so I think that’s where people reach a really, a point of panic. Because especially if you’re, if this is going on early in life, you’re 27 years old. I mean you have the whole rest of your life to live and a lot of people can’t even have healthy relationships because they’re just in bed all the time or they are kind of, you know, “no fun Bobby” because they can’t do anything very exciting. So that’s where people are going to reach out to you. So I think just having more of this information and knowing what to look into is, it’s really, really fascinating. It’s going to help a lot of people if they get the right help.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. For sure. I’m going to actually take some of this information and create a survey from it to see how prevalent this is among my Energy Blueprint members, I’m just curious how many of them are struggling with some of these issues or are likely struggling with him. I know actually in the context of chronic fatigue syndrome, there is some research showing that sleep apnea and other sleep disorders, sleep movement disorders and, you know, a couple other ones, but especially sleep apnea is actually shockingly common. Something like 50% of the people with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, it is. So what happens, too, is the lack of oxygen, oxygen deficit over time leads to a heightened sense of pain. So it also leads to a lot of people, not just those with chronic fatigue, but they are misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia. And it’s an inflammation and inflammatory feeling in the joints. There’s constantly, something is hurting, they feel worn down, achy, old, like they are in an old person’s body. And it actually, again, is sleep disordered breathing related.
So very, very high, it might even be higher than 50%. And again, our western medicine philosophy is give them meds. So you’re going to be, even if you were diagnosed with fibromyalgia, you’re going to be given an antidepressant for it. Which, by the way, there’s some really interesting studies now on how Prozac in one generation is changing the neurotransmitter development of their children.
Ari Whitten: Really, I had wondered about that. I haven’t seen any research…
Dr. Nicole Vane: They’re seeing some new cool studies even in fish where they have like obviously something that will rapidly populate so you can see a ton of new generations in a short frame of time. We can get into that and another study. But that’s the sad part also. So, you know, I want to get into the endocannabinoid system and how CBD can help people also because those same receptors where people are being treated with Prozac could be airway related, it could be related to another autoimmune disorder. Again, they can be treated with something naturally that can help them get a lot better.
Toxic Materials Used in Dental Practice and Why They Might Be a Good Reason to Switch to Holistic Dental Care.
Dr. Nicole Vane: We talked a bit about how hidden things in the airway can impact your overall health and restfulness and energy levels. And there’s also a lot of things in dentistry materials or the way the materials are handled that can cause energy fatigue and a slew of other symptoms that seem unrelated but are actually related to the mouth. Like hidden factors.
Ari Whitten: Okay, yeah. You’ve told me apart from this recording how you’ve had a couple people that have come into your office recently that have had some serious health problems and they’re tracing the origin of these serious health issues back to some dental work that’s been done. Can you just describe the details of this and sort of what lessons can be drawn from it?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. I had a patient today I saw a couple of weeks ago. In July she went down to a supposedly actually holistic dentist in Tijuana and paid them cash and immediately her health started to decline. So she went to several other consults before me and then decided to have me do her dentistry. But unraveling all that, she had 20 crowns done and now she needs several root canals and we’re deciding how to manage that. She’s so sick she can’t use the bathroom. She literally cannot go to the bathroom. She has such bad leaky gut that her skin is broken out. She has no energy, she can’t sleep she is getting heart palpitations. Her liver isn’t detoxing and when your liver doesn’t detox it makes your emotions go all over the place. So, she sounds a little crazy. And in that I just mean she is so emotional about how rapidly she deteriorated from this dentistry.
She is wanting me to unravel how to fix it. So we ran a bio compatibility test which shows which dental materials you’re allergic to. And her list is very, very long about the materials you can’t use. Now I have to replace her dentistry she just spent thousands and thousands. Yes, it is a cheaper price in Tijuana but now we have to redo all of it and none of it’s going to be paid for.
And she just wants it out of her mouth as quickly as possible so hopefully some of her symptoms will start to go away. Obviously it’s going to affect and impact your lifestyle if you can’t even use the bathroom. So we’re working on her case. We’re actually starting it next week after we did a series of tests for me to get blood work in and figure out exactly what the main sources were.
And a lot of it does tie in to her dentistry. So then I have to figure out how to sequence it so, one, I don’t re-overwhelm her immune system and, two, I can start phasing it so she gets better little by little in addition to working with a naturopath to help detox her. Another case yesterday. The patient came in and wanted me to take out an old root canal of hers and we have a meridian chart that shows which organ systems can be affected by the tooth.
And she told me that after it was done she started having symptom after symptom and within three months she couldn’t work at all and she hasn’t been able to work in over a year. Very intelligent person. So she’s hoping that this will solve a lot of the onslaught of symptoms that started the day she got it.
Now that doesn’t always happen but I think the correlations are really profound in some people. I have another patient, too, that after she finished the dental work, same thing. She came in on a walker. She was on a list of meds through her western medicine MDs, at least 15 medications. She was in so much joint pain and lethargy that she couldn’t sleep anymore. They kept giving her a ton of steroids to help with her inflammation. Came in to me, we started unraveling a lot of it.
And, again, working with a naturopath. Within one month… She couldn’t even keep food down when she first saw me. Within one month she was able to eat. Within one month, too, she was off her walker, came in walking. And now, two months out, she is on half of her meds, she’s going on hikes with her husband and she’s cooking again.
And so I can’t wait to see how things unravel at month three or four but she is starting to feel like herself again. But I can imagine how traumatic it is for someone who has some dental work and some other things done and then all of a sudden they end up bed ridden, you know? So…
Ari Whitten: Yeah. How common do you think that is? Is this something that is just like a super rare incident or do you think that this is occurring a lot?
Dr. Nicole Vane: I think it’s occurring a lot because as dentists we are very ignorant. We’re not taught any of these things in dental school. You know, I had a patient yesterday whose parents came in because he’s having such a bad reaction to his braces that his gums are overgrowing all of the brackets they are so swollen. So I said, “I bet your orthodontist told you to brush more.”
And he’s like, “Yeah, every time we go in that’s all they say. I know he has a nickel allergy.” We tested him. He does have a nickel allergy. Braces are nickel titanium. So just having a simple allergic reaction to something that is in his mouth 24/7 for the past 18 months. And so in his case you could physically see the reaction. But for most people it can be a lot more subtle.
And then for people like me who I never knew I had all these problems. I mean outwardly I’m very healthy and high functioning, I don’t need that much coffee and I get through the day. But I have Hashimoto’s disease, MTHFR, was mercury toxic. I still have to be on a daily detox regimen and watch what I eat or else I can be very triggered. And if I was unaware or I had a lot of dental work done, thankfully I’ve been blessed with having almost no dental work, I would have been highly, highly reactive and not have known why. So I think that’s pretty powerful.
Ari Whitten: Right. I would imagine there’s… So there’s an incident like this woman who went down to Mexico and had some work done and then sort of immediately had all these very serious health problems and could immediately trace the origin to the dental work. But I would imagine there’s a lot of incidences of, you know, for example, just getting silver fillings. Super, super common with mercury fillings, you don’t necessarily get any serious health problems immediately after getting mercury fillings especially if you are a kid.
But those things are releasing mercury into the system, very small amounts every day for years and then years later it can manifest in some kind of symptoms and you have no way of tracing that to mercury toxicity.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right. Or we can just measure their mercury levels at that current state and see how reactive they are. But nonetheless, it has a cumulative effect over the years. And sometimes the symptoms are more subtle. You start getting more headaches or you get gut dysbiosis from the mercury and then you’re having a lot of GI issues and you’re thinking, “Oh, if you go to your western every year you’re just told that you have irritable bowel syndrome.”
Which has like a list of over 200 symptoms underneath it that just means something’s not working. Usually it’s diet and then you can’t detox if you have all this mercury in your system. So it’s really interesting to see how subtle it can be. And even on patients where I’m identifying it and it’s not the chief concern, like when we were talking about airway and I’m seeing all this acid erosion on their teeth is heavy, where a lot of dental work, it’s showing me that they’re just fighting to breathe and their teeth are just jamming into each other at night.
And then they have these other health symptoms. None of it is tying into them with, in their mind, with dentistry. They’re just at my office for a cleaning. They have no concerns or they will have some jaw soreness or something that develops and then they want to treat the symptom. And it’s kind of profound for some people to be like, well, it’s not just this one thing, this is a full issue.
So, yeah, I enjoy unraveling some of those and some of them can be really complex. And I feel bad for people knowing what I know now who are seeking answers and they’re feeling debilitated and they’re trying their best to find the right practitioner. And if they are kind of led astray, especially if it’s a traditional based doctor and their methodology where they want to just give a pill or medicate something when the easiest source and remedy might be just to cut out dairy or gluten and then avoid certain materials being used in their mouth. And, you know, yeah.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, Interesting. Going back to the airway stuff, I know that, you have, there’s one other thing that we didn’t really talk about which is the airway resistance.
Airway Resistance and Its Symptoms and Effects
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. I just, I realized when we were speaking earlier that I had forgotten to talk about another subcategory. So instead of just sleep apnea, there’s obstructive sleep apnea, OSA or OSB, obstructive sleep disorder. And there’s also UARS, which is upper airway resistance syndrome. That’s what we more commonly see in thin females where they’re not necessarily truly snoring. Although lately I’ve had a lot of women who say like, “Well, my husband says I snore.
I don’t think I do.” But it’s not always clear they are snoring, but they are very lethargic, high-strung, never feel rested, bitchy, resting bitch face. I mean you can laugh at it, but it’s just kind of funny how you can almost see it walk in sometimes and then you’ll start doing a questionnaire and I can tell that they are falling into that category, especially when I look into their airway. The other thing I didn’t mention is you can get…
Ari Whitten: Do you tell them, “I’ve discovered the source of your resting bitch face.”
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, exactly. “And you know what, I might have a cure for that.” Well, so you can also have your airway evaluated with a 3D cone beam. It’s really interesting to see your profile with essentially your skull with your skin off. And some people, their airway is so profoundly narrowed at night. It’s like drinking through a, breathing through a drinking straw versus a huge snorkel tube.
And so you can use a 3D cone beam technology to have that evaluated if you really wanted to start undergoing treatment because we can do some dental treatments to expand the jaws and open the airway. And then we can see a before and after result on how much air they are getting besides just how well they feel.
And then the other thing I didn’t mention is instead of just going to a hospital for a sleep study, you can order a home test. So I can provide you with some of that information also of just how… What you do is you contact this company, I think it’s about $300. And honestly going through medical insurance with all your deductibles would probably be even more than that.
So even though it’s cash it’s a good value. They’ll mail you a home sleep kit. So it’s something that will strap on your nose and then a pulse oximeter that can go on your finger or there’s some other monitoring devices, but they’re smaller and they’re comfortable. So it’s going to measure your number of hypoxic episodes per hour and then per night and how well you sleep and circadian rhythms and the oxygen saturation of your blood.
And then you’ll actually have like a Skype consult with a sleep specialist, a doctor who will give you the results. And then you can use those results to go to a dentist or, well, there are some sleep treatment centers who specialize in just the dentistry component of sleep disorders, with those test results. Because typically medical will cover a sleep appliance. Except the conundrum is ENTs who have to diagnose it, or a primary care, but usually it’s like in the ENT realm, they can’t make sleep appliances. Only a dentist can. And we can’t prescribe them without having…
Ari Whitten: Oh, gee.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah, so your medical insurance will kick in, you just need to have this overlap. So this will help with that overlap. You can literally walk in and say, “Here’s my sleep study. Can you make me an appliance? Which appliance would be best for me?” And then there’s other side benefits besides feeling rested.
Again, you can, you’ll start losing weight when your body starts, your metabolism and your circadian rhythm start falling in line. A lot of things will start to improve besides the fact that your partner can now sleep in the same room. So I wanted to mention those things because I don’t want people then feeling overwhelmed where, “Well, I’ll go get a sleep study. Okay, great. How do I do that?”
Ari Whitten: Right. Yeah. I mean that’s the big barrier, right? Is like, you know, even for people who are snorers or people who have some of these symptoms, it’s like, “Well I don’t want to have to go through a whole sleep study. It’s such a pain in the ass to do that.”
Dr. Nicole Vane: It is, I mean, for goodness sakes, I mean, even if I felt unwell I would immediately tough it out because it’s like I don’t have time to go to the doctor. Let alone like schedule the consult to get the sleep study order, to schedule a date with the sleep center to go into the hospital. Especially for these milder cases, too, where they’re not truly apnea. Where a USAR or OSB or OSA, it’s really going to be impactful for them just to have a simple appliance made at the dentist. But again, they would need to undergo the sleep study, too, to have it properly diagnosed and covered by their medical.
Ari Whitten: And what, how can people get that? Just to recap, how can people get that device, the home device to do sort of an at home sleep study?
Dr. Nicole Vane: So you really want to have a dentist. So to order the home sleep study, I’ll provide you with the website information. You can provide a link so that people can…
Ari Whitten: Do you know the name of the company offhand?
Dr. Nicole Vane: You know, actually I don’t, I don’t want to say it wrong because there’s quite a few of them. And then you would want to go to a dentist who’s trained in sleep. So you know, I know a lot of my dental community, we all have it on our menu or list of services. If you Google “sleep dentist,” you’re going to have quite a few of them who’ve done a lot of extra training pop up.
Ari Whitten: Okay. So we’ll put a link on the page for this Podcast which will be at my site theenergyblueprint.com, there’ll be a link to it. If you’re watching this on YouTube, there’ll be a link below the video. If you’re listening to the audio, you’ll have to go to theenergyblueprint.com and find this Podcast, Dr. Nicole Vane. And we’ll have it set up on that page.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. And the other thing we could provide a link for is for children. I’m just really passionate about airway development and expansion in children so we can prevent this in adults, as we talked about with the Price/Pottenger studies, arches all getting extremely narrow. I mean, even my own son in front of my own eyes, who was breastfed but tongue tied has very narrow arches. So, you can get dentist training in what’s called a Vivos Appliance, v-i-v-o-s. Or a DNA Appliance. Both of those actually, the DNA Appliance can treat adults. It supposedly can activate stem cells to regrow the jaws into a wider position.
But with kids it’s a lot easier. Especially because as adults our compliance usually, even the most dedicated person doesn’t want to talk funny or wear a big piece of plastic in their mouth during the day if they have meetings or they are socially oriented. I mean, even I would feel a little self conscious. But I am considering ordering one for myself just to see if I can wear it all day long while talking to patients all day.
Ari Whitten: I wonder, I was thinking about this the other day, you know, with retainers and stuff. Do some of these materials that are plastic that are meant to sit in the mouth that maybe do good things as far as realigning the teeth, are they also releasing plastic toxins, phthalates or BPA and things like that into the mouth. And even some of the BPA free plastics still have other things like BPS or antimony or some of these other toxic chemicals.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. And I just read, well, it wasn’t a good clinical study. It would not pass the Dr. Ari Whitten test, but floss it’s releasing now a bunch of toxic chemicals from the Teflon coating that it has on it.
Ari Whitten: I saw that. Well, they actually, the study I saw, I don’t know if it’s the same one, but they showed that people who use the flossers that have those coatings actually have higher body burden of those chemicals.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes. Yeah. But it’s hard to correlate exactly that it’s only that within an individual. So, but, no, you’re absolutely right because I just had a patient yesterday who… I love doing clear aligner therapy like Invisalign for people that have mental sensitivities. I myself have undergone treatment. I had a patient who not only could not wear those, I mean she literally couldn’t even wear it for a day or two because of her allergy.
Then they made her a night guard and she couldn’t wear that either. So we’re going to run the biocompatibility test on her just so I can find out the right material for her. So, because there are some other things in there. They are called Bis-Acryls where they are either, even though they’re not BPA, there is a resin cascade or an acrylic type cascade that some people are sensitive to. And also some of these appliances have metal springs in them.
So even though they’re not embedded in you, wearing them constantly if you’re very sensitive to metals can be an issue in some people. That’s pretty rare. I have people that are just insistent absolutely, “No, no, no, I don’t want anything.” But then we’re really limited on our options because you have got to make them out of something. We don’t use wood, you know, George Washington days. So, but there are ways to find biocompatibility
The Scientific Conclusions on Studies Involving Childhood and Dietary Causes of Modern Dental Problems
Ari Whitten: Yeah, interesting. You mentioned in passing a minute ago, the Pottenger’s cats. Let’s go back to that. I guess we kind of, we’ve covered that a bit, but I want to talk some specifics as far as what have we learned from, not only those studies, but you know, all of the studies that have happened since, as far as what are some of the key nutrients and important facets of nutrition for optimizing dental health? And also in our kids, you know, the proper growth of the jaws and the arches and the way the teeth grow in?
Dr. Nicole Vane: That is a great question because it actually boils down to a couple of simple things that unfortunately, just based on our society, the way we are processing and handling our food, even if you grew it in your backyard, the nutrients in the soil aren’t there to get it into the vegetables anymore. Even if you had a hot house. I mean, it’s really amazing how much it takes to get soil well developed with chickens pooping on it and goats eating the weeds away and pooping and then birds coming in and eating that. I mean, it’s really profound. So besides what’s lacking in our nutrients the biggest thing we noticed was D3/K2 was what Price, he didn’t know what to call it and they discovered that’s what it was. So vitamin D3/K2 is mostly…
Ari Whitten: He called it “Factor X “or something like that.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, he did. He absolutely did. And then they, it was later identified as K2. So that’s found in a lot of organ meats. So what we’ve done is not only transition away from the agrarian lifestyle of, you know, the women planting the vegetables and harvesting them and the man goes out and kills something with an arrow and everyone barely cooks it over the fire and we eat it off the bone and we chew, to this process, you know, we eat Chicken McNuggets, Mac ‘N Cheese lifestyle. So it’s partially just the chewing off the bone.
But we were are also getting very collagen dense foods. So that’s where, you know, bone broths and things are coming back into play. And the D3/K2 is in a lot of organ meats, especially… So in, depending on the culture, like in Eskimo tribes it might be in the seal blubber where you get enough. Where we got our milk sources. Like again, in an Eskimo tribe it might be reindeer milk. But a lot of those are very, very raw milks where they are really nutrient dense and high in D3/K2. So especially when we were milking the cow in our backyard and our cow was grass fed, not grain fed, we were getting a lot of these nutrients just naturally in the simple basic diets that we had.
So nowadays, you know, getting out in the sun is also something that we are not doing. We are all just sitting in front of computer screens, iPads. So our D3 is deficient that we are not out enough in the sun doing normal natural things. We’re not hoeing our fields or doing anything, but also we’re not getting it from our food sources.
But it’s really important because it’s a fat soluble vitamin if we take it the right way. Also the A, E and K, not just the K2 but the K vitamins also help with the way your blood clots, the way we heal. If you bruise easily, you’re probably deficient in the K. And a lot of the B vitamins, too, are very, very poorly absorbed. So, the combination of all those is making your jaws weak. What we are taught in dental school, and then what medicine is also taught, is now they’re giving kids fluoride tablets at the pediatrician’s office.
Ari Whitten: Fluoride tablets to take internally?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, to ingest. Because they’re like, “Well, we’re going to prevent cavities.” Well, no, actually the kid has leaky gut because the mom is nutrient deficient also, and they’re not breastfeeding and they can’t breastfeed because they have a tongue tie that is undiagnosed. I mean it’s incredibly sad and complicated. But they are now giving kids that. It’s always like, “Oh, you’re not getting enough calcium.”
Ari Whitten: Right. Just real quick, you just reminded me of a quote I saw the other day from Dr. William something who works for the EPA and he said, he was commenting on fluoride. He said, “You know fluoride is a fascinating thing. Because when you have fluoride in a natural body of water, you have it in a lake or a river or something like that it is a contaminant and a toxin. It is labeled as a contaminant and toxin. As soon as you put it in the drinking water for humans, it’s no longer a contaminant and toxin. As soon as you prescribe it for kids to take, you know, orally, it’s no longer a contaminant and toxin, it is medicine.” Right? And the thinking on this issue has become very distorted because there is a lot of research showing that fluoride does have neurotoxic properties. And even if it does support proper dental health, you have to weigh that…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, it is also a thyroid suppressant. Before we had our modern day thyroid meds, they were given excessive fluoride to suppress their thyroid.
Ari Whitten: Right. It’s toxic to the thyroid, it’s toxic to mitochondria, and it’s toxic to the brain. And there’s research showing all of those things. And yet it’s just totally ignored as they are literally putting it in the drinking water.
Dr. Nicole Vane: I know. And then the funny… You should be in some of my dental forums because everyone’s like, “Yay for the ADA for keeping fluoride. You know, my town’s cavities decreased just because of fluoride and I’ve been practicing 30 years.” But on the flip side, too, mercury. So I have to regulate and log how I dispose of it. I have to have special traps. I can’t like dump it in the sink. I can’t dump it in the trash. Yet I can throw it in your mouth.
Ari Whitten: You can throw it in your mouth where it actually is shown to get absorbed and sometimes off-gas.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Exactly. And I can, if I break a thermometer in the old school days I would have to, we’d have to evacuate because or the released mercury. If I poured a broken thermometer into the water the EPA would call it absolutely toxic based on its parts per million. Yet again, I can put it in your mouth.
And the CDA is like, “Yeah, it is safe to use but you do have to, by law, have a posted sign that it’s a known neurotoxin and can affect developing embryos and to make the decision essentially for yourself.” It is all very strange medicine to me. Thankfully I don’t go to the doctor much just because I just, you know, it’s just the way we have gotten with just over medicating people. And that’s a problem with our diet is that when people aren’t functioning well, I know you see this, this is why I love talking to you about it, they crave things like the carbs and more processed food.
They are often always carb addicts. They’re craving like bowl of noodles and white rice and, you know, there’s no nutrients in there. So they are further exacerbating the symptom when they’re like, “Oh, but that’s what settles my stomach or gives me a little energy boost to get through the day.” Instead of really reorienting the way their body is processing and thriving on foods. It’s pretty amazing. Like even if you did fasting you can go without food and your body can perform really well once you get a lot of the junk processed out.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So with that in mind, what do you think the optimal diet looks like for dental health? So we have kind of, you mentioned vitamin D and K deficiencies and also some mineral deficiencies. What does it look like on sort of on a practical level if someone wants to structure their diet for optimal dental health?
Dr. Nicole Vane: More of an alkaline based food diet. So if you’re juicing, not having all carrot and apples which can cause acidity essentially in your mouth. There Is a lot of high sugars in some of those fruits. So I would not advise being fruitarian, but mixing it in. So more alkaline based foods. Great fats like avocados. Having to get organ meats. Like if you have to order it, I go to the farmer’s market and get fresh chickens, fresh eggs. It’s really amazing that they can sit out for three weeks because they have the bloom on the shell so then they are not pasteurized or processed. Raw milks. I mean, that’s virtually the only milks I can tolerate besides goat’s milk or sheep’s milk, if it’s going to be from a cow. Having good sources of vegetables. So I do organic.
Dr. Nicole Vane: I do, I can’t come to the farmer’s market. I do home delivery of my vegetables just to make sure. And you want a little bit of dirt on them, you want to make sure it’s from a good source so that you’re getting good microbes from the soil to keep our gut developed. So those are some important things. Obviously avoiding antibiotics.
I mean we’re in the season right now with winter where people are just being given them left and right. You know, those are really good places to start. And alkaline water and then also evaluating what you’re drinking during the day. Like I had a patient who read something about apple cider vinegar, so she was drinking it all day long and she ended up with a lot of cavities because it was just too acidic. And kombucha. So they’re great things. But everything in balance and moderation. So those are places to start.
Dr. Nicole Vane: And then also like I just try and keep as much as I can away from heavily processed foods. I mean I do it, too. I go to Trader Joe’s. I have a two year old, I’m a working mom. I work long hours. But it’s just how I mix it in and what I look for and if I am going to grab something off the shelf so that I can try and get as many of the nutrients as possible.
Really, making your bone broths is so easy at home. It can be expensive if you’re looking to buy them pre-made, like at Whole Foods, they’re like eight bucks a jar. So if that was a simple snack for you, that can be a lot for a lot of people. And nut butters are great fats. You probably have more advice than me on some of the things
Ari Whitten: Not on dental health specifically. That’s your territory. I’m definitely not an expert specifically on diet and dental health.
Dr. Nicole Vane: But really what makes a gut thrive is what is going to make a mouth thrive. So if you read of any of the anti-foods. And subtleties, too. Like some people are, if you’re really going to go all out on the veggie thing, if you’re sensitive to nightshades it’s going to make you really acidic which would make your saliva more acidic which can really affect your teeth and your overall oral health.
So really understanding your own chemistry, too, of what foods work best with you. As you know, there are some tests you can do, but some of it’s just trial and error. You know?
CBD, The Endocannabinoid System, and Your Dental Health
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. I know one other topic that we had talked about going into before we started recording was the endocannabinoid system and CBD. And you’ve been experimenting with that and you’ve been having some great results in your patients. So talk to me about what you’ve learned and what you’ve been experimenting with.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Well, so I became fascinated with it just in the more natural approach, but then I’m also like the last person you would suspect of being interested because I thought it was made from marijuana. And I’m like, I’m hippy dippy in my soul but I’m also not in the regard I’ve never tried anything. A glass of red wine is about as crazy as I get. So I was really like, “Mmm, let me look into this.” So CBD, the cannabinoids is made from hemp. So you’d have to have enough hemp the length of a football field to have even trace amounts of THC. It doesn’t have any in it. But what’s interesting is there is several cannabinoid receptors within our neurotransmitter system, specifically our parasympathetic system. So our rest and digest. So fight or flight is our sympathetic system. Parasympathetic is how we’re going to process things and get our body to calm and heal.
So the cannabinoids bind to all those. They bind to the same receptors as pain receptors. They bind to the same receptors as Xanax and Prozac. So if you had apnea and that made you highly anxious. If you’re just anxious in general, if you have gut dysbiosis and you’re having all these other inflammatory things that are developing because your body is just inflamed in general, it helps with all of those things.
If you have constant migraines and headaches, oh my gosh, it is amazing within five minutes because it not only binds to the same receptors. But with people who, again, don’t know enough about their diet, like gluten and grain can cause a lot of migraine triggers with people, they typically then start medicating with things like Excedrin or Imitrex. There’s a lot of over the counter drugs, whereas CBD works just as effectively.
I had, my own hygienist now, I mean, she’s one of my biggest raving fans about it. She came up to me and said, “Dr. Vane, I’m going to have to cancel all of my patients. I’m about to get a migraine and when I do, I have to lay down or I’m going to start throwing up.” And I said, “Actually, can you please just take some CBD? I don’t want to cancel your day.” And she was so skeptical. She’s like, “I know myself.”
I said, “Well, please just trust me.” So she did and she took it and then she took another dose at lunch and at the end of the day she’s like, “I have to buy this. I just can’t believe, I’ve never…” And every time now she gets a trigger, she just has it with her. She has not had one migraine since she discovered it. And I obviously have a lot of patients that say the same thing.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. There is some research. I don’t know if you’ve seen it from a guy named Ethan Russo on clinical endocannabinoid deficiency syndrome, linking it with migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, for inflammatory disorders. And also, when you mentioned the deficiencies of the endocannabinoid system, when I talked briefly about like soil deficiencies earlier, that’s the way we’ve gone off track. Like our body always got a little bit of… We were using hemp for a long time for making clothes and other products. It’s been in our society for a long time.
It’s just hasn’t been appreciated for this use. But not only with the migraines, but inflammatory disorders, for people who are in a lot of pain. Or I have patients who are on chronic steroids. It really works. Now some of them, some of the pain disorders, I now networked with some clinicians who are in a hemp dentistry and medicine group that I’m in.
And they’re using it for all sorts of pain disorders where people are on lifetime steroids, which again will cause other inflammatory disorders in your body, who were getting them off of them. But some of them need a little bit of THC in it. So start first with the CBD. For me, I use it if I’m getting splitting headaches, jaw pain, any back pain. It binds to those. People with anxiety though, when they come to the dentist, it works better than nitrous or some of my sedative pills. I have friends that are super stressed and they’re like, “I have presentations at work. I’m just going crazy right now. Can I take it before my presentation?” And every single one I’ve given it to has come in to get refill bottles because it’s obviously working for them. One of my friends said she would be jobless and not married if I hadn’t introduced her to it.
She also, I gave her one dose just in the dental chair. She doesn’t dig the dentist. And she is very enthusiastic. She’s like, “Oh my God, you changed my life.” And I’m like, “Ha, ha, you know, that’s so sweet.” But truly she came back to me and she told me that she has been on Prozac for 15 years and just the dose I gave her in the dental office, she called her psychiatrist on the way home and said, “I need to get off Prozac because I feel nothing with that.
And the way I felt on CBD is the way I should feel. Like I feel in balance, I feel happy, I feel not stressed. I don’t feel it obviously clouding my judgment.” It doesn’t impair you in any way. So, and now that’s all she takes. So it’s really interesting, especially when you read, it’s so commonly medicated now, especially Xanax. I have friends asking me all the time, “Can you give me some Xanax? I’m stressed.” I don’t know if you saw some of the studies recently where they’re finding fish, that giving Prozac to them, it immediately affects their offspring genetically, the genetic expression.
So even if you’re taking it for something simple like behavior or you’re feeling not yourself or whatever, it actually can impact your kids and your kids’ kids. So it’s much safer to take something like CBD. The only cautions are there is just a bunch of crap out there, you know? For all the powdered drinks, you know all the keto drinks that are just going to supercharge you by having this raspberry flavored powder. It’s like they are not nutrient dense. Same thing with CBD.
It can be just very, very poorly absorbed. And you also want to make sure it’s organic because hemp draws everything from the soil.
It super saturates it. So if someone was growing hemp at home and roundup is running down the hill into their yard, your hemp is going to be a super saturated bomb of roundup. And they might even call it organic because they grew it in their backyard. So it’s kind of important to know where you are getting it from and you want to make sure you have a water soluble form. I like the Prime My Body brand and I like UltraCell by Zillis because they’re both THC free. So you know I own my, I’m self employed. But I still don’t want to, I don’t know why…
Ari Whitten: You want to make sure you pass your own drug test so you don’t have to fire yourself.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah, my own drug test, dammit. So anyone who is concerned like that, it doesn’t show up. But also, I know, it’s highly absorbed. And I could tell because I have some people drop off samples and they are like, “I left CBD in the waiting room and I wanted you to try mine. And it’s like…
Ari Whitten: Everybody’s got their own CBD brand.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Oh my gosh. It’s crazy. And then I’ve had some patients that are like, “Yeah, it doesn’t work.” And I’m like, “Oh, where are you getting it?” “Well I have a CBD tea” or, “I had, one of my yogurts had CBD in it” and it’s like, oh my goodness. It’s like…
Ari Whitten: Yeah, the dose is also something that people don’t really know how to consider deeply. So like sometimes you’ll see a product, like for example, there is here in town, there is a CBD water. Like it is water with CBD infused into it. Now I don’t know for certain, but I would guess that probably in that whole bottle it’s like five milligrams of CBD, which is, or maybe 10. It’s just, you’re going to pay for an expensive bottle of water that doesn’t have a meaningful dose of CBD because it would be, otherwise, and it has to be that way. You know, from their perspective, if they put in 30 milligrams of CBD into each bottle of water, they’d have to charge you $10 per bottle of water.
Dr. Nicole Vane: I was laughing because what immediately popped in my head was, “And Cinnamon Toast Crunch is vitamin fortified.” It’s like 1% of like some of the daily nutrients, but they put that on the outside of the box. So people are like, “I’m having something healthy.” And you’re like, “Cinnamon Toast Crunch?” “Yes, it has vitamins in it.” And you’re like, “Oh my goodness.” Same thing with that. Even if it was chocked with fortified vitamins you wouldn’t absorb it through your Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
So, or absorb it well. Yeah, and actually that goes back to when you’re asking about the supplements or what we are dietarily deficient in, vitamin C, obviously, and vitamin A and E are important for our body’s detox. But C, for instance, if you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to get sick. I’m going to super up regulate my immune system and I’m going to drink that Emergen-C powder all day long. I’m going to have 10,000 milligrams a day.” Well, you are going to urinate all of it out.
If you have a liposomal form that you go in sublingually with, you’re going to actually absorb all of the milligrams that you’re trying to get into your system. Same thing with the D. So you want to make sure you’re getting a good source so that your body is getting what it needs. And again, everyone is dose dependent on, some individuals are more deficient than others. So those are important things to look for.
Common Chronic Disease States May Have a Dental Link
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Do you have any sort of closing thoughts? You know, one other thing I want to mention is before we started recording you mentioned that sometimes cases will present as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome and, you know, something deeper is going on and it may actually be dental related.
Do you want to, I know we kind of touched on that a bit with, for example, the person who went down to Mexico for their dental work. But do you have any thoughts on that? Because I think it’s important for people to just understand that dental work is not something to mess around with and look for discounts. You really want to find somebody who has real expertise if they’re doing any serious work in your mouth.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Right, right. And it’s the same with… Gosh, I love the show “Botched” on bad plastic surgeries. A lot of them happen in Mexico or someone has someone come in their home. And this girl was having someone inject silicone into her butt so she would have a beautiful Brazilian butt.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, I do that every other day. I have somebody come over. That’s why I have such beautiful buns.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Exactly, exactly. And you are packing plants too, right? No, so she went into rapid kidney failure. She was in intensive care for over two weeks and years later she still hasn’t fully recovered. She has very poor kidney function from this silicon and then they couldn’t even get it out of her system. And I’m using that as an example of someone would be like, “Well, duh.
Why would you let someone come to your house and inject silicone into you that’s not even medical grade?” But people don’t realize that’s going on the same way with even a well intentioned dentist. So that’s an important factor. But fibromyalgia, when we were talking about that, people are truly suffering from those symptoms and would be classified as such. And unfortunately, if they went to the “medical doctor,” and I say that in quotes because they just a lot of times get antidepressants and something of that nature,,,
Ari Whitten: Or sleeping pills or told…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yep. And they are given sleeping pill. But that’s what I mentioned earlier, how it’s tied back to sleep apnea. Most often they’re just not getting enough oxygen. So their body goes into inflammatory distress and everything becomes painful.
So not only are they lethargic, I mean if you think about it like they torture, like actually in the Navy Seals, part of you passing through BUD/S is they go through, they try and break you with depriving you of sleep. So some people literally go insane and they have to be discharged from BUD/S. And I’m told actually some don’t even really recover based on how they react to the sleep deprivation. So imagine if that’s an extreme case, right? But that’s how they tortured people in Guantanamo. They keep you up 96 hours.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. The worst one though is that’s how they, that’s sort of like a rite of passage in medical residencies. Is they have, you know, these newly graduated doctors going through their residencies, and I think this used to be more the case than it is now. They have realized the stupidity of it. But they used to have these people working 100 hour weeks or 120 hour weeks just, maybe not 120 but something like…
Dr. Nicole Vane: No, actually, no, you’re right.
Ari Whitten: Am I right about that?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. Yeah. Sleep a couple hours in a break room in between a patient. Close your eyes and tough it out.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, like 80, 90, 100 hour a week stuff and stuff in there. And there’s actually, the worst part is that they have research now showing the amount of medical errors and people harmed by doctors who are making mistakes as a result of their brain not functioning well, as a result of being overworked and sleep deprived.
Dr. Nicole Vane: It’s true with pilots, too. They limit their flight hours now because some people were put on back-to-back-to-back flights and it was just, you know. Planes weren’t falling out of the sky, but there were more problems than I think we realized. So, yeah.
So a lot of people get so shut down and then, you know, what do we do? We self medicate. Coffee, carbs, trying to go for a run in the morning to wake yourself up, you know? And so it’s important to just to ask yourself. And so one of the things we’ve talked about putting on your site also was just a sleep questionnaire. It’s pretty simple questions, but if you score high on it, you’re like, “Oh my God, how did I not…?” I guess, you know what? To everyone, that’s their normal. It is not normal to go poop once a week and have a big hard turd that doesn’t barely comes out.
Dr. Nicole Vane: But people like, “Yeah it is. I’m that way. My Mom’s that way. My sister’s that way” And it’s like, “Well, you all have the same genetics. You all eat the same thing.” So it’s, never-the-less, it’s not normal…
Ari Whitten: You sound a little southern on me there. You all.
Dr. Nicole Vane: I know. You all. But a lot of people just think this is just how I am right now. And it’s only when people reach a critical point, when they start seeking out information like that you provide where they’re like, “This is not how I am. This is how I’ve been, I need to get out of this funk.” So yes, it can relate a lot to inflammatory disorders.
And again, none of my patients who I’m treating came in with mouth pain. It’s all systemic stuff. So you can only imagine, too, if they have been seeing an MD on the side. A lot of them are going to be given a lot of medications that compound or mask. Or then, if it has been suppressed for a little while, it doesn’t mean that it stopped.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Well, I mean that’s the problem that we have in the medical world today is that everyone is specialists, their particular little slice of the overall system of the human being. And there’s, you know, everybody has their sort of way of looking at that part of the body, of that system and trying to fix that system with their limited set of knowledge and tools about that system.
And there’s so much problems with people, majority of these specialists just lacking an understanding, a deep understanding of how interconnected all of the different systems of the body are. So it’s for that reason I think extremely important for people given, you know, the nature of dental work and how easily something like heavy metals in your mouth or the wrong kind of materials in your mouth can translate into really serious systemic problems, brain problems, gut problems, skin problems. I think it’s just imperative to work with a holistic dentist who really understands those things deeply.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. And also getting it through to the patient. Like this patient, I could not reinforce enough how much I have to work with a naturopath because just cause I get the dentistry out, I’m not getting it out of your brain now, out of your gut. You have to start extracting it through, there are a lot of different detoxes people can do. But, and sometimes it’s a dietary detox, too.
When I did a cleanse, I mean, you’re just trying to get all the crap and the things that are built up on the inside of your intestines that you can’t see out, things start to feel a lot better. Again, it manifests in your skin, your hair and your overall functioning. So, I really value what you do. I’m glad you had me on just so I can talk about our little piece of the world, how I see it.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I’m really glad you came on. Thank you for being on the show again. I know that the first Podcast was a hit. People really loved it. So, I’m excited to share another one. And, also, keep doing good work on my mouth. That’s my personal…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
How to Find Resources to Improve Your Dental Health
Ari Whitten: But, you know, on a serious note, I would love to, I think we did this in the first one as well, but just to reemphasize this, are there any resources for people to sort of like find a list of dental practitioners in their area that are, have some particular certification that, you know, speaks to their knowledge and expertise of holistic dentistry.
Dr. Nicole Vane: It’s kind of hit or miss. The one easier resource, there is the IAOMT, the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology. And you want someone who is like Smart Certified, which is safe mercury amalgam removal technique. Because some people say they are and then they’re a member but they don’t attend any of the meetings and they’re not actually certified. Hal Huggins Certification. Now I’m certified, but they want you to pay $2,500 a year to be listed on their website. So I think that’s a little, I don’t know…
Ari Whitten: So, just like you, they could inquire at the dentist. Ask the dentist “Are you Hal Huggins Certified?”
Dr. Nicole Vane: Inquire at the dentist. Yes, or Smart Certified. There’s the Holistic Dental Association, the HCA. But it gave me, you can tell a little bit just through people’s websites, too. Because there’s quite a few here in San Diego that I know aren’t holistic or trained. I’ve never seen him in a meeting.
Ari Whitten: They just use the word to market, to like attract people who are…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. Or I think they just have their own version. They’re not, but it’s not, it’s like it’s not supported by our academies. You know, if you want to have some sort of standard of care that would be a great way to go. I mean, if you’re willing to fly to Switzerland, too, there’s some great experts out there, too, it’s actually cheaper, who use really biocompatible materials.
They are experts. So just doing a little bit of research on that. Not just, “I say I’m the best” and “look at my fancy website” and “I’m the number one expert.” And it will show itself based on their degrees and their training and how involved they are. You know, I know a lot of older holistic dentists I tried to learn from that called themselves holistic just because they didn’t place mercury. And they cared about how they drilled them out, but they weren’t doing it to the standard that we uphold now.
Ari Whitten: Got you. For people that are in, we are in San Diego, North County, San Diego. For people that are in San Diego or people in southern California or nearby who maybe are interested in coming to see you or, you know, even, I know there are some people that have flown across the country to see you, what is your contact info and what is your website that I can send people to?
Dr. Nicole Vane: My personal email is drnicolevane@Yahoo. And sometimes, I had people from the last Podcast contact me from Germany or you tell me where, And I’m involved in quite a few forums where sometimes I really, I actually could know someone right in your area, in your town. I mean, I know a ton of people in a small town in Texas even that do great work.
Ari Whitten: Okay. Are you sure you want to be bombarded with emails asking for recommendations for their local town.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah. Well I can get to them as I as I can. But there are some great resources that I might be able to refer them to someone amazing.
Ari Whitten: Okay. I will say, just for everybody listening, just be mindful of taking up too much of her personal time asking for recommendations in your local area. If you have serious medical issues and dental issues and you need help…
Dr. Nicole Vane: Do your research first.
Ari Whitten: You know, try and look. But, and feel free to reach out. But, just, I just don’t want her to be bombarded with 5,000 emails, you know, from people all asking for recommendations.
Dr. Nicole Vane: And really, my website, I tried to make it very educational for anyone logging on. It doesn’t matter if you’re… If you look at mine I have a lot of videos on what is involved in safe mercury removal, or a proper, safe extraction or cavitation. So if people just wanted to learn a little more, I have it on there just for strictly educational purposes. So people can log on anytime, moonlightbeachdental.com.
Ari Whitten: Moonlightbeachdental, all one word, right?
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah.
Ari Whitten: Moonlightbeachdental.com. Cool. Awesome. Well thanks so much Dr. Vane. Really such a pleasure to have you on and hang out as always and I really appreciate your time.
Dr. Nicole Vane: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Dental health, chronic fatigue, sleep disorders, nutrition, CBD, obstructed breathing, autoimmune disease and more, with holistic dentist Dr. Nicole Vane– Show Notes
What is Holistic and Integrative Dentistry? 01:01
The Relationship Between Your Teeth and Your Other Organs and Body Systems (03:28)
How Your Dental Health and Jaw Structure Affects Your Airways and More (06:04)
How Eating Habits in Childhood and Infancy Impact Dental Structure and Ultimately Total Body Health (17:09)
Dental Health’s Effects on Breathing and Sleep Disorders (21:20)
The Connection Between Obesity, Dental Health, Breathing, and Sleep (32:55)
Solutions if You Suspect Dental Structure-related Sleep Dysfunction (38:57)
Toxic Materials Used in Dental Practice and Why They Might Be a Good Reason to Switch to Holistic Dental Care (48:43)
Airway Resistance and Its Symptoms and Effects (57:34)
The Scientific Conclusions on Studies Involving Childhood and Dietary Causes of Modern Dental Problems (01:06:29)
CBD, The Endocannabinoid System, and Your Dental Health (01:16:47)
Common Chronic Disease States May Have a Dental Link (01:26:09)
Closing Thoughts and How to Find Resources to Improve Your Dental Health (01:33:24)
Links
Check out Dr. Vane’s personal website here.
Link to International Academy of Biological Dentistry and Medicine
