The teeth and the rest of human health

There are the teeth and then there is the rest of the human body. Or is it there is the human body and then there are the teeth? Does the jaw belong, or doesn't it? It's as if these two structures are two separate entities. That's the impression you get when contemplating health maintenance on the one hand, and tooth maintenance on the other. That's how our two health insurance systems are set up. They are like paying for two different car-repair insurances: one for, let's say, the transmission, the other one for the rest of the car. That situation, i.e. having two separate insurance systems, should be alarming enough because one doesn't know what the other is doing. What's most alarming is the fact that a dentist doesn't know beans about what his action s do to the rest of the body, nor does the physician know what untoward ingredients the dentist has put into the divide behind the nebulous boundaries of the no-mans-land between the teeth, the jaws, and the far reaches of the other side called the mouth, the ears, the nose, and the throat.

I have gone to the dentist often enough. But I cannot remember him ever mentioning to take more Vitamin D, not that my family doctor volunteered that information. No, he never suggested taking more because my teeth were bad. But the dentist should be the first person to suggest that Vitamin D helps improve the teeth and might improve the state of one's jaw bone. It might even prevent cavities. When the dentist sees cavities, he sees dollar signs. He doesn't seem to know that when he puts mercury by way of amalgams into a mouth that this mercury contributes to the ill health of the jaw. Mercury is known to cause the infamous pockets that eventually cause the patient to be toothless. Should I really be that cynical and say that a dentist cultivates his patients to become cash-cows with the help of dental amalgam? I am not even talking about the other bad things that mercury does.

Now this is how it is with the physician. He'll see me. I'd complain about depression or irritability, or tingling in my hands and feet. I'd be complaining about the bad headaches, the forgetfulness etc. He would think that I am getting older and prescribe some Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and send me home. Silently he may think I am turning senile. Fortunately I don't have those problems, but I know plenty of people who do. The fact that mercury damages the kidneys is almost never mentioned when talking about dental amalgam. And when after many moons a person starts having a hip replacement or a knee replacement or, as I did, a bone transplant from one part of the jaw bone to another, the physician will not be privy to the possibility of mercury and the lack of Vitamin D being connected.

The connection lies in the fact that mercury damages the kidneys in such a way that the kidneys do not make the active form of Vitamin D as well any longer.

Getting back to the two systems, maybe if there were only one system, the dental and medical entities would talk to one another because they are connected. After all there is only one human body. The teeth really cannot exist without the body or vice versa.