Dr. Craig Clayton | Restoration Dentistry (00:34)
Welcome to season two of Dentistry Disrupted. Very glad to have you here, and I'm so excited because today my wife, my partner, best friend, and the producer, director, brains behind all this good stuff is Eliza Jane. And she is here with me. Hello. Excited to be here. So fun to have you here. We are going to have a good time and we want to introduce our intention with season two. It's going to be a bit different than season one. We want to do
more podcasts, shorter form, and we want to do a lot of interviews with not just other dentists or dental providers, but we also want to include other professionals like functional medicine, myofunctional therapists, body workers, such as chiropractors. We want to involve a lot of different people so that you can learn about a more comprehensive whole wellness approach outside of just focusing on oral health.
And then the other half of the time, we will probably be going off script, talking about whatever we feel like talking about as related to
health, wellness, dentistry, things that we're seeing online on.
viral social media posts, questions from followers, crazy stories. But the intention behind those is short little 10 minute episodes you can just throw in on a quick walk in the morning.
And if you're new here, we'd like to give some introductions. I am Dr. Craig D. Clayton. I'm a
in Meridian, Idaho, and my family and I live in Boise, Idaho, and this is where Eliza grew up. So we love it here. It's been great. We've been here for four years. I went to dental school in Kentucky and grew up in Southern California, and we've also lived in Utah for a bit as well. lived a couple different places, but this is home for
Three things about me, I love to ride bicycles specifically off -road. So mountain biking and bike packing, which is like backpacking but on a bicycle. And I love to do all sorts of activities with my family. They're my favorite people to spend time with and we go backpacking and a lot of water play, skiing. And then I guess my second favorite sport or up there with biking is skiing. So skiing and biking make me really, really happy. And then...
backpacking is climbing up there now too. Yay, good. that's number three. I might be turning you into a backpacker. So I married this lovely man in 2016 and moved to Kentucky with him, supported him. 2015. cut. I'm glad that wasn't me that got it wrong. Okay, So a little about me.
I married Craig in 2015. We have two boys ages four and six. And was a competitive dancer growing up. And then I studied child development in college.
when Dr. Clayton started building out the dental practice, I somehow decided I would do the marketing for it, even though I don't have background in that. And it's been a really great time. Now we work together and we somehow built this. Yeah, mean this happened by, this happened by accident. Yeah. But three things about me. Number one, I love backpacking. I grew up doing backpacking and I've been getting my husband and my kids into it. And I also take groups of women backpacking.
I love a good dance party. I love girls nights, laughing, chick flicks, Idaho sunsets, playing in the water. I will get in every mountain lake that I come upon. It is a rule for my life. It's not, No matter the temperature. No, for sure. we love working together. It's been so much fun. And yes, this was like totally stumbled on it by accident.
Thanks to a couple posts taking off that we never intended to go viral, we now have this opportunity to reach so many more people and to teach all of you about all things oral health. As well as various other topics.
So why don't you give us a little background on dentistry, why you chose the profession, and how you ended up where you are today.
Besides all the fun stuff, I got into dentistry originally because it felt like it was a wise decision. I thought about medicine versus dentistry, looked at the of the lifestyle schedule of dentists.
And it just looked fitting. I wanted to spend more time with my family and recreate more outdoors. So I said, sure, why not? Let's do dentistry. It's nice to work with my hands, work with people, provide an essential service. But fast forward to dental school, I considered dropping out halfway through my second year because I just was miserable. I didn't like it. It didn't feel right as far as it just, we were learning so much good stuff, but when it came down to like,
the skills, like what we actually did on a day -to basis. was focused so heavily on fixing teeth, and I don't feel like it had enough clinical focus on how to actually fix the problem. So, got through dental school, obviously chose not to drop out. I had a little bit to do with that. Yeah. When you take on a lot of sometimes it's best to just stick with your game plan. So anyways, got out of dental school,
practiced for two years and just, I had always planned to open up my own office. That was our game plan from the beginning. However, those first two years really made it clear, practicing a more conventional dentistry made it clear that I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. And fortunately, one thing led to the next. I ultimately started learning about a different form of practicing dentistry, oral health care.
And that matched with a couple of really good questions from some of my first patients really launched me down this career path. So it's been rewarding and here we are and we get to help out hundreds of thousands of people learn alternative ways, more conservative ways to not only repairing teeth, but also to approach oral wellness, oral health as part of the entire body system rather than something that's just about teeth.
And dentistry was the first medical specialty, isn't that right? So it should be considered part of your body. Pretty wild, huh, that the mouth is actually part of the body? Yeah, foreign concept.
Can you tell us a little more about that first mother in your dental practice that kind of shifted things for you? Absolutely. So I had the concept introduced to me that cavities are caused by a disease that you can actually treat rather than just telling people they need to do, you know, brush their teeth more and eat less sugar and all the normal stuff. And I had a, I had multiple mothers actually that came in all around the same time that brought kids that had tooth infections and teeth that needed to be taken out.
And so naturally I wanted to figure out what was going on and I started asking them all the questions, know, do your kids have access to like, sugary snacks throughout the day? Do they sip on anything? Do they do this? Do they do that? And these were really well -educated families that ate really clean, lived really clean lives. They were aware of these different things and their kids still were getting cavities. and so in the common denominator or the only thing that they had in common, was
A red flag as far as what we're taught in dentistry is that they weren't using fluoride. And I thought there is no way fluoride is the deciding factor between kids having healthy teeth and not getting cavities and then kids getting abscessed teeth and needing to get teeth out. So that really started the journey digging more into what the risk factors are, what the research is, what are all the different parts of this disease. Because we need to manage each of those parts to be able to solve the puzzle.
We can't just throw more fluoride at it, know, eat less sugar, brush more. Those things are helpful and they're part of that pie. But there's a whole lot of other risk factors that have to be managed. Well, and with more research, you learned that daily fluoride isn't even useful. No, no, it's considered low evidence as far as how useful it is. In fact, in adults, fluoride isn't even considered strong evidence in any case.
There's not a strong evidence argument in any case for adults. And for kids, the most effective is a fluoride every six months, not a fluoride every single day. So if you add that on top of risks of using fluoride, it just seems like people are really not understanding the real way to solve this problem from a whole health perspective.
That and the wrong research is being presented in dental school. We're being shown research that fluoride is one of the greatest accomplishments in the 20th century. Yet there are studies of 37, 30 plus thousand people in different towns in the US showing that there was no difference in cavity rate between two populations, one on fluoridated water and one without. So that's water specifically, but...
So that's what we're here to do. We're here to try our best to dispel myths and present evidence -based oral health care. So how did you come to be known as the cavities guy on Instagram? Okay, so the first video that actually took off was on TikTok. And I started by saying that people should not be getting cavities, that cavities is caused by a disease. And people that keep getting cavities, this disease is not being treated, only the symptoms of the disease are being treated.
And that resonated with so many people because this is the most prevalent disease worldwide. Everybody has at least a family member or close friend that has gotten a cavity, at least one. And I would say every family has someone in it that has gotten the cavity. That's how close to home it is. no one enjoys going to the dentist and getting cavities treated and teeth fixed and needing more work and...
just all the stuff that comes as a result of just getting one cavity is significant. Unexpected expenses and even down the road the fear of losing teeth. Yeah, it's significant. Yeah, and then on top of that is dental anxiety. So many people just do not want to spend their time at the dentist. Yeah, and I don't blame them. I don't like spending time at the dentist. You heard it from the dentist himself. And that's because, and I want you to all be very kind to your providers because
As a provider, it's irritating, but also just heavy being told constantly that you're hated when people mean to say that they don't like dental experiences, but instead it's, hate the dentist. So please don't go say that. But even for myself, I feel dental anxiety. I trust my providers, but it's just not fun being in the chair. It's in very personal space. So.
That's what started this whole thing. And then from there, Eliza ran with it and it just grew and grew and grew. And now less than 1 % of our followers actually live in the area. So our following is nationwide. Worldwide. It's worldwide, yeah. Yeah. And we now have 250 ,000 followers on Instagram, which is where most of our community hangs out. And we make digital guides and courses to help educate patients specifically because we feel like
Well, not only dentists, but especially patients do not understand the cause of their dental problems and don't know how to fix it in a holistic sense because the only things they're told at the dentist are brush, floss, don't eat sugar, use fluoride. And it's like, well, then I'm still dealing with these problems. What else can I do when it comes to preventing gum inflammation, cavities, other issues like clenching and grinding that are just, you know, mostly people are just given a mouth guard for that.
What are the root causes of these issues? So we do have two guides I'll link them below. The first one is a free products guide where we just outline our favorite effective safe dental products. And then the other two are more comprehensive. We have the functional dentistry roadmap to help you get started in knowing the functional solution to your dental problems and how to find a provider.
to work with that's near you that can support you. And then the second guide is our signature guide. It's helped over 1 ,800 people and it is called the ultimate guide on how to cure cavities. And we collaborated with Dr. Ryan Nolan who is a cardiologist and researcher to write that. We're really proud of that resource and if you haven't gotten that already and you struggle with cavities, that is absolutely the best place to start.
So last question for you, where do you see restoration dentistry going in the next three years? Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, there's a couple different avenues. Here locally, I want our brick and mortar practice to grow. We want to bring on some new doctors, maybe have a couple locations. Not that my dream is to own a bunch of practices, but we see the demand that...
people want for this kind of dentistry Doctors are just slow to adapt new styles. So I see the need of needing to have locations just to be able to handle patient demand. This is really important for people to be able to get this care. with the dentistry practice side, we hope to be able to train other dentists how to implement this model so that wherever people are, hopefully we can...
train more more dentists so that more people that practice this way with this philosophy will be available to people nationwide and then hopefully, know, worldwide as people can understand how to adopt this model. But with the social media side of things, we have different goals and missions. Yeah, so we want to continue to offer digital guides and courses at an accessible price so you guys can continue to get the answers you need.
but we want to explore a couple other things. We want to see if we can do some social media coaching or practice coaching for Dennis, but I do have a couple other things up my sleeve. We're thinking about writing a series of children's books about the functional way to approach oral health. But my ultimate goal from the social media side is just to get tons and tons more success stories.
I love getting the success stories in our DMs that someone purchased the guide, worked on things for about six months, and then the next visit, no cavities. That is my dream, so let's just keep collecting those. Honestly, our ultimate goal is to embody the name of this podcast, which is Dentistry Disrupted. We want to be a big part of truly disrupting the entire dental field and hopefully all the way back to dental schools.
is we need to change our way of practice. We need to change so much about our profession, especially to be able to properly care for people's oral health because the health of your mouth is intimately connected to your gut and to the rest of your body, even your brain. So we need to change this. We need to move away from fixing teeth and move towards healing the oral cavity and preventing disease like cavities so that we can properly care for our patients and even extend
the length of their lives. Because oral disease can shorten your lifespan because it contributes to so many other things. that is our ultimate goal To change this entire industry. Well thank you for joining us today on Dentistry Disrupted. There was a little intro and future episodes are going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk about all sorts of different topics, bring really great people on here.
Thanks for joining us today and you will be hearing from Eliza again. Yes, I hope so. She is the best. And we're going to start doing a whole lot more together because I could not be who I am without her. Truly. So she's given us wings to fly and she's provided this, the whole reason why you are listening to me is because of her and what she's created. So.
You will be on here more. That was unscripted, guys. Thank you. So we look forward to speaking with you soon and until then, keep disrupting. Keep disrupting, my friends.
and the producer, director, brains behind all this good stuff is Eliza Jane. And she is here with me. Hello. Excited to be here. So fun to have you here. We are going to have a good time and we want to introduce our intention with season two. It's going to be a bit different than season one. We want to do
more podcasts, shorter form, and we want to do a lot of interviews with not just other dentists or dental providers, but we also want to include other professionals like functional medicine, myofunctional therapists, body workers, such as chiropractors. We want to involve a lot of different people so that you can learn about a more comprehensive whole wellness approach outside of just focusing on oral health.
And then the other half of the time, we will probably be going off script, talking about whatever we feel like talking about as related to
health, wellness, dentistry, things that we're seeing online on.
viral social media posts, questions from followers, crazy stories. But the intention behind those is short little 10 minute episodes you can just throw in on a quick walk in the morning.
And if you're new here, we'd like to give some introductions. I am Dr. Craig D. Clayton. I'm a
in Meridian, Idaho, and my family and I live in Boise, Idaho, and this is where Eliza grew up. So we love it here. It's been great. We've been here for four years. I went to dental school in Kentucky and grew up in Southern California, and we've also lived in Utah for a bit as well. lived a couple different places, but this is home for
Three things about me, I love to ride bicycles specifically off -road. So mountain biking and bike packing, which is like backpacking but on a bicycle. And I love to do all sorts of activities with my family. They're my favorite people to spend time with and we go backpacking and a lot of water play, skiing. And then I guess my second favorite sport or up there with biking is skiing. So skiing and biking make me really, really happy. And then...
backpacking is climbing up there now too. Yay, good. that's number three. I might be turning you into a backpacker. So I married this lovely man in 2016 and moved to Kentucky with him, supported him. 2015. cut. I'm glad that wasn't me that got it wrong. Okay, So a little about me.
I married Craig in 2015. We have two boys ages four and six. And was a competitive dancer growing up. And then I studied child development in college.
when Dr. Clayton started building out the dental practice, I somehow decided I would do the marketing for it, even though I don't have background in that. And it's been a really great time. Now we work together and we somehow built this. Yeah, mean this happened by, this happened by accident. Yeah. But three things about me. Number one, I love backpacking. I grew up doing backpacking and I've been getting my husband and my kids into it. And I also take groups of women backpacking.
I love a good dance party. I love girls nights, laughing, chick flicks, Idaho sunsets, playing in the water. I will get in every mountain lake that I come upon. It is a rule for my life. It's not, No matter the temperature. No, for sure. we love working together. It's been so much fun. And yes, this was like totally stumbled on it by accident.
Thanks to a couple posts taking off that we never intended to go viral, we now have this opportunity to reach so many more people and to teach all of you about all things oral health. As well as various other topics.
So why don't you give us a little background on dentistry, why you chose the profession, and how you ended up where you are today.
Besides all the fun stuff, I got into dentistry originally because it felt like it was a wise decision. I thought about medicine versus dentistry, looked at the of the lifestyle schedule of dentists.
And it just looked fitting. I wanted to spend more time with my family and recreate more outdoors. So I said, sure, why not? Let's do dentistry. It's nice to work with my hands, work with people, provide an essential service. But fast forward to dental school, I considered dropping out halfway through my second year because I just was miserable. I didn't like it. It didn't feel right as far as it just, we were learning so much good stuff, but when it came down to like,
the skills, like what we actually did on a day -to basis. was focused so heavily on fixing teeth, and I don't feel like it had enough clinical focus on how to actually fix the problem. So, got through dental school, obviously chose not to drop out. I had a little bit to do with that. Yeah. When you take on a lot of sometimes it's best to just stick with your game plan. So anyways, got out of dental school,
practiced for two years and just, I had always planned to open up my own office. That was our game plan from the beginning. However, those first two years really made it clear, practicing a more conventional dentistry made it clear that I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. And fortunately, one thing led to the next. I ultimately started learning about a different form of practicing dentistry, oral health care.
And that matched with a couple of really good questions from some of my first patients really launched me down this career path. So it's been rewarding and here we are and we get to help out hundreds of thousands of people learn alternative ways, more conservative ways to not only repairing teeth, but also to approach oral wellness, oral health as part of the entire body system rather than something that's just about teeth.
And dentistry was the first medical specialty, isn't that right? So it should be considered part of your body. Pretty wild, huh, that the mouth is actually part of the body? Yeah, foreign concept.
Can you tell us a little more about that first mother in your dental practice that kind of shifted things for you? Absolutely. So I had the concept introduced to me that cavities are caused by a disease that you can actually treat rather than just telling people they need to do, you know, brush their teeth more and eat less sugar and all the normal stuff. And I had a, I had multiple mothers actually that came in all around the same time that brought kids that had tooth infections and teeth that needed to be taken out.
And so naturally I wanted to figure out what was going on and I started asking them all the questions, know, do your kids have access to like, sugary snacks throughout the day? Do they sip on anything? Do they do this? Do they do that? And these were really well -educated families that ate really clean, lived really clean lives. They were aware of these different things and their kids still were getting cavities. and so in the common denominator or the only thing that they had in common, was
A red flag as far as what we're taught in dentistry is that they weren't using fluoride. And I thought there is no way fluoride is the deciding factor between kids having healthy teeth and not getting cavities and then kids getting abscessed teeth and needing to get teeth out. So that really started the journey digging more into what the risk factors are, what the research is, what are all the different parts of this disease. Because we need to manage each of those parts to be able to solve the puzzle.
We can't just throw more fluoride at it, know, eat less sugar, brush more. Those things are helpful and they're part of that pie. But there's a whole lot of other risk factors that have to be managed. Well, and with more research, you learned that daily fluoride isn't even useful. No, no, it's considered low evidence as far as how useful it is. In fact, in adults, fluoride isn't even considered strong evidence in any case.
There's not a strong evidence argument in any case for adults. And for kids, the most effective is a fluoride every six months, not a fluoride every single day. So if you add that on top of risks of using fluoride, it just seems like people are really not understanding the real way to solve this problem from a whole health perspective.
That and the wrong research is being presented in dental school. We're being shown research that fluoride is one of the greatest accomplishments in the 20th century. Yet there are studies of 37, 30 plus thousand people in different towns in the US showing that there was no difference in cavity rate between two populations, one on fluoridated water and one without. So that's water specifically, but...
So that's what we're here to do. We're here to try our best to dispel myths and present evidence -based oral health care. So how did you come to be known as the cavities guy on Instagram? Okay, so the first video that actually took off was on TikTok. And I started by saying that people should not be getting cavities, that cavities is caused by a disease. And people that keep getting cavities, this disease is not being treated, only the symptoms of the disease are being treated.
And that resonated with so many people because this is the most prevalent disease worldwide. Everybody has at least a family member or close friend that has gotten a cavity, at least one. And I would say every family has someone in it that has gotten the cavity. That's how close to home it is. no one enjoys going to the dentist and getting cavities treated and teeth fixed and needing more work and...
just all the stuff that comes as a result of just getting one cavity is significant. Unexpected expenses and even down the road the fear of losing teeth. Yeah, it's significant. Yeah, and then on top of that is dental anxiety. So many people just do not want to spend their time at the dentist. Yeah, and I don't blame them. I don't like spending time at the dentist. You heard it from the dentist himself. And that's because, and I want you to all be very kind to your providers because
As a provider, it's irritating, but also just heavy being told constantly that you're hated when people mean to say that they don't like dental experiences, but instead it's, hate the dentist. So please don't go say that. But even for myself, I feel dental anxiety. I trust my providers, but it's just not fun being in the chair. It's in very personal space. So.
That's what started this whole thing. And then from there, Eliza ran with it and it just grew and grew and grew. And now less than 1 % of our followers actually live in the area. So our following is nationwide. Worldwide. It's worldwide, yeah. Yeah. And we now have 250 ,000 followers on Instagram, which is where most of our community hangs out. And we make digital guides and courses to help educate patients specifically because we feel like
Well, not only dentists, but especially patients do not understand the cause of their dental problems and don't know how to fix it in a holistic sense because the only things they're told at the dentist are brush, floss, don't eat sugar, use fluoride. And it's like, well, then I'm still dealing with these problems. What else can I do when it comes to preventing gum inflammation, cavities, other issues like clenching and grinding that are just, you know, mostly people are just given a mouth guard for that.
What are the root causes of these issues? So we do have two guides I'll link them below. The first one is a free products guide where we just outline our favorite effective safe dental products. And then the other two are more comprehensive. We have the functional dentistry roadmap to help you get started in knowing the functional solution to your dental problems and how to find a provider.
to work with that's near you that can support you. And then the second guide is our signature guide. It's helped over 1 ,800 people and it is called the ultimate guide on how to cure cavities. And we collaborated with Dr. Ryan Nolan who is a cardiologist and researcher to write that. We're really proud of that resource and if you haven't gotten that already and you struggle with cavities, that is absolutely the best place to start.
So last question for you, where do you see restoration dentistry going in the next three years? Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, there's a couple different avenues. Here locally, I want our brick and mortar practice to grow. We want to bring on some new doctors, maybe have a couple locations. Not that my dream is to own a bunch of practices, but we see the demand that...
people want for this kind of dentistry Doctors are just slow to adapt new styles. So I see the need of needing to have locations just to be able to handle patient demand. This is really important for people to be able to get this care. with the dentistry practice side, we hope to be able to train other dentists how to implement this model so that wherever people are, hopefully we can...
train more more dentists so that more people that practice this way with this philosophy will be available to people nationwide and then hopefully, know, worldwide as people can understand how to adopt this model. But with the social media side of things, we have different goals and missions. Yeah, so we want to continue to offer digital guides and courses at an accessible price so you guys can continue to get the answers you need.
but we want to explore a couple other things. We want to see if we can do some social media coaching or practice coaching for Dennis, but I do have a couple other things up my sleeve. We're thinking about writing a series of children's books about the functional way to approach oral health. But my ultimate goal from the social media side is just to get tons and tons more success stories.
I love getting the success stories in our DMs that someone purchased the guide, worked on things for about six months, and then the next visit, no cavities. That is my dream, so let's just keep collecting those. Honestly, our ultimate goal is to embody the name of this podcast, which is Dentistry Disrupted. We want to be a big part of truly disrupting the entire dental field and hopefully all the way back to dental schools.
is we need to change our way of practice. We need to change so much about our profession, especially to be able to properly care for people's oral health because the health of your mouth is intimately connected to your gut and to the rest of your body, even your brain. So we need to change this. We need to move away from fixing teeth and move towards healing the oral cavity and preventing disease like cavities so that we can properly care for our patients and even extend
the length of their lives. Because oral disease can shorten your lifespan because it contributes to so many other things. that is our ultimate goal To change this entire industry. Well thank you for joining us today on Dentistry Disrupted. There was a little intro and future episodes are going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk about all sorts of different topics, bring really great people on here.
Thanks for joining us today and you will be hearing from Eliza again. Yes, I hope so. She is the best. And we're going to start doing a whole lot more together because I could not be who I am without her. Truly. So she's given us wings to fly and she's provided this, the whole reason why you are listening to me is because of her and what she's created. So.
You will be on here more. That was unscripted, guys. Thank you. So we look forward to speaking with you soon and until then, keep disrupting. Keep disrupting, my friends.
