Craig Clayton - Last Chance (00:47)
And this program includes course...
coaching and community as well as many great bonuses. So to get more information on that, visit the show notes and you can learn about not only the course community and coaching, but also the bonus resources we made to help you be successful. If you already have our cavity guide, this is a more comprehensive.
program where we work with you and hold you accountable. So make sure to check that out. But let's go ahead and jump into our frequently asked questions all about cavities. So the first question that you often get or I get in the DMs on your behalf is why do I get cavities even though I brush floss and eat healthy? Those are probably the three things that people are like, why doesn't that work? Yes, such a common question. And I have that here.
In my dental practice, I get asked the same question. Okay, so here's the reality. You can't brush and floss and eat less sugar your way to living a cavity free life. There are other risk factors that are often overlooked that we need to consider and fix in order to get you out of this cycle. For example, one that's commonly over missed is airway. If you're breathing through your mouth, night and day, your mouth is going to be more acidic and you're going to have a much harder time
becoming cavity free. What's another example of a commonly missed risk factor?
Well, autoimmune diseases definitely seem to be on the rise. I have a lot of patients that come in with autoimmune, specifically Hashimoto's or low thyroid production. And thyroid hormone levels affect the amount of calcium that's available in your bloodstream. Calcium is very important for muscles. Your muscles need it to be able to work. So consider your heart. Your body's not going to preference calcium in your saliva.
over calcium going to important muscles like your heart.
Wow, that is fascinating. It's really interesting, right? Everything is connected. Everything. All right, another common question that we hear is, my dentist told me that I have soft teeth. Now, what does this mean? I would say it's more appropriate that you've been told you have an aggressive biofilm. So the biofilm or bacteria on our teeth
When they're aggressive, they increase your risk of getting cavities. So people that actually have truly soft teeth, these are abnormalities of the teeth, and that is very uncommon. So most of the time, there are other risk factors driving the cycle, and because we don't have good answers for what those are, we just say, you've got soft teeth. They're just not as resistant as they need to be.
So they're not actually soft. No, they're not actually soft. And sure, like the amount of collagen we have in our skin, know, some people are more prone to wrinkles and stretch marks than others. Our teeth definitely from person to person vary in how mineralized they are, but the genetic conditions that actually cause truly soft teeth that are very vulnerable to decay are very uncommon. That's interesting.
All right, the next question that we hear is why do I keep needing to replace my dental work? So someone gets a cavity and then they get a filling in a couple years, maybe five, 10 years go by and they come in and they need to get that filling replaced. So why do they keep having to replace their dental work? Maybe they're even to this point have gotten a crown or needed to get a root canal treatment and the cycle just keeps going. Yeah, great question. I get asked this a lot.
and we get receive DMs as well, especially if I have a cavity under a crown or a cavity around a filling, can I heal this? Can I reverse it? So short answer, absolutely not. And that's the final answer for those cases. But dental work doesn't last your whole life, unfortunately. Nothing is better than our natural tooth structure. But another big problem is a lot of conventional dentistry and techniques.
can lead to much shorter lasting results for various reasons. So know it will not last your whole life, unfortunately, but there are things we can do to ensure that we get the best dental work possible and have the best chance for those restorations, those fillings, crowns, whatever you have gotten to last as long as possible.
I mean, what's one way that a student could try to get better dental work that's gonna last longer? If you need to get a filling or a crown or any sort of treatment repairing the tooth, asking for a rubber dam is a great way to improve the survival of that restoration. This isolates the tooth and so it cannot get contaminated or wet from the saliva in your mouth.
And that is crucial to getting a good seal around that filling so decay can't creep in again. So that's a win today. If you need to get a filling or any sort of dental work, ask for a rubber dam. Every dentist knows how to use one.
So a rubber dam is a non-latex sheet of rubber and little holes are punched into it and those holes are slid over the teeth. And so there's this barrier where if you look at the rubber dam, all that's coming through are the teeth and then the tongue and the mouth saliva, the other teeth are behind the rubber dam. And so that is the best way to keep those teeth isolated from getting wet.
and preventing early failure. And something to note is we can ask for accommodations to get better dental work, but at the end of the day, once you touch a tooth, it's never going to be the same. And so the ultimate goal would be to prevent cavities in the first place to get out of that disease cycle. Absolutely.
As Eliza said, yes, I want to reemphasize once we treat a tooth, it's never the same and it will most likely need more treatment in the future, which removes more of the tooth further compromising the tooth. Yes, and that cycle is actually called the tooth death cycle. That's a scary name, but it's basically saying that once a tooth gets a cavity and needs dental work,
that it's on this cycle of death, eventually to the point where it could be extracted. And we want to stop that at all costs. And that includes getting better dental work, but ultimately preventing cavities.
Another really common question we get is what products should I use to stop getting cavities? They may be making their own concoction at home with essential oils and bentonite clay and salt and all these different things that they're really excited to tell us about and wondering if it's working. So tell it to him straight, Dr. Clayton. Okay. The reality is...
Our mouth is designed to have saliva in it and that's it. And of course the food we eat. So introducing anything foreign is a risk of making things worse. Okay. We have to be careful with the products we use. We've all been brainwashed to think that we have to use some sort of toothpaste every time or rinse every time to keep our mouth healthy. What we need to do is encourage
more saliva because that is what's going to keep our mouths healthier than some concoction we make at home. Now there are good ingredients that can help with cavity prevention, remineralization, but at large, I highly recommend to stop using homemade concoctions and stop following the recipes of people online telling you how to make a homemade toothpaste because do they have any evidence that it actually works? No.
zero. And from what I've seen and other colleagues have seen, when people use homemade products and products that are dangerous and don't work, they often end up with very poor oral health rather than good oral health. So two things to look for are products that are tested for safety and products that are tested for efficacy or basically show that they actually work to reverse cavities or to prevent them. Yes. Because the mouth is
is chemistry really. It's this delicate balance of how all these different things interact. So if a product that you're introducing to your mouth does not account for this delicate chemistry, we're throwing a huge wrench in this system.
There is so much that goes into preventing cavities and that is why we designed a comprehensive program, confidently cavity free, so we could really walk you through each of these risk factors so you don't feel overwhelmed and you know exactly what small actionable items you can work on each week. And so we're really excited to have this program open again. It hasn't been open for nine months
And we feel so grateful to have been able to build relationships with our students last class and walk them to their cavity free life. And if you are looking for more support and accountability and resources to make this journey more accessible for you, then Confidently Cavity Free is a great place for you. we'd love to invite you to join us before the doors close on October 30th at midnight.
so we can get you started for the new year.
And it's been so rewarding to see students get great results of finally getting out of this cycle. So if that sounds like the right fit for you, just visit the show notes for a link to join and enroll today. And we get started right away. And this program goes through December 16th, but you do have lifetime access to all of your course material. Absolutely.
And this program is right for you if you are willing to do the work, if you're ready to jump in and learn more about topics such as these and really identify what you're missing, what you need to do better to get out of this cycle. So it takes commitment, it takes work, but it's attainable.
