The Highwire with Del Bigtree - MATTERS OF THE MOUTH

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Retired Biological & Functional Dentist, Thomas Lokensgard, DDS discusses the importance of a holistic approach to dentistry for your overall health. His book, ‘Matters Of The Mouth’ outlines the many misconceptions of dental care pushed by corporate interests from root canals to protecting beneficial mouth bacteria. He discusses with Del why oral health should be on the front lines of the Make America Healthy Again movement.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

There's so many important medical decisions that we make health decisions. Part of this Maha movement that is breaking loose around Robert Kennedy Jr. And the work that he wants to do is how do we make America healthy again? How do we make ourselves healthy? How do we avoid needing surgeries in the future and taking drugs in the future? What is the proactive way and things that we can do to actually change our lives, make ourselves healthier? One of the things that I think gets overlooked the most is our mouth. How many of us are neglecting that pain or that thing in our tooth?

Or do you still have mercury in your teeth? I mean, are you doing, are you like checking every label, reading every label, making sure that you're not getting seed oils now, but you didn't get the mercury out of your mouth? I mean, you're moving backwards if that's the case. So one of the things we've got a brand new book called Matters of the Mouth that we're going to be talking about today, this dentist, Tom's Loken's Guard, pulled the mercury out of my teeth,

which was a huge game change. for me it'll look like this. So what we're gonna do, Dell, is we're gonna put a nasal hood on you. Okay. For oxygen, we want you to breathe through the nasal hood. Okay. And that is to prevent you from getting any vapors from the mercury fill removal into the into your nose.

Okay. Because that goes right to your brain. All right. Let's not do that. Well, people will ask me, so why do they put mercury in your mouth anyway? I mean, how did that get started? And it goes back to Galen's four therapies, whereby the Earth Metal, used to, they used to think if it came from the earth, it was good, it was safe, it was good for you. Silver actually turns out to be good.

Aluminum, not so good. Mercury deadly, okay? But they mixed it, you know, probably in the late 1800s because they needed an amalgamation of metals, so it was workable. All right, open one. You doing it okay, Dale? All right. So the next thing we'll do is we'll put some topical anesthetic into the area where we're going to give you an injection. And we're going to give you a painless injection, my friend.

Okay. Done. And you see, right here is mercury. It's just a shinier, deeper white. In biological dentistry, we believe that very high-speed drilling, which is like 600 revolutions per minute, really destroys teeth. It causes micro fractures, and that's not good. So we use electric hand pieces.

So these do a lot less damage. They go slower, and they cause less vibration. This is the composite fill and this is the mercury fill right here. Right now this is kind of interesting. What we do here is we use a technique where we call it we chunk it out. We try to touch it as little as possible. This is the nasal hood so he doesn't breathe any of this in.

This is an air vac machine. This is a suction that sucks any vapors that would come out of the filling that we would miss and it sucks it into a big filter down at the end. Okay? Okay. Moving it in one big piece. Okay, there you go. See if we can chuck this out here.

Here you come. Gone. All right? We hardly touched it. And there we go. You let me know if there's enough anesthesia here, okay? It's fine. Okay.

All right. You don't even know where his body is. It can't through my arm. This is a baby tooth here, and it's full of mercury, and instead of taking a mercury filling out, and putting a new in it, we're just going to extract it. tooth. So we push the gum tissue away with this little instrument. And there's not a whole lot of root structure left on this. Just loosen it up a little bit. Slow back and forth. And it's coming.

That's the tooth. It's almost all mercury. And we figured rather than trying to get the mercury out of there and vaporize everything or vaporize even any of it, we need to just remove it. We've taken it out, cleaned it out, ozoneated it, put a packing in, and we're going to put a suture in here. Perfecto. Well, I Can Press has a brand new book because there's so many questions about your mouth. What's good, what's not, and how's it affecting the rest of my body? Matters of the mouth, a holistic guide to achieving optimal oral and overall health. The author joins me down. Dr. Tom Loken's Guard.

You know, you really saved my mouth, which is why I was so excited to get involved in this. One of the first things I was speaking, I believe it was. that the truth about cancer when we first met. You came up and you asked to sort of look at my teeth and we recognized I still had mercury from baby teeth that never fell out and things like that. You know, how did you get into this? And what is the terms, biological dentistry?

Biological, holistic and biomimetic dentistry. Okay. But we were at a Weston A Price Conference in Chattanooga. And then we heard from a lady that was funding the event that you were going to be speaking at this place in Nashville right after the truth about cancer conference. And so we said, well, let's just go. And so that's where we first met you. All right. So and when it came to Mercury, and I remember it was quite an ordeal, you know, you can't just, I mean, and something you said to me that I was shocking.

is even the dentist is taking a risk. Mercury is the most toxic profession on the planet, in my opinion. Yeah. And it's every time you touch a mercury filling or you drill out a mercury filling, or let's say you want to remove a mercury filling, and you want to drill, drill, fill, and bill, as they say. It's very dangerous.

There's a lot of toxicity that's released from the amalgam. It's mercury. And mercury can cause cancer, and damage your brain and cause Alzheimer's and all kinds of things. Is it still being used? I mean, you know. About 30%. I'm guessing it's about 30% of the dentist and probably more so in the military than not.

When I went to dental school and afterwards, I realized very quickly that probably what I learned was 50% correct. And the other half was 50% wrong. I just had to figure out which 50% I should follow. But yes, it's still being used. I mean, I know that there was, even when, you know, I was working with you, there's controversy around it. There's a lot of, is it dental, dentist associations that say there's no problem with mercury? Is that still going on? Is there still people making an argument?

A lot like fluoride. That mercury is okay in your mouth? Yeah, they're saying it's, in fact, in dental school, in hygiene schools, they teach hygienists to how to polish the filling, the mercury filling, so they're nice and shining. But when you're taking out a mercury filling, there's a tremendous risk at inhaling this mercury vapor. Wow. The other thing that I've had done, which really pushed the edge for me, was I had a root canal removed. Why is that an issue? And you talk about all these things in your book, and you get into all sorts of ways that the body's effect.

by the mouth, but what is it about so many people get root canals? And I have to say it was like a lifesaver for me. I was like, oh my God, pain, all that was gone. But ultimately, you and a couple of other biological dentists said, Del, you really need to get that out of your mouth. But it didn't hurt. Why should someone remove that? Well, oddly enough, the dental profession is the only profession I know, the only medical profession I know, that keeps dead body parts in the body. And that's heresy, in my opinion. So it has to be removed. But when you remove a root canal, because nerve and blood supply, inside the tooth, it becomes infected. And basically in every disease state, what happens is there's a lack of blood flow to the organ. Then there's a lack of

nitric oxide to the organ. Then there's a lack of voltage to the organ, which decreases the oxygenation to the organ, which wakes up the bugs and they start having you for lunch. And then inside the root canals, their root canals will go systemic. The pathogens will lodge themselves in the tooth, and then they'll go systemic, and they'll cause cardiovascular disease, strokes, heart attacks, thyroiditis, and all kinds of things. And that's just because it doesn't have blood flow anymore, it can't protect itself. And I think one of the issues is you can't feel it, right, because you don't have that blood supply. You've taken out the nerve supply, but there's probably three miles of nerves inside the tooth structure

that can go systemic to the rest of the body. So if there's an infection at the end of that root canal, then it can go systemic. It goes into the rest of the blood supply. As a dentist and spending your life in dentistry, how hard was it to unlearn? Because you said you realized half of what you had learned was not true. What was it, you know, was there an aha moment or was it a slow, gradual understanding that shifted? Great question. It was, there were several aha moments, but it was mostly a gradual transition for me from dental school.

Because in dental school, I heard things like America will never have. have a macro or a micronutrient deficiency problem because we have vitamin-rich bread like wonder bread. And that came from a very talented biochemist who I studied under at the University of Minnesota because I graduated in 1980 at the University of Minnesota dental school. And then because I had so much biochemistry

in my college career, Dr. Leon Singer was his name. He was a PhD, a biochemist. And he said, Tom, I want to do this. experiment with fluoride. And so back then, and I said, okay, so I joined him in the lab. And even when we talk about fluoride, you know, we say it does all these damaging things, which it does. It can even kill children. But the bottom line is it doesn't even work to help tooth decay. Really? Yeah, really. Because what happened was we did this, we took some extracted teeth from oral surgery, and we were going to measure the ion flow across the enamel membrane.

So we took some extracted molars, and it was a nine-week quarter back in the day when it was on a quarter and out of semester system. And so we ion tophoratically, we painted these teeth with zero fat and measured the ion, the fluoride ion migration across the membrane. Do you know how much fluoride ion migrated across the membrane in nine weeks? No. Take a guess. I've no idea. Zero. Zero. So the idea is it should penetrate, it should be doing all this work.

Right, but the thing is, so if it doesn't penetrate the enamel matrix in nine weeks, what does it, and you go into your dental office and you have a one-minute fluoride treatment, how much is going to migrate across? Right. Obviously nothing. But fluoride can damage your melatonin levels, your pineal gland. And I can damage that for sure 100%. So all of these things are slowly, you know, coming out.

You know, do you feel like dentistry, sort of like we're talking about right now with Robert Kennedy Jr., the conversations are changing? You know, it used to be that the biological, holistic dentists were sort of the outcasts, you know, the crazy ones. We were. Is that changing? Do you feel like... It's changed a lot, and it continues to change. I moved to Nashville. I made a prediction. I said, and people would ask me, well, what do you do? I said, I'm a holistic biological dentist. And the answer, the question was, what is that? What does that mean?

And so, nobody had heard of it. And now everybody's seeking for biological holistic dentists. There are some major organizations that you look for it. One is the IAO, the International Association of Orthodonics, which my practice was a lot of orthodonic treatment and arch expansion. expansion and then the IABDM this is all in the book okay yeah and then the IOMT was a very uh so if you remember of that or the HDA holistic dental association um what is the sort of in the work that you've done and of course you get into a lot of other like natural health remedies and things that affect the whole body in here because dentistry took you on a journey into uh you know the whole body health which is what I think is so interesting about this book.

Right. Did you have any concept that oral health was so engaged with Oregon health throughout the body? I had no idea, Del. When you started, no. I had no idea. It was just some of those aha moments came, you know, when, well, for example, the recommendation to have a six months treatment, you go visit your dentist every six months. Do you know where that came from?

No. There was this back in the 50s, in the 1950s, There was this toothpaste company called Ipanah. Okay. Ipanah toothpaste. And they had a mascot called Buckey Beaver. And Buckey Beaver said, brush your teeth after every meal and visit your dentist twice a year.

And that became the standard insurance standard. It has nothing to do with clinical dentistry. How often should a person go to the dentist? Well, it depends. Some people need to go every couple months. Some people need to go every couple years. Okay. And every in between, depending on what your issues are.

But the whole thing that you brought up was, what did I learn about, when did I understand that the mouth became the whole, was basically when I became a naturopath. So you went and studied naturopathy while you were a dentist? Well, I was getting frustrated with dentistry, but then some things tweaked my ear, and I found out that the three biggest disease states in the world are dental decay, gingivitis, which is inflammation of the gums.

and peridontitis, which is a bona fide infection, which can lead to root canals and receding gums and receding bone. Are there any things that you see, like, in the teeth that tell you that there's something else wrong with your body? Are the teeth ever, I mean, I know the teeth can affect your health. Is there the reverse where we can see that there's issues with your health that's coming out in your teeth? Well, I have patients come into me all the time and say, geez, you know, my, my, something wrong on my bladder. Do you think that's related to my teeth? And I'm like, I have no idea.

I doubt it. I have no idea. It doesn't make sense to me. Then I came to find out that TCM dentistry, traditional Chinese medicine, teeth are like little batteries, and they sit on a meridian, on a collagen meridian,

and they're like circuit breakers. Oh. And so if you have a tooth, well, in fact, let me give you an example, Thomas Rao, who's an MD, who runs the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland. He's an MD that treated cancer. And he did, he had, it was a rather small study, but he studied cancer patients, women cancer patients that had breast cancer

on the ipsilateral side, meaning the same side. They had, he discovered that they each had root canals, failed root canals on the right side on the ipsilateral side, that caused the breast cancer because they were tracked on this meridian. And so the teeth were removed, fixed up PRF, which is protein-rich-fibrin, and then oxygenated and ozinated, and then restored. But he's the one that made a connection between breast cancer and tooth problems. So yes, every tooth, your teeth...

Did that help? Does it help? If you get the teeth fixed, does it help with the cancer? It helps a lot. So are there any things else that you would think people would be surprised that your dental health effects in the rest of your body? Well, yeah. Alzheimer's and dementias can be related to a bug called Perferomonas ginger valis. Okay.

Because your mouth has a microbiome, just like your gut does. And everybody thinks that the gut is the beginning of your health. The beginning of your gut is your mouth, right? But your mouth has a microbiome just like your gut does. And so if Porfirminus gingervalis gets into your system to the tooth, into the body, it can cause Alzheimer's and dementia. And it can cause stroke, cardiovascular disease, thyroid dysfunction, and all kinds of things. What about the constant use of mouthwash?

I mean, one of the things that I discovered during COVID is, you know, something as simple is just gargling strong mouthwash because everyone's talking about, like the colonization of the virus, like stop it. It's been very effective. Every time I get a scratchy throat of that feeling like something's coming on, I go and gargle mouthwash, but it seems if it's powerful enough to do that, it must be wiping out, you know. It's wiping out the good bacteria.

Yeah, that's what I'm wondering. So we developed, I started a little company called Pearl Oral Health a few years ago. Yeah. And we have a product called oxymist that your body produces this compound naturally. And so that's what I recommend. But no, as far as any of the commercial mouth rins, they're toxic. So you don't want to be, you know, rinse your mouth like the commercial savory day to get rid of the bacteria. What about water picks or vibrating toothbrushes?

Did these things matter? Yeah, sure do. Flossing, brushing, tongue scraping in our system, we have an oral health care. We have a MAHA oral health system. Okay. It's just designed for your mouth. And so if you go on our website, it's Pearl Oral Health. Okay.

Maha, the Maha dot store. And so congratulations for what you're doing too. Thank you. Thank you. So with this Maha movement and this desire to make America healthy again, you know, the whole dental space is so critical. There's a lot of people that wait, you know, wait. They're sitting on an issue. A lot of it because we just hate the experience of going to.

a dentist, but what would be your advice to everyone watching right now that's maybe taken a while or sort of nursing these little issues that we're chasing around our mouths? The bottom line, Dell, is this. You cannot have a healthy body without having a healthy oral structure, oral mouth. This is where it starts. And so you have to keep it clean, like you said, with toothpicks. My regimen is I get into use a sonic care. Okay. Sonic care is a vibratory, and they get rid of the dental plaque. And then I use a toothpick. Yep.

A gum pick. I think those are very valuable. We have a toothpaste called Nature's Toothpaste. Okay. And it has everything good for your microbiome. And it boosts nitric oxide synthase and synthesis. So you know about nitric oxide. I think...

I don't, though, really. How does nitric oxide... Nitric oxide is a gas that's producing your endothelium. in your arterial wall, and it dilates the blood vessels. All disease states, no matter what they are, start with a decrease in blood flow into the organ system. And with that, there's also a decrease in nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is producing your parinatal sinuses.

So you want to avoid becoming a mouse breathing. And at night, you want to use some kind of an appliance, which will cause you to breathe through your nose. that's a whole other discussion. That's another topic. Now, are you saying that teeth are actually organs? Is that... There are switches.

Yeah, they're organ systems. But on each meridian, there's a meridian channel. For example, I had a lady come in with her daughter. And I noticed she was on prednisone. And I said, ma'am, how come your daughter's on prednisone? And she goes, well, she has bladder infections. And I go... Yeah.

So I said, well, so I took a look at her lower front teeth because that's a meridian that's connected to the platter. And her four lower teeth were just bombed out. And I said, well, there's your problem. And see, I wouldn't have known that 20 years ago. Right. Or 10 years ago. Because people would come in and say,

well, do you think this is affecting this in my mouth? I go, again, I have no idea. Right. But in her case, so we went ahead and removed those teeth and cleared up. she got off the prednisone. Wow. So each one of your teeth are like little circuit breakers.

And once they become infected, they shut down the canal. And that's what, there's a biological holistic dentist know that, and they know they can, like, sort of work on those issues. Right, right. So it might, yeah, it might not even be a tooth issue at all. Yeah. Or it might be. So.

I know there's people like deal with migraines and stuff and then go and get dental appliances and things like that. True. Well, that's a whole other thing, is the size of your mouth. Okay. Because with this COVID thing, masking was ridiculous. Right. Because you're just re-breathing the bad bacteria.

What you want to do is you want to have your mouth proper form, shape, and size, which is what I, which is what my focus on my practice actually became, was orthodontics until I, until I ran into you. So what do you think about it? Have you heard of mouth taping? Yeah. Yeah, what do you think of that? I think it's great. Yeah?

If you're a mouth breather, because if you're a mouth breather, you're not developing the nitric oxide in your paranasal sinuses, which then goes into the stomach. One of the biggest issues, I think, in dentistry and disease is nasal, non-nasal breathing. You've got to become a nasal breather. Interesting. That's the bottom line. I didn't breathe through my nose for like the first, you know, I think 20 years of my life. Actually, even longer, I was on the doctors. I had a deviated septim my whole life.

Did you get that fixed? Finally, when I was working on the doctor's television show, actually my executive producer, Jen Sherry, who's here now, shot it. She went and shot and they're like, oh, we'll do the surgery for you. And they rebroke my nose. It was the break heard round the world. You should have heard the audience. I mean, it was crazy.

But I, it definitely. What's good is you got to correct? Yeah, I mean. Did you have any orthodonic appliances? I mean, I got braces when I was a kid and things like that. That's something that I questioned. Let me just ask you something because my son's 16. You know, he's ready to, I want to straighten those teeth out.

Ever is 16 now? Yeah, he's 16. He's also 6.3. For those people out there that saw him the mask on during COVID, he's this little guy. He just shot up. I'm hugging a bear now and I'm hugging my own son. I personally felt like wearing the head gear and pulling all the teeth back, then a couple years later, like, well, there's no room for your wisdom teeth.

We got to pull them. I was like, you took away the room for my wisdom teeth. I mean, I'm just... You need to do slow arch expansion. I mean, I would rather just, can I leave? Is it, are there people that live with all their teeth, including their wisdom teeth in their mouth? Sure.

Yeah? Yeah. That's, we, I've gone from having to. to remove wisdom teeth because there wasn't enough room like you said. Yeah. The reason there's not enough room is because there's not enough space out here. Okay. And so if you expand out the arches, you expand the upper arch

and you want tongue placement on the palate, and then you want to have nasal breathing going on all the time, even at night, even at rest. Okay. And then you'll produce nitric oxide, which is the whole thing that drives. It's all about, The whole human body is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Yeah. But it's designed to run as an electrical circuit and a biochemical circuit, meaning that you need the chemistry to, you need the voltage. It's all about voltage. Yeah. There's a book called Healing is Voltage by a Jerry Tenet called Healing is Voltage. We are electrical beings. That's one of the reasons why we moved to Florida so we could run around on the beach.

Yeah. But that's a good, yeah. Once the electrical voltage drops, then the mitochondrial drops. So you've got to raise the voltage, raise the nitric oxide levels, and that's what we're, that's what our little company called proloyal health is all about. And so with this maha movement, the timing is phenomenal. Yeah. I mean, the timing is just incredible.

I mean, we were, Jan and I were jumping up and down the day, because I was concerned, because some of those decepticrats, they're nasty. They're nasty. Decepticast's first of ever heard that. Yeah, it was, it's truly a miracle. And it's why I'm so happy to be, you know, getting your book out there. Dental health is just going to be part of making America healthy again. Exactly.

And thank you because I was looking around for a small publisher. The book had been mostly written. About a month or two went by. And then some Saturday morning, I see this number and I go, I don't recognize the area code. And so I picked it up and you go, hey Tom, it's Dell. I go, hey, Del, how are you doing? You go, hey, your book, I want to publish it.

And that was just unbelievable. So thank you so much for that. Well, thank you for trusting us. And thank you for all that you've done to help, you know, keep me healthy because it's rough out there, all the traveling, you know, going around. And, you know, I get compliments on my smile. And I said, well, this is the guy that made that happen. Tom, Logan's Guard.

Thank you for this book. Thank you for your incredible body of work. Thank you. If you want to get this book, Matters of the Mouth, you'll be really glad you grab this.