Wisdom Teeth + Chronic Illness
“The mouth is simply the gateway to a world where the external becomes internalized.”
I'd like to be clear about one thing: I am not a doctor or a certified health professional of any kind. I am also not making any direct recommendations in regard to your health. What I am doing is merely sharing my own experience, questions I'm wrestling with, and insights I believe I've found in a profoundly long and difficult health journey. Whatever you take from this, I hope it's only that you are in the driver's seat of your own health, and you know what is best for your own body and your community.
Like most "Elder Millennials" in the United States, I had my wisdom teeth removed sometime in high school. As procedures go, it appeared to carry on as planned. Unconscious for the whole thing, I only remember recovering afterward, strewn across our living room couch, mouth filled with bloody gauze, probably watching ESPN or My So-Called Life while my parents were at work.
Normal. This was the normal picture of a young teenager in this country.
Life went on like normal after that, too, and I went onto university.
It was there, in college, though, that I developed my first persistent, physical experience of anxiety. That seemed relatively "normal," too, given I was an under-slept college kid with more on my plate than ever before. Plus, anxiety is just an "emotional problem," right? It was just stress, surely.
Around the same time, I also developed a heart arrhythmia. Again, probably stress, right? I didn't have seasonal allergies until then, either. Probably just an environmental change from Texas to Arkansas, where I moved for school, right?
Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else. Or, maybe those things were more intensely triggered by a related problem, already happening within me.
Still, life continued.
I eventually graduated without any additional, known symptoms and came back to Colorado, where my family had moved after freshman year.
As health stories go, it would take too much to provide a run-down of all the diet and lifestyle changes I tried between then and now, desperate to find solutions to my growing list of health challenges, all of which are part of my whole-health picture.
What I will say, though, is that I eventually developed a series of symptoms that seemed too low-grade to truly concern any Western medical doctors and too complexly related for even functional medicine practitioners to untangle, including—
An under-functioning thyroid that doctors still refuse to acknowledge, despite a growing population of benign nodules on the gland.
Terrible sleep, sleep apnea, and, at times, sleep paralysis.
Leaky gut.
Malnutrition.
Chronic fatigue.
Brain fog.
Food allergies.
Panic attacks.
Depression.
Acid reflux (this one came with a two-year cough).
Eczema.
Low blood pressure.
Unexplained weight gain.
Cold fingers and toes.
Irritability.
Severe physical stress before every period.
Small red bumps all over my legs and arms.
The list goes on, honestly.
Many of these aren't officially diagnosed because most of the medical community isn't looking at the whole picture, doesn't believe the symptoms are "real," or uses faulty "standard ranges" to determine whether something's wrong with you. That makes it pretty impossible to feel like you're not either crazy—imagining your own symptoms—or like you have any real control over getting better.
And most things here? Pretty "normal" for your average adult, right? Tired and stressed, depressed in a world falling apart, anxious at all of our individual burdens and global catastrophes. I mean, of course we're exhausted, right?
But we just need to cope with all of our symptoms and move on, grow up, push through, get over it already.
You're probably just getting older, man.
Hello, gaslighting, my old friend. I know you well.
For a long time, I believed two things about my symptoms:
1. A lot of this was probably just my "personality." I thought I'd simply gotten a raw end of the deal in the brain department as a fairly not-happy human. I was an irritable person, sluggish, lazy, neurotic, unmotivated to exercise, and kind of a bummer to be around. (A therapist once told me I was "tightly wound.") This is who I was.
And 2. My body just can't deal with the world the way most other people can. I'm excessively triggered by life—toxins, stress, etc.—more than the average human. A "highly sensitive person" or "HSP," as the Instagram world will affirm. At one point, I found myself weeping to a former CEO, worried that my body was literally incapable of coping with regular "work" any longer. Maybe my past trauma makes me more prone to stress and disease than others, but again, kind of a raw deal, all around.
Thing is, though, these symptoms didn't feel normal to me. Something in me knew there was a "different Brandi" in there somewhere. A Brandi that could access joy. A Brandi that felt lighter and had more energy. A Brandi that didn't feel anxious, or constantly stressed and worried, or stuck beneath the weight of a truck when I woke up each morning, physically, spiritually, or emotionally.
A Brandi that had something more to give.
So I wasn't willing to accept all of my symptoms as a normal part of aging, culture, or life, in general.
Something felt wrong, and I knew it.
My main job became tracking down what that something was.
To that end, I tried nearly every healing modality that exists.
MRIs.
PPIs.
Blood tests.
Acupuncturists.
Naturopaths.
Mushrooms.
Allergy tests.
Lung doctors.
Salt caves.
Every diet imaginable.
Supplements.
Heavy metal detox.
Candida killing.
Meditation.
Massage.
Talk therapy.
EMDR therapy.
Chiropractic.
Float tanks.
Herbalism.
Fermentation.
Much of it did help, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was throwing darts at a wall, completely guessing, hoping I might—at best—alleviate the severity of symptoms plaguing my daily life, but never necessarily addressing any sort of root cause.
Until a handful of months ago, when a few things happened simultaneously.
The night I launched the podcast, a group of people came over to celebrate with me, including my friend Lauren. It was a Tuesday night in mid-September.
That Thursday, I took a book with me on a solo camping trip, my first of the season and a welcome break from all the work of launching the show. The book was No Pressure, No Diamonds from Teri A. Dillon, gifted to me by my friend Kim only a couple weeks before Teri passed away from ALS this October. Teri's story—the account of her long health journey—mirrored so much of my own, even if I wasn't suffering from ALS: her path through various healing modalities, her symptoms, her life in Colorado.
And, as it turns out, her mold issues, and a last-ditch effort to see a dentist.
Reading the book, lying alone in the back of my car out in the wilderness, I broke out into immediate tears when she and her husband realized they were living in a home full of mold, and that they were selling their house and getting rid of everything they owned so Teri might have a better chance at healing.
Something mystical happened in the back of that car, and I knew it was the universe telling me I was about to admit something very hard, and very life-altering.
When I returned home, I texted Lauren to tell her: I knew there was black mold in my home, and I'd been ignoring it for too long, concerned at the financial implications of remediating the problem. Her return text?
When I came over the other night for your launch party, I had a mold response, and I wasn't sure how to tell you until now.
That's when it all became clear.
Lauren had been undergoing an expensive series of dental surgeries, exactly like Teri had hoped to do. They're procedures only performed by "biological dentists" and deemed highly controversial by the rest of the dental community. I'd listened along as she kept me up-to-speed on parts of it, and watched as chronic health symptoms began to fall off of her, even as she struggled to "detox" after the removal of infections in her mouth.
What exactly was there, in her mouth?
Lauren's lingering infections existed under every prior root canal and wisdom tooth extraction site. They'd stayed there, seeping infection into her jaw—an area where blood flows straight into the rest of your body—the whole time.
What kind of infections?
Well, for starters, black mold (that's an image of one of her removed, infected teeth; view at your own risk, and yes, she did give me permission to share). Along with a whole host of other necrotic, infectious bacteria, nearly breaching her sinus cavity.
Dental cavitations, as they're called, happen in one of two ways (credit to Lauren for this info):
Improperly extracted teeth (especially wisdom teeth):
The overwhelming majority of dentists don't properly remove your teeth. They actually leave behind ligaments and other particles in the surgical site, which impedes healthy bone from growing in, which later becomes an infection site without oxygen and proper blood flow. Zero oxygen and improper blood flow in a warm, moist environment creates the perfect environment for nasty pathogens to flourish and for the immune system to be unable to solve it.Root canal-treated teeth:
Root canals are typically done when a tooth has decay or infection that go all the way down to the nerve. Studies show that root canal-treated teeth still contain infection 100% of the time after treatment and supposed “sterilization." That infected tooth is also cut off from oxygen and proper blood flow in a warm, moist environment, so nasty pathogens flourish and the immune system isn’t able to solve it there, either.
Why don't you know about it, though? They're referred to as "silent killers" because they leave a hole in the jaw bone, cannot be detected by standard X-ray equipment, and don't produce any oral pain because the nerves where your tooth once was is now dead. You can't see them, either, because your mouth eventually forms a thin film over the hole where dead tissue and trapped bacteria linger, so you move on, completely unaware they exist.
Until, like me, you might mysteriously begin to develop symptoms elsewhere.
Like allergies.
Like anxiety.
Like thyroid malfunction.
Like gut issues.
Like heart problems.
Like a whole slew of autoimmune disorders (Lyme Disease, MS, or Lupus, anyone?), pain, or disease in your other organs.
I mean, do you know what meridians of the body in Chinese medicine are connected to your wisdom teeth?
Your liver. (I left out the kind-of-large part where the use of dirty instruments during my wisdom teeth removal gave me Hepatitis C, the at-the-time-incurable liver virus, which I was thankfully cured of in 2017).
Your thyroid.
Your heart.
Your small intestine.
And your central nervous system.
Not sure if it's evident by now, but each of those areas are associated with my specific symptoms.
So, I finally booked an initial consultation with a local biological dentist—someone who specifically has a 3D cone beam X-ray to see the entire mouth. Surely enough, we found dental cavitations at all four sites where my wisdom teeth were extracted.
That's when I knew, like Teri, it was time to do what I feared:
Get rid of the mold, sell my house to afford the dental procedures, and begin the long, often-expensive process of removing all forms of "toxic load" on my body—toxins we all encounter, every day: poor indoor air quality, lead and other metals in our water, damaging ingredients in our body care products, and so much more.
I've also begun work on what is apparently an under-developed mouth and jawbone, affecting my airway, tongue, and breathing. Turns out, not having a vaginal birth and not breast feeding often lead to smaller mouths and airways in children, which can lead to a whole host of problems, including lack of oxygen at night (a contributing cause in Alzheimer's), sleep apnea, ADHD, and a whole host of other issues.
Still, do I know for sure that any of this is "real," "legitimate," or "worth it"?
No. Like I said, I'm no doctor. After putting my "faith" in every possible remedy already, it's hard not to feel like this could be one more expensive and emotionally exhausting try in a long line of half-helpful measures. But I have become what feels like a relative expert in my own health, and I finally feel like I've found a missing corner piece of the puzzle.
Do I think removing my dental cavitations will immediately resolve all of my health issues?
No, because I don't think that's how bodies work. Disease happens over time, and so does healing. Actually, sometimes things get worse before they get better, as your body detoxifies from a lifetime of infection.
Do I even think the surgery will eventually cure every chronic symptom I have?
Probably not. Things aren't usually that simple, especially when it comes to our bodies.
But, do I think there's an awful lot of evidence telling me I might have just found a way to plug a lot of the holes in my leaky boat, as Lauren often says?
Yes.
Is it worth selling my home in order to afford the process?
I mean, I heard the other day that Alzheimer's—which my grandmother had and I am likely to develop, as well, without proper prevention—costs the average person $350,000 between diagnosis and death. If treatment of my dental cavitations, airway work, supplements, and other, related support end up costing me even a third of that (the process shouldn’t even cost that much) while also giving me a higher quality of life until I die? I count that as a major win, y'all.
Plus, I mean, what's your own life worth to you? I am totally convinced that being healthier would unleash my capacity to not only live a much more full, rich, energized life for myself, but will also unleash my highest capacity to give what I'm here to give. I don't care about much more than those two things.
So if that's not worth every dollar I have, leveraging every privileged asset I have to give it a shot, I don't know what is.
And, do I think that if—like me—you have spent a lifetime hunting for explanations for your ongoing health issues, it might be worth taking a closer look at your mouth?
Yes, friend.
Your life and your vitality are worth everything.
And the answers could very well be hiding underneath your teeth.
I'll let you know how it goes.
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