Your Priorities Will Shift

You, your family, your friends, and everyone else are victims of a broken system that fails to educate us, fails to provide access to care, and fails to connect medical and dental expertise to recognize and appropriately treat disease. Nor is it about any of the other general recommendations you can get at your dentist’s office. Those are important things we should all be doing, but if you’re not doing them, it’s not all your fault. You are not the problem. But you can be a big part of the solution for yourself and for those you love. In addition to affecting your overall risk of developing a devastating chronic illness, your mouth impacts your happiness, prosperity, behavior, mental health, sleep, and longevity. By learning how and why your mouth has so much power over your life, you can harness that power for good! You can live more than a decade longer. You can find more confidence and happiness. You can sleep better. And you can give your children better lives and brighter futures. Your mouth impacts everything, often silently, and without you even noticing. Once you start to be more aware, you’ll realize that taking care of your mouth is essential in order to have a good life.

Before The Beginning

Your priorities will shift. You’ll equate skipping brushing with skipping eating or neglecting your medication. You will also understand how to dramatically lower your risk for many of the most dangerous and debilitating diseases that afflict our species. Many children are not getting the care they need for the healthy development of their mouths, bodies, and minds. This is not because parents are neglectful. It’s because medicine and dentistry are two distinct fields with very little overlap. And it’s because our system of medical insurance often doesn’t cover dentistry. Many people simply lack access to the care they need. Dental caries, the disease that causes cavities, is the most common chronic disease of children. Childhood tooth decay is four times more common than early childhood obesity, five times more common than asthma, and twenty times more common than diabetes.3 Cavities are so common that they’re considered normal. By the time these youngsters reach kindergarten, more than half have dental decay.

Don't Run Away

According to the Centers for Disease Control, a whopping one out of five children have rampant decay on seven or more teeth. Plus, children in California miss 874,000 days of school every single year due to dental problems. Sadly, adolescents aren’t any better off. Toothaches lead to other troubles, like difficulty eating and sleeping, which are likely to impair children’s physical development and academic achievement. As you can already see, mouth health quickly becomes whole body health. Of course, this epidemic extends into adulthood. A full 9 out of 10 people over the age of 20 have some degree of tooth or root decay. Four in ten adults have two or more. And chronic illnesses compose seven of the top ten causes of death. As Americans age and habits don’t change, predictions become increasingly dire. Between 2000–2019, deaths from Alzheimer’s have increased an incredible 145 percent. If chronic disease is such a big problem, and we know oral disease is a big part of that equation, why has it taken so long to connect the dots? The main reason is the historical separation between dentistry and medicine.

Words Are Weapons

This separation began back in the 13th century, when French barbers were responsible for surgical care, including pulling teeth and oral surgeries. Hayden, founded the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the first in the world. To this day, barbers and dentists wear short coats, while physicians wear long coats. Today, medical doctors ask you to say Ahhhhh, then look right past your mouth into your throat. When doctors do recognize a problem in the mouth, they often assume your dentist will take care of it. They don’t follow up to make sure that you seek the appropriate care, nor do they communicate with your dentist about the physical conditions that might be connected to the oral problems. In other words, there is no coordination of care, even though many diseases of the rest of the body are caused by oral bacteria entering the bloodstream. On the other side, how many systemic diseases do dentists miss? Signs and symptoms often appear in the mouth first, like thrush, which is indicative of depressed immune function, bad breath from stomach ulcers, or sores from cancer. How many people are suffering from this lack of coordination between the two branches of health care? In addition to this split, or perhaps because of it, dental insurance is not included in most health insurance packages. And many people can’t afford to purchase more insurance on top of the prohibitively expensive plans they already have. The payments they receive from Medicaid are far lower than payments from private insurers, so they don’t offer appointments to Medicaid patients. Finally, on top of these consequential obstacles, people are terrified of the dentist. Going to the dentist is second only to public speaking when it comes to people’s biggest fears. So, even when they have insurance or can afford to go, they still avoid the regular visits that could save and improve their lives. Oral care is medical care. Think for a moment about the importance of a winning, beautiful smile. They evoke trust, they inspire attraction, and an unhealthy or unattractive smile is heavily stigmatized. Think about all the associations we take for granted. We associate an underbite with meanness. In America, we equate bad teeth with bad character. We see it almost as a moral failing. We don’t associate bad joints or lost limbs with a person’s character, but teeth are held to a different standard. Here is another way in which a healthy mouth creates a healthy person and a good life, only in this case it’s a psychological and social benefit. There, we’ll explore each connection point, starting with how oral health impacts fertility, pregnancy, and childhood. And everything to keep. Your mouth tells a story.