Episode 036 | Masks, Mouth and Misconception

Transcript:

Hello again and a warm welcome to episode # 036 of Elmar´s Tooth Talk – The missing link to total health. Today we talk about Masks, Mouth and Misconception. I am Dr Elmar Jung.

So, before we start, let me tell you What’s in it for you in this episode:

We talk about:

• WHY wearing a mask should protect
• WHY wearing a mask can harm
• WHAT is Mask Mouth?
• WHAT causes Mask Mouth?
• WHY does it cause tooth decay?
• HOW to avoid the risks of Mask Mouth
• HOW Mouth Breathing endangers your health

Dental Protection

Protection seems to be the new order. Protecting yourself and protecting others. Protection by social distancing, protecting by staying at home, protection by not seeing friends and family, protection by adhering to official statements, protection by buying into mainstream media announcements and of course protection by wearing a mask and receiving a vaccine.

As dentists we are used to wearing masks all day long, so nothing new in this regard for our profession. And we are used to keep our surgeries clean, our instruments sterile and the air purified. So, our surgeries are most likely the safest place to hide from viruses and bacteria.

Since many years we use an air purifier system. The IQAir Dental Series air purifiers filters even the smallest and most harmful of airborne particles, including aerosols from high-speed dental procedures, and tiny, dangerous ultrafine particles. In our practice we don’t even use high speed turbines but only the slower hand pieces.

IQAir’s Hyper HEPA filtration technology is proven to effectively filter ultrafine particles, all the way down to 0.003 microns in diameter – the smallest particles that exist. 

A virus however, is at least 5-10 times bigger and bacteria are even bigger than viruses. Therefore, we can purify our air to the highest standard.

Extraoral suction is a critical part of infection control during dental procedures by reducing the amounts of infected aerosols and particles that escape the mouth during dental procedures. 

High-speed instruments used for drilling or scaling can produce millions of tiny aerosols and droplets that carry infectious bacterial or viral material. These particles can directly affix themselves to the clothes of dental staff and linger in the air for hours, exposing staff and patients to an increased risk of respiratory infections. 

Therefore, the most effective infection control in a dental office consists of a high-performance air purifier with source capture using extraoral suction and negative pressure equipment to prevent infectious airborne aerosols from ever leaving the dental surgery.

Therefore, you can rest assured that when you enter our dental surgery, you are in a very safe place.

Wearing a mask

We are all told to wear masks to protect ourselves from inhaling the supposedly deadly virus and from preventing to pass it on to others. 

BUT did anyone tell you the truth about the masks YOU are wearing?

Don’t Touch

We dentists, surgeons and professional mask wearers are taught and indoctrinated to not touch ANYTHING but our surgical field. Not our masks, not our hair, nothing, nada, nichts, niente, rien de tout.  

Do you get where I’m coming from?

What do Lay people do? They constantly touch their masks, re-arrange it, up and down thereby masterly inoculating thousands of virus particles onto their mainly bare or even worse gloved hands. 

So, rather than keeping infection at bay, the masks encourage the transmission of viruses to hand, face and clothes.

And it as you can probably already imagine, it gets even better than that:

The mesh on the majority of masks is insufficiently microscopic to prevent coronavirus to pass through

N95 filter masks

Covid 19 virus particle size, according to research, ranges between 0.06 microns and 0.14 microns which equals between 60 and 140 nanometres. 

The recommended N95 mask filters down to 0.3 microns.

Got it? 0.3 filter compared to 0.06 virus size? 

So, the FACT is that N95 masks filter very few if any virus particles. And most masks don’t even do this!

So, what’s the point in wearing a mask? 

Masks can make you sick

If you use other masks, maybe home-made or the likes of scarfs, here is what you are up for:

• Free passage of COVID 19 in and out of your mouth and lungs

• These masks become warm, damp and moist – an ideal reservoir for ANY bacteria or virus

• the blue masks and several others are pre-sprayed with PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) a highly toxic chemical that’s been linked to a synthetic fluoride used to coat non-stick cookware. It’s not something you should breathe in because of its association with cancer.

• You are constantly re-breathing your carbon dioxide which makes your blood pH drop, keeps you acid and your kidneys have to work extra hours to eliminate the acid. 

• Breathing in is much more difficult, a bit like breathing through a straw.

• Already back in the early 19 hundreds Nobel Prize winner Dr Otto Warburg warned regarding the root cause of cancer:  “Deprive a cell 35% of its oxygen for 48 hours and it may become cancerous”

• How long do you wear your mask?

• Why would we trust masks made in China, when they got us in the dilemma in the first place?

If you still believe in the benefit, security and safety of the mask that questionable and medically non-trained government officials delude and mislead you in to, keep wearing it. 

Regardless of your perspective regarding face masks, understanding the effect that wearing a mask can have on your oral health and knowing what to do about it helps you to navigate your path to maintaining or achieving great oral and whole-body health.

Check the science, question everything, this episode too, then make your decision.

If you thought this is it, be warned, it gets worse.

WHAT is Mask Mouth?

Have you ever heard, read or talked about Mask Mouth? 

Before the hysteria and chaos regarding Corona 21 started this word-combination Mask Mouth didn’t even exist.

We are talking about a new oral health threat unleashed by the unprecedented events of 2020.

Dentists report of an increase in patients suffering from dry mouth, gum disease and even tooth decay.

Any idea what this could be attributed to?

Yes, you are right.

This rise can be attributed to wearing masks for long periods of time.

Let us look a bit more closely into the physiology 

Mask mouth is a new phenomenon worldwide. Few will have heard of or about it. 

A research from 2015 concludes on the subject that breathing through N95 mask materials have been shown to impede gaseous exchange and impose an additional workload on the metabolic system of pregnant healthcare workers, and this needs to be taken into consideration in guidelines for respirator use. 

The benefits of using N95 mask to prevent serious emerging infectious diseases should be weighed against potential respiratory consequences associated with extended N95 respirator usage.

Another study fresh from the press November 2020 found that exercising with facemasks might increase pathophysiological risks of underlying chronic disease, especially cardiovascular and metabolic risks. 

Social exercisers are recommended to do low to moderate-intensity exercise, rather than vigorous exercise when they are wearing facemasks. 

It is also recommend that people with chronic diseases to exercise alone at home, under supervision when required, without the use of facemasks. 

Given the identified and hypothesized risks, social distancing and self-isolation appear to be better than wearing facemasks while exercising during this global crisis

WHAT causes Mask Mouth?

I trust you are familiar with the importance of the breathing. Elmar’s Tooth Talk episode 23 dives deep into this topic.

Here is what causes mask mouth.

As you wear a mask and breathe in and out, parts of your exhaled breath will get trapped on the inside of the mask.

Over time, this results in a decrease in oxygen levels and an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in your blood.

Increased blood CO2 levels have a domino effect on your physiology, including fatigue, brain fog, headaches, and flushing.

The mask also gets warmer which isn’t just due to the mask’s insulation property. It is primarily caused by the increased CO2 levels in your blood that creates a slight flush of warmth.

Once your brain and body register this slight increase in blood CO2 levels and the decrease in oxygen levels, your body automatically, yes unconsciously seeks to increase oxygen and therefore makes you breath more.

It is similar to when you are exercising vigorously. Your body, in respond to the low-oxygen level is making you breathe through your mouth rather than your nose. 

I guess you have a good idea what happens if you continuously breath through your mouth!!

WHY does Mouth Mask cause tooth decay?

Yes, correct. It causes tooth decay. But WHY?

Well, the number 1 cause of tooth decay is?   Dry Mouth!!

And a major player in this synergistic interaction is your saliva. Your saliva plays a very important role when it comes to developing tooth decay or gum disease. 

Reduced saliva levels are the prerequisite for bacteria to thrive beyond the numbers your immune system can deal with them appropriately. Therefore, it is important to always have sufficient saliva in your mouth to wash around your teeth and gums.

And the best way to achieve reduced saliva levels is by breathing through your mouth, even if it is done unconsciously.

There is a big difference if you breathe through your mouth just to catch your breath after you did a strenuous exercise regime. This will take only a few minutes.

However, breathing into or through a mask for hours and hours whether through nose or mask is a totally different situation. 

You produce a situation with constant low oxygen levels which puts pressure on your entire physiology. 

The body will therefore try to compensate with often unconscious corrective measures.  One of these measures is mouth breathing to increase the amount of oxygen.

Mouth breathers face more side effects such as bad breath or misaligned teeth because the tongue is not at its normal location which is the roof of your mouth and therefore can’t support the teeth staying aligned.

This is one of the reasons dentists now find tooth decay and gum inflammation even in patients who never before suffered from these symptoms.

So, if after all that information, you are still wearing your mask due to someone telling you there is a pandemic going round and you must wear a mask, what can you do to keep healthy?

HOW to avoid the risks of Mask Mouth

From everything mentioned so far, it would be a no-brainer to only wear the mask when it is absolutely necessary. 

Is there a need to wear a mask while driving alone in your car? 

You could even argue that whilst operating heavy machinery, which a car no doubt is, you don’t want to breath yourself into a state of brain fog or worse hypoxemia.

Keep your tongue in its natural position and keep breathing through your nose whenever possible.

If you are in an environment where you feel obliged to wear a mask, breath consciously and take some deep slow breaths every 10 – 20 minutes! This way you may work against feeling fatigued. 

Although the mask is a great device to hide bad breath you are better off to increase your oral hygiene regime when wearing a mask for extended periods. This includes cleaning properly, best done with the Blotting Brushes or Mini-Blots and a proper tongue scraper. 

As a seasoned Blotting Brush user, you probably know that you can “floss” with the Blotting Brush. If you don’t know it yet, watch Dr Phillips video from the 1960’s. 

Masks, Lockdown and Research

On top of being told the story, some say it is a bogus one, wearing a mask will safe your and others live, we are also led to believe that lockdowns are the best way to control coronavirus.

Lockdowns might be the perfect way to bring a countries economy to the knees, but does it do the same to the virus. Some people doubt this. 

The American Institute for Economic Research recently shared some information that calls into question the effectiveness of lockdown measures for combating COVID.

The questions that you have to ask yourself:

• Are we doing more harm than the virus by implementing lockdowns? 
• Are governments representing the will of the people? 
• Why are experts who oppose the measures ignored and remain unacknowledged?

The Great Barrington Declaration

One example of sceptics is The Great Barrington Declaration, which was initiated by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Professor of medicine at Harvard University, a biostatistician, and epidemiologist, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor at Stanford University Medical School a physician and epidemiologist. 

It has an impressive list of co-signers and has also been signed by more than 50,000 doctors and scientists.

Isn’t it odd that doctors such Anthony Fauci or Christian Drosten, are given instant access to all kinds of media outlets to share their opinion yet hundreds, if not thousands of world experts who oppose what we’ve been hearing in mainstream media are completely ignored and unacknowledged?

Mask Mouth, some common sense and decide what is best for your own health!

I trust this is Food for thought and I leave you with it for today. 

This is Elmar’s Tooth Talk – the missing link to total health. 

Bye for now.

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