Episode 22 | Dental Implants – Heaven or Hell

Transcript:

Hello and a very warm welcome to episode 022 of Elmar’s Tooth Talk: The missing link to total health. I am Dr Elmar Jung.

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

We talk about:

• The Implant Hype – a critical view on implants
• A patient’s experience – HOW implants can affect your health
• How well do implants integrate in the bone?
• What a world-renowned clinic experienced when falling for the implant Hype
• Final thoughts on implants

There has been a real implant hype for a while now. More and more patients want implants, and more and more dentists are offering implants.

Today’s podcast wants to make you aware that thorough questioning and considering is important before deciding for or against an implant solution and thus aids in reducing possible unpleasant consequences before a foreign material is incorporated into your own body.

Today I will report on my experiences with patients who come to our practice after they have been provided with implants elsewhere. In our practice we don’t place implants but since many years we are very experienced in removing them.

You will learn about the impact implants can have on your health.

In the previous Podcast you learned about the different kind of implants, the materials, the implantation methods and today we talk about patients who received an implant treatment.

A few preliminary remarks

Now, I have to say this podcast, for obvious reasons, is rather biased because patients who come to us with their implants often have massive problems, not just or not even with their implants but with their overall health.

They are mainly chronically and seriously ill who have suffered for a long time and who are only inadequately helped with medical and or dental treatments whether conventional or so-called holistic.

This specialization of our practice makes it obvious that our clientele looks completely different than that of most conventional dental practices and that we therefore have very different experiences with the success of implants than the “normal” dentist.

Therefore, I cannot speak for the hundreds, thousands or even millions of patients where their implants have supposedly and I emphasize supposedly, no impact on their overall health.

However what I can say is that if you suffer from a chronic disease this means that mainstream medicine hasn’t found a cure for you yet, and placing implants on an already pre-damaged immune system, implants similar to root treated teeth, Jawbone necrosis or amalgam fillings could well be an important stumbling block in your recovery.

Listen to the patient cases and then decide for yourself if implants are the way forward for you. Or if you have an implant if they could be the root cause of your calamities.

There are only very few critical voices when it comes to the topic of implants. There are even fewer voices pointing to the possible medium and long-term over health implications.

Before I talk about my patient’s experiences, a few sentences on the subject of “dental implants” in general.

The Implant Hype

Could it be that this implant hype, which has been going on now for at least 15-20 years, will swing back like a pendulum and leave many victims behind?

Of course, even after a treatment with implants, hardly any patient drops dead when leaving the practice practice or falls ill the next day after the treatment.

But the deterioration of their health after such treatment can be similar to the problems with amalgam fillings or root canal treatments.

As is usually the case, the body is able to compensate for all sorts of stress for quite a while.

This capacity to compensate is dependent on the individual patient, their immune system, their genetic predisposition, their lifestyle, how they can or will deal with a stress.

As we know, there are smokers such as the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who died in 2015 at the age of 96, who smoked one cigarette after the other for decades and cheerfully lived to be over 90, while others smoke for a few years then stop for many years and then to die of lung cancer at a relatively young age, as I had to experience with my father when he was 49.

We never really know what the reasons and causes are for some ones ill health until we look at the entire person in a multi-dimensional way from top to toe, inside out and a Mind-Body-Spirit point of view. But that is a topic for another podcast all together.

Back to the implants

Here, too, there are many healthy, robust and well-built people who can literally endure their carefully planned and placed implant with good care for years and decades to come and who will never have a problem with them.

My thoughts and my work are with the others. Those whose immune system has already been damaged or who are simply not so robust from birth, whose bucket is already full, who have exhausted their capability to compensate and another stress factor will literally push them over the cliff.

And there are patients who appear to be completely healthy for years, who become ill sometime after the implantation as a result.

Or the patient who can tolerate one implant without any problems but suddenly becomes ill after the second or third implant has been implanted.

Why do I know that for those patients the implants were the root cause? Because they found back to their previous health after removing the implant.

What are my experiences over the last 15 years?

This can be best illustrated with an example. The example given here is just one of many that we see in our practice and more are coming to see us almost every week.

Just as the number of implant recipients is increasing, it seems, so is the number of those who will have problems with them. From a purely mathematical point of view, of course, completely logical.

A patient’s story

Before Polly received her implants, she was supposedly attributed as healthy by her doctor and dentist and fit for the treatment.

Polly could not face wearing dentures under any circumstances and had therefore decided to receive a total of nine metal implants over a period of three years to replace lost teeth.

Her health went downhill in small steps, but steadily. It got so bad that at one point she thought that if this continues, I’ll be dead next year.

She suffered from a plethora of serious symptoms ranging from allergies to auto-immune weakness to liver and kidney dysfunction. Despite the most detailed and very expensive examinations, no cause could be diagnosed for any of her symptoms.

We tested the implants with the Komstar test, now called OroTox, for bacterial toxins. All nine implants showed extremely high toxin levels. Looking at the OPG x-ray, all implants looked well healed and no pathological findings could be seen.

Two weeks prior to the start of treatment Polly started on a supplementation protocol with high-dose nutrients. Our treatment consisted of removing all nine implants and giving high-dose vitamin C infusions over four days as well as further nutritional supplements for the next few months.

The bone that surrounded the supposedly healthy implants was sent to a special laboratory in the USA for examination and came back with the unsurprising result that all bone parts contained highly toxic bacterial poisons.

The laboratory results also showed that as a result of this poisoning, five of your body’s most important enzyme systems were blocked by approximately 90%.

So, it was no wonder she felt like she was dying.

After the implants were taken out and the necrotic bone removed, her recovery was quick and impressive.

In just three months she was able to sing in her beloved choir and after nine months she was back in her old sturdy form.

Back then we used the Cavitat-Scan, now we use the CAviTAU, an ultrasound scan to reveal jawbone density, showed healthy jawbone density in all previously necrotic and infected areas.

After this experience, she quickly gave up her aversion to dentures and she now loves them more than anything else.

What does this example show?

Neither the treating dentist nor the doctors and specialists she visited brought the patient’s symptoms into connection with her dental care. All of them lacked the knowledge and experience to add two and two together to come to the correct conclusion.

It also shows that the “normal” examination methods, such as X-rays, are often insufficient to track down the causes.

In this example it was the patient’s instinct, gut feeling, that something is wrong with the implants. This gut feeling led her to do research on her own and ultimately to visit our practice.

This in turn allows the conclusion that you should listen to your gut feeling to your intuition when something seems not  quite right.

We are made to believe that implants have a 90-95% success rate – do they really?

With implants, a very high success rate of between 90-95% is often reported.

How exactly this success rate is defined often remains unclear.

• Is it the survival time of the implant over a period of five, ten or fifteen years?
• Is it the x-ray documented so-called osseointegration?
• Is it the lack of mobility after a certain time?
• Is it the lack of inflammation in the bone after a certain time?
• Is it the lack of inflammation around the implant?

Regardless of which definition one follows, shouldn’t it also observe if the patient maintains their health after placing the implants? Who takes this into consideration, who does this kind of study?

How likely is it that the implant manufacturers will do such a study?

A colleague told me about a Dutch research a few years ago where they found that 60% of osseointegration was considered a “success” and it was unusual ever to have more than 80%.

This means that if only 60% of the implant has healed in the bone, this can be regarded as a success.

Ledermann, one of the pioneers in implantology, already described in the beginning that when titanium implants are screwed in, titanium particles shear off into the surrounding bone areas.

It  is unlikely that this has changed.

This shearing off is then one of the reasons causing the bone to become necrotic and is exactly what we see when removing an implant and exploring the jawbone.

We can only hope that these rates have increased considerably with the latest zirconia material improvements and placing methods.

I recently spoke with the chief physician of a world renowned holistic medical and dental clinic about his experience with zirconia implants.

He became very quiet and had to admit that shortly after falling for the Zirconia implant hype for their chronically ill patients they had to pull the plug and stop placing implants left right and centre because they had so many complaints and problems. The clinic’s reputation suffered severely due to this experiment.

They have now implemented a much stricter indication for the placement of implants, terminated the collaboration with the well-known implantologist and can now only hope to regain their patient’s trust back in due course.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion from our practical experience we can state the following:

1. Implants offer an alternative to conventional dentures.

2. Metal implants should be avoided

3. Implants made of zirconium or PEEK are the materials of choice at present

4. Even if the implant material tests ok today, this says nothing about the tolerance tomorrow

5. The prospective implant wearer should also be examined carefully to see whether he is currently able to compensate for a foreign body.

6. Implants should always be examined if any kind of health symptoms occur, especially those that are apparently inexplicable.

And again, we have come to the end of a podcast.

As you have now heard, the subject of “dental implants” is extensive and controversial.

There are Facebook groups of patients and dentists who share their experiences with implants, root canal treatments and bone inflammation.

That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in.

This is Elmar’s Tooth Talk – The Missing Link To Total Health.

Until next time

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