Transcript of Episode 230: The Hidden Epidemic of Oral Toxicity and Disease
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Thomas Levy
Dr. Pompa:
Cellular Healing TV fans, exciting few weeks. You are on location with me at SOPMed, the Society of Progressive Medicine. You know why we’re here? -inaudible- bringing together MDs, NDs, DCs, all types of practitioners to mastermind, bring the best of what we believe people need to get well today. As a matter of fact, even this very evening tonight, we have the leaders coming together in this profession to meet on the future of alternative medicine.
You’re on location. I’m going to be bringing you some exciting interviews with some of the leading practitioners in the area that you’re going to want to hear from, cancer researchers, doctors, stem cells, you name it. You’re going to hear some exciting interviews right here. The next few weeks, stay tuned to Cell TV for these exciting interviews that I know that you’re going to love. It’s going to definitely affect and change your life.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and in this episode, we are joined by Dr. Thomas Levy. One of the topics here at CHTV which really ignites our passion is oral health, so today’s episode will not disappoint. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Levy break down how infections in the mouth cause a vast majority of disease.
Dr. Levy, a renowned cardiologist, has spent much of his career researching the effect that oral pathogens have on the body and how they are the primary cause of heart disease. The doctors discuss therapeutic Vitamin C and its powerful effect on dental toxicity as well as the important role that nutrition has when healing from the resulting diseases.
You will also learn how to take control of your own oral care, hear about alternatives to root canals. You’ll gather some information to equip yourself with before your next dental appointment, and you’ll hear Dr. Levy’s take on whether or not there is ever a scenario for which a root canal is the only option. If you or someone you know is affected by a degenerative disease with a cause unknown to you, have mercury fillings, or have had or are planning to have a root canal, please listen to this important episode. Sometimes the answers are right there in such obvious yet unsuspecting places.
Before we jump in, though, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Thomas Levy. Dr. Levy is a board-certified cardiologist who, after practicing adult cardiology for 15 years, began to research the enormous toxicity associated with dental work as well as the pronounced ability of properly administered Vitamin C to neutralize this toxicity. He has now written 11 books with several addressing the wide-ranging properties of Vitamin C, its ability to neutralize toxins and resolve most infections, as well as its vital role in the effective treatment of heart disease and cancer.
Recently inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, his ongoing research involves documenting that all diseases arise from increased oxidative stress and that they all benefit from protocols that optimize the antioxidant levels in the body. Dr. Levy has assembled multiple protocols built around optimizing Vitamin C administration along with other agents such as ozone in order to bolster the immune system and facilitate recovery from a wide array of infections and chronic diseases. Let’s join Dr. Pompa and Dr. Levy on this special episode of Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, Dr. Tom Levy. Thank you for being here. This is a special series that we’re doing from the SOPMed conference. You were part of the mastermind last night, as well, where we’re looking at the future of medicine. The topic that we’re going to discuss here, I felt came up. I sure hammered it home, and you did, too. You’ll have to wait to see what that topic is. Man, you changed my life, and my viewers have heard me talk about my experience and my story. I don’t know. Was it your first book? Probably not, but it was one of your original books.
Dr. Levy:
It was my 10th book.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, 10th book. Gosh, that was a long time ago. That was back in 2000. His book, called The Roots of Disease—I read his book, and it convinced me to get my root canal out. I had no pain. On plain films, it looked perfectly normal. We’re going to emphasize that, but yet, when I read your information in The Roots of Disease—and you co-authored it with Hal Huggins.
Dr. Levy:
No, with Robert Kulacz.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, that’s right, correct. It was my searching through Hal Huggins that led me to that book. That’s when I said, “It may not have been why I got sick; however, it could have been a part of how I got sick because it’s the perfect storm.” I was convinced that I wasn’t going to get well, possibly, with that root canal in my mouth. Thank you right off the top, and I thanked you yesterday.
Dr. Levy:
You’re welcome. Always glad to hear a story with a happy ending.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it. Back then, I just went with this Maryland bridge, and we can talk more about options there, as well. Not that he’s a dentist; you’re actually a medical doctor. Let’s start there. Tell your story. How does a cardiologist end up writing books about dentistry? By the way, I’m going to promote your new book right now. It’s The Hidden Epidemic, and I see a lot of teeth on the front. Once again, this is another dental book written by a medical doctor/cardiologist.
Dr. Levy:
I would say fate, or destiny, or whatever you want to term it is what led me into this. Even though it looks like I’m too much concentrated on the teeth, we show you by evidence of the data in there and the articles from the literature that it is, in fact, infections in the mouth—the gums, the teeth, the tonsils, and the sinuses—that cause a vast majority of disease and make worse all disease. As the title of the book says, it’s the primary cause, and by primary cause, I mean greater than 95% of all heart attacks are caused by pathogens coming from one of those four sources or more than one of those sources in the mouth.
Dr. Pompa:
You said last night, the only reason it may not 100 is because nothing’s 100 in biology.
Dr. Levy:
That’s right. There’s a good chance it’s 100%, but you just immediately get branded a lunatic if you say that.
Dr. Pompa:
Ninety-five, we’ll stick with that.
Dr. Levy:
Ninety-five is comfortable. Some 25 years ago, I was actually living in Colorado Springs here. Dr. Hal Huggins, probably the most significant renegade, maverick, anti-mercury, and as I later found out, anti-root canal dentist, I got associated with him. Met him at a conference here in town. He invited me to come by and look at his clinic.
Quite honestly, I was getting tired of cardiology. I really didn’t get any satisfaction there. The synergy of the timing, I ended up seeing what Hal did, and I started working with him. What I saw the first few days I was there is I saw patients with Lou Gehrig’s, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, sick, sick, sick people; people that I was informed in my training really weren’t supposed to get better.
Nothing’s 100%. I’m not going to say this always happened, but Hal had a program. Put them through a total dental revision, extracted root canals, took out the mercury, cleaned up infected implants, took care of cavitational disease, and started an extensive nutritional and supplemental program. For example, I saw patients, some, who had been wheelchair bound for over a year take their first few steps after a couple weeks.
Part of it—and this is what really triggered where I am now—was when I saw many of these very sick patients—they looked so miserable. Then they went and got four hours worth of the most horrible advanced dental work, extractions, and they come out of it, and they were looking bright and alert and feeling better. They wanted to go out to a restaurant in town. Hal, if you knew him, had a very wry sense of humor. I said, “Hal, what’s going on? How can these people be so animated and feel so good?” He sort of pointed at the IV bag.
I said, “Well, thank you, Hal, but that doesn’t help me a whole lot. I’ve given a lot of IVs in my life. They haven’t had this effect.” He said, “Well, it’s what’s in it.” I said, “What’s in it?” He said, “Fifty grams of Vitamin C.” I had never heard of Vitamin C being used in a therapeutic capacity before in my life, but for whatever reason—I’m not trying to give myself credit for anything other than to say that I don’t routinely deny what my eyes have witnessed. What I witnessed was to me, at the time, nothing short of a miracle. I said, “It’s about time.” I jump in with both feet and figure out what the heck Vitamin C is doing. That sort of began the story.
Dr. Pompa:
We can talk even more about that because it is significant. Hal started the Vitamin C after any of these dental surgeries or procedures. He described it as many ways. Obviously, there’s an anti-inflammatory effect; upregulates glutathione; even has a neutralizing effect on mercury. He said back then—that was some of his way of describing why people felt so darn good afterwards, but there’s probably other reasons.
Dr. Levy:
I don’t even know at this point in time because we’ve seen a lot more things develop, a lot more literature of everything that Hal knew about Vitamin C at the time, but he knew a lot. He knew that it had a powerful effect on infections. He knew that it had a powerful effect on toxins, which are invariably part of any infection, and it had a primary stimulating effect on healing.
One thing that Hal would do that no other dentist had ever seen before him was when he had a particularly bad area that was extracted, he would inject two to three units of long-acting insulin, PZI insulin. When you look at the literature today, you now see that insulin is an agent that—guess what—pulls Vitamin C into the cells. Hal was using an agent that pulled the Vitamin C into the cell and accelerated the healing. He was a man way ahead of his time.
Dr. Pompa:
He was a nice guy. Let’s go back to 95% of all disease. Look, oral microbes, I think, the last 20 years, have been associated with heart attacks. That’s why dentists want to give an antibiotic after certain procedures in the mouth. Now, are you familiar with the new study that just came out this year in February? The study states that 7 out of 10 chronic inflammatory diseases are from oral microbes. That’s in line with what you’re saying is perhaps—
Dr. Levy:
I’m not familiar with that particular study.
Dr. Pompa:
It just came out.
Dr. Levy:
I can tell you, if anything, that’s a low ball, especially depending on the disease that you look at. We now know from studies from 2013 to the present that—in one study, 100%, 34 out of 34 plaque specimens that were pulled out of coronary arteries at atherectomy—that’s where you sort of do a Roto-Rooter and pull the plaque out. They sent those off for analysis, and they found an array of over 50 different pathogens of oral origin. Each particular plaque had at least between two and nine different pathogens in it.
Now, plaques should be sterile, or at the very least, they shouldn’t have any significant microbial contamination. In this case and in other cases, the concentration was substantial, not incidental, and it was always from the mouth. The evidence is now very clear that pathogens from the mouth are not associated or linked to heart disease; they are the direct cause.
In another study in 2013, they pulled the blood clots out of patients who had acute MIs, examined them, and not only did they have these pathogens most of the time, they had them in a concentration of sixteenfold, 1,600% higher than the surrounding plasma. Now, you didn’t have a sterile blood clot that suddenly got colonized. You got a blood clot that formed because of all the pathogens that were there. We got to stop trying to gloss over and minimize the impact of this by saying, “Oh, it’s associated. It’s linked.” Yeah, it is, but we now have the evidence to show that the association and that link is cause and effect.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ll share that study with you because it’s your point. It’s showing causative factor. Seven out of ten, like you said, that’s probably an underestimation. There was a study years ago—one of the things that actually convinced me was they took a root canal, and they put it in rabbits. Talk about that because people don’t probably know about that. That was years ago. The rabbits took on the same diseases of the person that had the root canal.
Dr. Levy:
Probably one of the greatest scientific minds, in my opinion, of the previous century was of Dr. Weston Price. He was a dentist who did a lot of primary research. In this particular case, although he did many, many, many other things, he would take—extract root canals from individuals that had a neurologic disease, a heart disease, an arthritic disease, and without any further contamination, just taking it out, he would, for lack of a better word, he put it subcutaneous. He took it into a subcutaneous flap underneath the rabbit. Within a few days, the rabbit would get the identical syndrome that that patient had and then die.
This might not be—this might be cruelty to rabbits. I don’t know if you want to say that. He would then take that tooth, and he would show that same tooth in 40 consecutive rabbits would cause the same syndrome and death within a few days. Different diseases, different scenarios, but there was no question that not only were these teeth infected, they had powerful toxins. These were mostly, by using logical reasoning, toxins that were eluting off of the root canal tooth rather then—I mean, it didn’t really cause this huge, big infection, but it invariably caused the disease syndrome the human being had and ultimate death.
Dr. Pompa:
What camp are you in? In the alternative dental world and even in the alternative world, there’s two camps. There’s one that, amongst the biological dentists, that believe you can do a root canal safe, and there’s one that believes that you can never do a root canal safe.
Dr. Levy:
I have to be -inaudible- there. Now, all the time I was working with Hal, it was like root canals, never, always toxic, etcetera. What I’ve discovered since might have my former mentor flipping in his grave a little bit, but we’ve had some—in the context of writing this new book, Hidden Epidemic, root canals are 100% infected, all of them.
Dr. Pompa:
Yes, that’s important.
Dr. Levy:
We also have a subset of teeth that are asymptomatically infected. They’ve never been worked on, but we see on x-ray a big abscess. It turns out they’ve done studies where they’ve compared systemic effects of these infected teeth that had never been worked on and a root canal tooth. The root canalled tooth shows substantially less toxicity than this tooth that is infected but has never been taken out or operated on.
What does this translate into? I’ve still maintained, and I would side with Dr. Huggins, that if the patient comes in to you and has one of these asymptomatic teeth, which is detectable on the 3-D cone-beam imaging, that it should be extracted.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk about that, uh-huh.
Dr. Levy:
I mean, if the patient says, “Doctor, dentist, do what’s best for my health,” no question. The tooth should come out, and you follow it with an implant or leave it alone, depends. The patient plays a role in their dental and their healthcare. What do you do when the patient says, “No, you can’t extract that tooth. It feels fine. You don’t have my permission to do that. Do whatever else you think is best for it, but without extracting the tooth.” Under those circumstances, based on the literature that we have, a root canal procedure on that tooth will make it less toxic than if you left it alone.
Dr. Pompa:
True, I would agree with that.
Dr. Levy:
Then you can counsel the patient. “Now, we’re going to periodically repeat this test. If there’s a big, huge abscess growing back on this tooth or if your blood work, your C-reactive protein is getting bad, or other metabolic syndrome, blood work’s getting bad, I’m going to encourage you very strongly to get it extracted. If none of that happens and all your blood work stays good, we’ll leave it as it is.” We don’t have further data on this, and the books suggest that these studies should be done. We know for sure some people get a root canal, and they get a heart attack six months later.
Dr. Pompa:
They’ve mobilized -inaudible-.
Dr. Levy:
We also know some people get root canals, and they do fine for decades, and they live normal life spans. How do you figure out what group you’re in? Right now, you can’t predict which group you’re going to be in, and that’s the Russian roulette of it all, but an expertly-done—this is the other thing, too.
If a root canal is to be done, it has to be done by a high-volume endodontist because if it’s done poorly it will have much more problems than if you have an endodontist that really excavates well, seals all the areas, and not much, for lack of a better word, leakage takes place in the apical area that the immune system can’t counteract. You have all those provisos, but if the patient says, “Do what’s best for me,” the infected tooth needs to come out.
Dr. Pompa:
If the patient says, “Do what’s best for me,” would you take the root canal out?
Dr. Levy:
Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Explain to them why every root canal, actually, even with the best methods, has anaerobic bacteria, which are these bacteria that really cause a lot of these problems that we’re talking about.
Dr. Levy:
Even though most of the time the tooth that you’re going to do a root canal on is already infected, sometimes that’s not the case. It might be pain from another origin, or you might not really know what’s going on with the tooth, and the dentist just says, “Well, you need a root canal,” and you end up getting it. Invariably, always, what they do with the root canal tooth, is they go in through the top, and they core out the pulp, the root, the nerve, and the blood supply, and the connective tissues. They core out the middle of the tooth, and there’s nothing but a tooth that’s a hole there.
Even though you might have nerve endings in the jawbone, where the bone inserts, above there, the tooth is dead. The tooth has been embalmed in situ. Once you do that, there’s no way the immune system can ever reach the infection that’s present there. Your immune system is not magic. It needs a physical matrix to move from one area to the other in these connective tissue fibers, blood vessels, nerves, you name it. If you don’t have a physical matrix, the immune system can’t do anything for you. As a result of this—and this has been corroborated by the work of Dr. Huggins and Dr. Boyd Haley at the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, we know Boyd.
Dr. Levy:
They analyzed over 5,000 consecutive extracted root canal teeth from around the country. They just sent them all in—
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, most of which would say had no symptoms.
Dr. Levy:
That’s right, most of which have no symptoms. They analyzed them, and in 100% of those 5,000 teeth, Dr. Haley found extremely potent toxins that, in his particular laboratory setup, potently inhibited critical enzymes in the body that are used to regulate energy. That was found 100% of the time.
Just to make sure it wasn’t a artifact from when you got to pull the tooth out through this infected, toxic mouth, they also analyzed a few teeth removed for orthodontic purposes, which are usually normal teeth. They don’t want the teeth to be crowded and let braces come and pull it in. Those teeth were completely sterile and had none of these toxins at all.
The root canal—and they can call me crazy if they want. You can put the 100% label on this. One hundred percent of root canals, whether they hurt or not, and whether they show an abscess on this x-ray or not, are infected, and they’re dead, the upper part.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s the concern of many people watching this. They have health challenges, and their immune system’s already compromised. That’s why I got my root canal out. Wasn’t bothering me. Wasn’t considered infected, I would say, but knowing those bacteria are in there, I knew what could happen and maybe what was already happening. I got it removed, regardless. Let’s give them some options. I know people that watch this will say, “Well, what do we do?” That’s always the question. I take my root canal—I can tell you what I did, but what are some options today? Things got better since I have had mine done, but what are some options once you remove a root canal?
Dr. Levy:
Really, the options are fairly small. One is if it’s in a non-critical spot, you leave a space there.
Dr. Pompa:
I did that for about four years, by the way. I didn’t have the money.
Dr. Levy:
Number two is if the anatomy permits, you can put a removable bridge or a permanent bridge, so you need two teeth. The downside with the bridge—and I have a couple bridges myself. They were done a long time ago. The downside with a bridge is you have to really shave down two healthy teeth on either side of the gap in order to put the bridge in. At least for me, so far, thank goodness, they’ve worked out. That’s an option, too.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s called a Maryland bridge, and I have something called zircon. It’s really strong so it’s lasted years. It’s really done well. There it is right there. See that? Okay, camera guy, you really want to see my teeth? There you go. All right, that’s good.
Dr. Levy:
If you really want to—if you already have a large number of other teeth missing, a partial plate or sometimes it’s a full plate, is the answer. Then finally, and very significantly, are implants. Implants, I think, have gotten a little bit of a bad reputation undeservedly because the literature now shows that, believe it or not—this really stunned me, and it’s in the book here—that when you have an infected tooth taken out and you do all the appropriate things, you clean out the socket, you give them ozone, maybe give them antibiotics, IV Vitamin C, platelet-rich plasma, everything to promote good healing—
Dr. Pompa:
We talk about all those things on other shows, by the way.
Dr. Levy:
You can put an implant or start the implant process the same day. Used to be, intuitively, I just felt you got to let it—bone fill in for four, five, six months.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it was three to six months.
Dr. Levy:
The thing is—and this is what I did not realize that I have since learned—is that when you just have a hole there that you leave alone over the next few months, you are going to grow in far less bone than if you have something sticking in it. It will stimulate, and the bone will go around it. There’s been an increasing problem with the old titanium implants, but we’re finding the zirconia implants are doing very well.
Dr. Pompa:
That was one of my questions.
Dr. Levy:
On the order of—almost 95% of the time you end up with a good outcome with an implant done in this fashion. Ninety-five percent is a pretty good percentage for just about any type of procedure you could look at, especially when you see the diversity and the variable illnesses in situations that patients are in.
Dr. Pompa:
I didn’t opt for that. It was only titanium at the time. I did a little homework there, immunosuppressive, things I didn’t like, so I went with the bridge. Today, we do have the zircon or zirconium oxide implants. With the PRF, stem cell, really, basically activating your own stem cells, I think they can be done safely now.
Dr. Levy:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
I would have opted for an implant, a zircon implant, today.
Dr. Levy:
It’s important that the patient gets education because if the procedure is done well at the outset and the patient understands the care that they need to place, these things really never become infected unless you neglect the gum lines around it.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s big.
Dr. Levy:
If you let the gums become inflamed, you have a new portal of entry for brand new bacteria to come in, work their way down, and you develop an infection.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they will.
Dr. Levy:
Sometimes that can be resolved because you’re not dealing with an infection inside the implant, just in the surrounding bone, but most of the time, once an infection sets up in an implant, it’s got to come out.
Dr. Pompa:
Just popped into my mind, before we exit this conversation of root canals and move onto other things, the fact is—and someone brought it up last night—I think it was Dr. Zach Bush—that just a dead tooth in the mouth, what does that do to the immune system? What is your feelings on that, meaning that you said, and I agree, that there could be a need for a root canal or someone has it in, but it’s a dead tooth. Is that a problem?
Dr. Levy:
Yeah, I think we were playing a little bit with semantics last night. A dead tooth is an infected tooth. You can’t have a dead tooth for any period of time without it being chronically infected. It’s going to be even worse if you see a huge abscess, but all of these infected teeth have some degree of abscess around them. I didn’t completely understand everything Dr. Bush was saying last night, but I know when you have this type—and it’s not a colonization. I think there was a little play over semantics, colonization versus infection.
Colonization is when you have a few bacteria, no systemic impact is taking place, and you’re certainly not having secondary phenomenon like pus and abscess formation. Once you start forming pus and abscess, you’ve got not a minimally, but a severely infected tooth, and guess what? Everywhere else in medicine, if you have an abscess or an infection, it’s got to come out.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s surgery.
Dr. Levy:
It’s got to be debrided and taken out as best and completely as possible because they all produce nonstop torrents of pro-oxidated or toxic debris that brings down your immune status everywhere in your body, not just in your mouth.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s been said that 88% of wisdom teeth removed end up in something known as a cavitation, which is—it’s like a cavity in the jaw. It’s an infection in the jaw, which I see ruin people’s lives, drive autoimmune, unexplainable illnesses. Talk about that.
Dr. Levy:
Actually, that came from a paper that Dr. Huggins and I put together. I reviewed a whole series of his patients that had come in to his clinic. What they did at the time was if you had four wisdom teeth extracted, after you’re numbed up, of course, they just took the drill bit, and they just pressed on the top. Usually, after two or three seconds of bzz, boom.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s like going into—missing the stud in drywall.
Dr. Levy:
It falls into a hole. I’m going to be a little off on my numbers, but some 75 to 80 percent of people that had four wisdom teeth extracted had at least three cavitations by falling in, and very high in the 90s, people that had those extracted had one or more. It’s not rare. That’s the point to make. It’s not rare. It’s expected. When you do an extraction—a typical extraction does not involve a routing out of the extraction site. The tooth sits in a strong, ligamentous almost like hammock. It’s like a shock absorber for the tooth.
Dr. Pompa:
The odontoid ligament, it’s called.
Dr. Levy:
Periodontal ligament, okay? When you don’t extract that ligament, guess what? You have a hole here, you have ligament, and you have normal bone cells here. The normal bone cells don’t know the tooth is gone because it still sees the ligaments, so you’ve lost the natural stimulus for bone to come in. Instead, the bone senses where the ligament ends at the top of the extraction site, and then fills in a little, thin cap of bone over top.
Dr. Pompa:
Then this is the infection, and here are the cavitations.
Dr. Levy:
Correct.
Dr. Pompa:
It even happens with people who’ve got the ligament removed, which I would have said is a better job just because even the anesthetics they use perhaps were vasoconstrictors, lack of blood flow in the area; therefore infection still formed.
Dr. Levy:
A lot of these are older people. They have osteoporosis. Guess what? You’re not going to have the bone of a 21-year-old in your mouth if your femur’s getting ready to fracture from osteoporosis. You’re dealing with older people, depressed and suppressed immune systems, coagulation disorders. It’s actually the exception rather than the rule to clean out one of these cavitations and just expect it to fill in completely with bone.
What you hope for is to get a good cleanout and turn a cavitation this big into a much smaller residual cavitation. As they get smaller, and smaller, and smaller, they become by all observations, and the blood work, and clinical status, clinically inconsequential. When they get massive and they start spreading along the nerves inside the tooth, they can be as toxic as anything else that you encounter. It’s the whole range of clinically inconsequential to being the primary reason for your chronic degenerative disease.
Dr. Pompa:
I see it all the time. I just recently, literally last week before I came here, I had a client. They went, they got their cavitation out, and a root canal. It may have been a month or two in between since I had talked to the person. Their autoimmune already shut down. Blood work, Hashimoto’s, normal. Other autoimmune markers, normal. That was in that short period of time. That’s the impact that these infections have on the immune system.
Dr. Levy:
Dr. Huggins, many years ago, had his clinic. He had the two-week period where he did everything in the mouth, gave them nutrition, gave them supplements. I don’t know if it was routinely or just frequently, but often enough he would have patients that had hugely elevated anti-nuclear antibodies, 64, 128 and highter to 1 come back and go down to zero in two to three weeks.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happen. The mystery illness when someone’s not getting well and they’re doing all these amazing things, we look here, and oftentimes it’s these cavitations.
Dr. Levy:
It would have been very interesting—because this work was with Dr. Huggins some 25 years ago. It would have been very interesting to see if we were able to add to Dr. Huggins’s magic already, platelet-rich plasma and ozone. We now have evidence, and there’s a chapter on this in the new book, with Dr. Phil Mollica and Dr. Robert Harris in Pennsylvania—they give lectures on ozone in dentistry around the world.
Dr. Mollica’s been able to show that when you’re persistent with ozone injections directly in the cavitation, no surgical intervention, which is almost crazy to us old-timers, you can start to see the growth of new bones start to fill in the cavitation.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to show a video this evening in my lecture. Dr. Robert Rowen, he’s speaking at one of my future seminars. He has many YouTube videos of, literally, people not even being able to walk. I’m thinking of the one that I’m showing this afternoon. He injects number 215, and next scene she’s walking without her walker without pain. She’s crying because she’s—the first time.
Now, he did point out that he believed that tooth that he injected would need basically further care in the future, but he was proving to her the connection of that in her knees and her hip not working. That connection’s real. What about the meridians, those nerve connections between these teeth and certain places of the body, as well?
Dr. Levy:
My take on meridians is there are multiplicative factors. If you have an infected tooth, whatever problems you’re having are going to be multiplied many-fold and more concentrated on a certain organ system if they’re in a particular location. That said, even if they’re not in a meridian of note, they’re still going to cause you significant problems if you don’t get them taken care of. I guess the current terminology would say that meridians massively upregulate the toxicity and the pathology of these infected teeth.
Dr. Pompa:
In the past, you had brought something up. You said we had to—and this happened to me. I had a wisdom tooth removed years ago. When I was getting all of my dental work done, he drilled in, and he found a little hole, and he just kind of hollowed it out. That was the old way of detecting—and then there was these Cavitat machines, these ultrasounds. They’re still around, but today we have a different tool that I’m a big fan of. You and I both believe that everybody watching this should get this done just like any other test. Talk about it.
Dr. Levy:
Just as much as if you went in to see the doctor for the first time. Should you get a fasting blood sugar? Absolutely, that’s the only way you’re going to know whether or not you’re already diabetic, you’re pre-diabetic, you’re not in danger of diabetes, or you got a blood sugar at 300, and you need insulin right away. Similarly, a lot of the pathology we talk about in the book—that’s why it’s called Hidden Epidemic—is because it’s talking about not only root canal teeth, which you see the infection on with this new machine.
Dr. Pompa:
Cone beam—
Dr. Levy:
A very large number—this is revealed in the literature when I looked at the studies from around the world in different patient populations. A very large number—by large number, I mean between 5 and 15 percent of all adult teeth show up as being infected on this study, and these are asymptomatic. They don’t hurt the patient. The patient feels fine, at least with regard to their mouth. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that just nearly all of our chronic degenerative diseases, which are already clearly shown to be linked to and often have a cause-and-effect relationship with periodontal or gum disease—guess what?
The pathogens inside these infected teeth are the same array of pathogens that were present in the gums, except they represent a more concentrated presence of these pathogens, and they have a greater and more efficient delivery system because you can chew and not really squeeze on your gums. When you chew on a tooth that has an apical infection, you push pathogens and toxins into the blood stream and in the lymphatics as, or more effectively, than if you took a syringe and pressed them IV. These need to be found out about and addressed to give a patient their best chance at disease resolution, especially with breast disease, as well.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, we didn’t talk about that.
Dr. Levy:
I said we already have the evidence to show over 95% of heart attacks directly come from these oral cavity infections. Guess what? We have thermograms that show the red hot lines coming from these affected teeth coming right on down into the breasts. When you get the breast lumps even before you get the breast cancer, they light up like Christmas trees. When you biopsy them, you find these typical, or at least one of these typical periodontal pathogens in there.
You also see GI cancers, and they have the same pathogens down there because you swallow them. You pass them through the lymphatics into your breasts, through your blood stream around to your heart, or you swallow them. Wherever they end up, they increase oxidative stress and are often the primary provoking reason for developing a cancer.
Dr. Pompa:
I said this last night. It’s frustrating to me because I get a lot of clients from these very prestigious doctors around the country. Invariably, these people still have root canals, cavitations. They hadn’t had even a cone beam, which they should have had, and believe it or not, even some still have silver fillings, and yet they were going to the best of the best, if you will, and yet those causes were not even considered. That’s very frustrating to me, and it should be to you, as well. The link between breast cancer—and we just, the prior weeks, interviewed some of the leading cancer doctors, and they all went here is a big causative factor. It’s underlooked.
Dr. Levy:
They just came out in the last six months with this ClearChoice implant commercial, where they’re trying to promote it—
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, I’ve seen it.
Dr. Levy:
In one of them, they have this old guy sitting there walking along, saying, “Well, my cardiologist told me that all heart disease starts in the mouth, and I better get these teeth taken care of first before I go see him.” You could have knocked me out of my chair when I saw that. I mean, this is a nationwide commercial, so the barriers are slowly coming down.
One of the things—I also work a lot with Vitamin C, I said, and we now have what Dr. Marik did with sepsis and hydrocortisone and Vitamin C completely blocking mortality from sepsis, and then a whole bunch of institutions in the States and around the world are now doing this work. That’s a good sign, especially for one reason that nobody appreciates. Our esteemed institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etcetera, they’re never—take my paranoia for it. They’re never going to recognize a country doctor for doing something that they haven’t done or haven’t discovered.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s true.
Dr. Levy:
If they pick it up and then do a series with 10,000 patients and show it, they’ll take the credit for it, and they’ll get the Nobel Prize, and they’ll get—but that’s okay.
Dr. Pompa:
We know those people.
Dr. Levy:
Then at least the people will have what they most deserve and what’s going to give them their best chance of long-term health.
Dr. Pompa:
I had a cone beam done. First of all, I don’t know if the camera guy there can focus in on the book. I want to point this out. Tell me when you’re in. Are you in? Okay, so if you see right around here, you’ll see a massive cavitation. This is the same film. This is a plain x-ray that you get from your dentist. This is a cone beam that we’re discussing that everybody should have. You can see the massive cavitation on the cone beam, but you cannot see it. This looks completely normal on the plain x-ray. That’s the point. You want to make another point on this?
Dr. Levy:
Not only do you see this huge abscess, when you come up close, you can see that the bony border of the sinus is completely eaten away so that the abscess on the tooth is directly communicating with the sinus cavity. All of this, number one, asymptomatic, and number two, completely undetectable on the regular x-ray.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, everyone needs this. You actually brought something up that nobody really talks about. You talked about normal teeth that aren’t root canals that—not post-extraction sites possibly having cavitation. Why would they have cavitation, and does the cone beam pick that up, as well?
Dr. Levy:
That’s a little semantics there. You don’t really have classical cavitational disease without an extraction, but in a very advanced patient, you will have cavitations that develop at an extraction site and literally burrow their way in the bone to involve the apex of another tooth.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what happened. That’s what happened to me, so I didn’t know. We got this cavitation out, and then it—what had happened is the cone beam showed that it went under the tooth in front all the way out. I had to lose that tooth.
Dr. Levy:
You’d have never found that on a regular x-ray and just stayed sick the rest of your life.
Dr. Pompa:
My plain film looked normal. Despite my best efforts of taking care of myself, that cone beam saved my life, no doubt. I would have been sick 10 years, 5—who knows, whatever it was?
Dr. Levy:
For whatever miserable period of time you had left to live.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah. The cone beam can show other teeth that may have been affected by other infections is your point.
Dr. Levy:
Sure, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
What about kids? Should a kid get a cone-beam x-ray? Could they have cavitation?
Dr. Levy:
I would say routinely, no, you don’t need to do a 3-D on a kid. What you do need to do is let’s say, for example, you have—your teenager’s going to play high school football. I definitely feel their initial physical examination—just like the blood work—should have one of these tests. When, hopefully, it comes back completely normal and he or she develops a problem when they’re 30, 35, 40, diabetes, arthritis, you name it, they redo the test, and see if a brand new infected tooth has popped up.
Now, on the other hand, with regard to kids, kids obviously develop catastrophic and fatal diseases. Let’s talk about leukemia. If you have a five-year-old kid that has leukemia, you doggone better do one of these tests because if there’s an infected tooth there—and kids get infected teeth, too. They have cavities. They dig in there. They get infected. If you have an infected tooth there, and a kid with leukemia, and you don’t address that tooth, you have completely missed his one chance, her one chance, at a long-term permanent cure.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Tom, I’ve had people get cone-beam x-rays and take them to their regular dentist. The dentist looks at them and says, “It looks fine to me.” I go, “Hmm,” and I send it to a dentist that looks more at these. He goes, “Fine to them,” and they see this massive cavitation. I can see them on the cone beam. What’s going on there?
Dr. Levy:
You bring up a great point. I was going to try to mention this, and then turns out the question you ask leads me right into it. As a cardiologist, we have a test called an echocardiogram. Now, I can read that echocardiogram without any information. I’m systematic, do all the measurements, look at the contractility, look at the valves, and reach my interpretation.
I will not get as much information out of that test as if the person ordering it says, “Look for vegetations on the mitral valve.” Then I can look at it. I focus in. I can see something subtle. Same thing with this examination. This examination has an enormous amount of information on it. You see the head, the brain. Unless you’re specific—you need to say, “I want the apexes of all the teeth examined in all dimensions.” When you got the controls here—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a 3-D x-ray.
Dr. Levy:
You can just sit there and rotate it around. You can see every possible angle. I want each tooth examined in its entirety from all dimensions to rule out apical infections.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah because they’re looking at it like a plain x-ray.
Dr. Levy:
Sure, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
“Oh, yeah, it looks fine to me.” Then when you do this—I’ve done it with my own. I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. There it is.”
Dr. Levy:
There you go.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a really important question because that’s happening more and more now.
Dr. Levy:
I’m sorry to say that that one particular one I just said is not in the book. I should have put in there make sure your interpreting radiologist, physician, or dentist knows that this is what you’re looking for. Just don’t say, “Here’s my test. Interpret it,” or you’ll lose a lot of information.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s happened to me dozens of times to the point now where I ask the question. Where can they get the book? Is it on Amazon? Where do they get it?
Dr. Levy:
Amazon and on my website.
Dr. Pompa:
Tell them your website.
Dr. Levy:
PeakEnergy.com, P-E-A-K Energy.com.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you won’t have peak energy if you have these infections, that’s for sure.
Dr. Levy:
Yeah, it was a pretty good name for a website.
Dr. Pompa:
That was really good, and the heart, too. I get it. See, now they’re going to remember it. You’ve mentioned a few other things. I had amalgams. I really cleaned up my act, obviously. Did it the right way. My protocols are how to get this stuff out of the brain safely. By the way, that’s where—big problem, too. On the post side of this is the fact that most doctors, even alternative, they really don’t go after it in the brain correctly. It turns to inorganic mercury. There, it’s locked. I got it out of my brain, but the problem was I was left with pockets, infection, periodontal disease even though I was healthy and got my life back, which would have led to bigger problems.
Dr. Levy:
The other thing with, for example, mercury is most of the docs, unfortunately, are not that experienced in different protocols for detoxification.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what I teach.
Dr. Levy:
Everything that you mobilize is not excreted. A certain portion of it gets redeposited into new tissues. I use the expression detoxification is also retoxification.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Levy:
Especially when you’re dealing with a type of detox that you know to be highly efficient, you need to give the patient coverage, not only with Vitamin C, but with other antioxidants so that—we talked about this in my previous talk. All toxins are pro-oxidant. Vitamin C is your prototypical antioxidant. When you meet these toxins in the blood, you give them the electrons they’re seeking and trying to get a hold of, and you’ve taken away their ability to poison the body. Then you’ve just left for that the ability for them to be excreted in urine, feces, enteropathic circulation.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, the retox, gosh, I totally agree. Most of my process is dealing with the potential of redisribution and retox. In the gut, we put a binder—four different binders that don’t leave the gut. We also use one even right before the dental appointment and right after that minimizes what’s happening in and around the cell to make sure this doesn’t redistribute. Otherwise, it’s going into the brain. That’s how I lost my life. I just had two fillings randomly taken out. Eight days later, I was fatigued. Didn’t understand. Months later, years later, I finally—my life trickled down over months, and years later, I figured out what happened.
Dr. Levy:
They have, for example, a very potent detoxation called DMPS. That is one of the most effective agents.
Dr. Pompa:
I use it, but most people use it incorrectly.
Dr. Levy:
You take it, you better be buffering yourself because it pulls out toxins. I’ve seen it take patients with minimal neurologic conditions and cause them to have advanced neurologic conditions because it hammers their immune system.
Dr. Pompa:
Me, too, yep.
Dr. Levy:
I’ve also seen or had related to me—it sounds incredible, but patients that have gone blind with mercury toxicity, and they start getting DMPS injections. I don’t know what the timeframe was, a month or two. They start getting their vision back. It should be part of your armamentarium, but you’ve got to protect the rest of the body against the detox effects. It’s like I call burning down the house to get rid of the roaches.
Dr. Pompa:
I wrote three articles, When Detox is Dangerous. I talk about those real chelators because there’s mistakes made with them, as you’re pointing out and other mistakes, and as well as the other side of the coin. Many people are using these herbal things, calling them real chelators and binders. They’re really not, and they just cause more redistribution. Read When Detox is Dangerous. Anything else that is in here that you feel they need to know to avoid this epidemic right here, The Hidden Epidemic?
Dr. Levy:
We talk minimally about supplementation. That’s covered more extensively in my other books. We talk a lot about the ozone applications. For example, one thing—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. I was going to ask you that.
Dr. Levy:
One thing that we haven’t talked a lot about here, but it’s really important because when you have root canals or when you have other chronically infected teeth that we’re talking about, guess what tissue is detoxifying as best it can and draining those infections. Your tonsils. Your tonsils are what I call affectionately wimp lymphoid glands. They can deal with a minimal normal challenge in the mouth and protect your body. When you hit them with a root canal that’s just pouring toxins and pathogens nonstop, almost across the board, they become chronically infected.
This is important. Not chronically infected like tonsillitis in a kid where they’re big, and swollen, and puffy. Typically, they’re not swollen, and they look perfectly normal. This was the work of Dr. Issels back in the 1950s. He had metastatic cancer patients. Ninety-eight percent of them had infected teeth and root canals. Initially, he started his protocol, extracted these teeth. They did better as a group, but there was still a substantial percentage getting heart attacks.
Somewhere along the line, he figured it out. He started routinely—and it’s a major operation. Don’t get me wrong. He started routinely extracting the tonsils, and he had no more heart attacks. In Dr. Issels’s words, not mine, 100% of the tonsils, even though they looked morphologically normal, were grossly abscessed, and pitted, and scarred on the inside.
Dr. Pompa:
After my cavitation surgery, I had my tonsils injected with ozone. Do you recommend that?
Dr. Levy:
Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
I hope so.
Dr. Levy:
You led into my next point, which is, quite honestly, I just about had a heart attack some, oh, eight or nine years ago. My CRP was elevated. I was getting chest pain. I’d done everything else, and I remembered Dr. Issels’s work. I didn’t know anything about ozone back then.
Dr. Pompa:
Your tonsils were holding infection.
Dr. Levy:
My CRP was elevated, so I got my tonsils taken out. Worst experience of my life, but my CRP came back into normal, and my chest pain subsided. I got an angiogram six months later, and they were perfectly normal. I have no doubt I had a critical stenosis back then. Then later on, I find out that, hey, you could do ozone injections and it might and frequently does clear up this infection or at least suppress it. How would you know if you suppressed it or not? CRP. If your CRP is five, which is quite elevated—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s high. I don’t like it above one.
Dr. Levy:
Right, and you do a series of ozone injections and it comes down to 2.5, 2, 1.8, well, you’re in a much safer category, ideal if it goes below 1. At least you have something where you can track it. There’re also a few more esoteric tests that I talk about in this book for looking at tonsillar anatomy that you could possibly do to look for occult abscesses.
Dr. Pompa:
If you have a dentist or a doc that’s doing ozone injections, have your tonsils injected. How many, typically, would you recommend if you—let’s assume that you have some infection there. How many?
Dr. Levy:
Oh, from the positive results we’ve seen in the series and the literature, probably three to five over a couple-month period. It’s very simple. A tiny, tiny, tiny needle, I think 27-gauge, something like that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it was painless.
Dr. Levy:
Two CCs of a low concentration of ozone. You just poke directly into it. Even if they’re tucked behind the faucial pillars, you just go right through the pillar directly into the tonsil if you can’t get a good angle.
Dr. Pompa:
There you have it. Great book, get it. This is a life changer. You changed my life years ago, and you didn’t even know it. Meeting you is a absolute pleasure. Thanks for being on Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Levy:
Thank you, Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ll see you all on the next episode right here from SOPMed.
