Today’s episode welcomes back my great friend, biologic dentist Dr. Gerry Curatola.
We are diving deep into the top reasons why you still don’t feel well or why you got that dreaded diagnosis.
This is a very important discussion about how root canals, cavitations, and hidden infections are driving auto-immunity, cancer, disease, and disrupting hormones. You will also learn the proper way to get cavitations and root canals fixed, as well as what you need to do to discover these hidden infections in the first place.
This is an important episode you don’t want to miss!
More about Dr. Gerry Curatola
Dr. Gerry Curatola is a renowned biologic restorative dentist with more than 35 years of clinical practice experience. He studied neuroscience at Colgate University and attended dental school at the New York University (NYU) College of Dentistry where he now serves as Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Cariology and Comprehensive Care. As a pioneer in the biologic approach to Restorative & Cosmetic Dentistry in the mid-1980’s, Dr. Curatola consulted in the research and development of many biocompatible restorative materials used today.
- Dr. Gerry Cutatola
- CHTV Episode 210
- CHTV Episode 189
- Root Cause Movie
- To purchase many of the supplements mentioned on our show, please visit AsSeenOnCHTV.com and use the code CHTV15 for 15% off.
- CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.
- CytoDefend
- Dr. Pompa’s Beyond Fasting – now released!
- Fastonic
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
All right, this episode of Cell TV, this could be why you still don’t feel well or even why you got the dreaded diagnosis. This is a very important episode. I don’t know if you saw the movie Root Cause, but it was taken off of Netflix. That’s how much controversy is around this topic of root canals, cavitations, hidden infections, and how it’s driving autoimmune, cancer, and diseases and, again, even just hormone disruption. You’re going to get the answers on this episode when I interview Dr. Gerry Curatola. As a matter of fact, you’re going to see something shocking that happened to my wife and why this doctor saved and changed her life. Also, we’re going to talk about the proper way to get cavitations and root canals fixed, what you need to discover or I should say do to discover these hidden infections. All of that is going to be discussed in this episode. This is going to be one you’re going to want to share and, definitely, you’re not going to want to miss. I’ll see you in the episode.
I want to give thanks to one of our sponsors, CytoDefend. Look, in a time like this, I think that our immune system and keeping our immune system up right now is more important than ever. I could also tell you that I pay attention to the things that keep my immune system on par and healthy so so glad that CytoDefend is one of our sponsors here on Cell TV. It’s a product that I use, my family uses, and hopefully, you’ll check it out, and by the way, you can check it out with the link right here below. If you want to try a free bottle, you can actually get a free bottle. Just pay the shipping, and I think you’ll reorder after that. Check it out.
Ashley:
If you’re listening to this podcast and want to access the amazing CytoDefend product Dr. Pompa just mentioned, please visit freeimmunity.com. Again, that’s freeimmunity.com.
Dr. Pompa:
Here with Dr. Gerry Curatola.
Dr. Curatola:
How are you doing?
Dr. Pompa:
One of my favorites, okay, so this episode—we’re good buds. You’re going to get a lot of fun in this episode, but this is a serious topic. It’ll be hard for us to pull back, but if we keep it fun, then we’re going to keep people learning. That’s for sure. I titled this this may be why you don’t feel well still, and this may be why you’re sick or got a diagnosis. This is a topic—we did a show. Gosh, I don’t know. It was a while ago.
Dr. Curatola:
It was a while ago.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Episode 210. I’ll tell you what, that episode has brought a lot of people to a big understanding. It’s brought a lot of people here, fortunately. As a matter of fact, I was brought to tears yesterday in your office. Sometimes I get beat down, man. It’s like is this making a difference? Am I making a difference? I walked in your waiting room, and there was a woman. She said, “Oh, I’m here because I watched a podcast of yours.”
Dr. Curatola:
That’s exactly right.
Dr. Pompa:
Most likely it was that one. Anyway, she went on to tell her story. Then there was another woman who was here that—matter of fact, we could put up the Facebook link on this, Ashley. One of my patients who you helped that I sent here sent her here. This poor girl was sick her whole life, unexplainable stuff, gut problems, diagnosed with Lyme, diagnosed with low immunity, of course low immunity, but yet not one person looked here. She had a massive, massive infection. She had a crown with metal over top of metal, which was in amalgam, that you said you pulled out about three thermometers full of mercury out of.
I mean, I literally teared up a couple times. He brought me in to the surgery, fortunately. That’s when we did the Facebook Live, and you can watch that. I teared up a few times because I realized she was literally right before my very eyes getting her life back and then seeing the other woman getting her life back and my other patient here. It was an emotional day for me, honestly. Here we are, an emotional subject, and I truly mean it. I told you I have a stack of folders of testimonies from just people, and many of them came here but people who got infection, hidden infection taken out of their mouth either in a root canal or a cavitation. Literally, I’ve gotten texts or emails before they even left the office saying, oh, my gosh, my life’s different.
Dr. Curatola:
One patient in particular—and we never know. I mean, I always look at—I always knew and aspire to the philosophy of Weston Price, who in the early 1900s he actually founded the research on to the American Dental Association. He spoke about focal infections in the mouth and the systemic complications in 1912 or 1913.
Dr. Pompa:
Didn’t he do the experiments with the rabbit where he literally took tissue and put it in the rabbit?
Dr. Curatola:
That’s exactly right. I always knew that there is this very intimate connection between the mouth and the body. It’s why I wrote the book, The Mouth-Body Connection.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re looking her up.
Dr. Curatola:
You can get it on tape.
Dr. Pompa:
There you go.
Dr. Curatola:
Anyway, that’s not tape. I mean, that tells how old we are.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, tape, it’s true.
Dr. Curatola:
You can get it on an mp3. You can download it on Kindle.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you have it on 8-track? Is it on 8-track? That’s what I have on my car.
Dr. Curatola:
Exactly, but it’s interesting. What I love that you’re doing, Dan, is—and this is the most profound thing and I thought about this this morning. The wall between medicine and dentistry is coming down. The 150 year divide that separated this from the rest of the body—150 years ago, there were medical schools and dental schools began. It began. It never used to be that way. As a matter of fact, it never separated in Europe.
In dental school, we were told, oh, yes, infections in the mouth can be a problem. Gum disease, you can lose your teeth. No, gum disease, you can lose your life. You have an upwards of 10 times greater chance of a heart attack, 7 times greater chance of adult-onset diabetes, 67 higher percent incidents of pancreatic cancer in men. I mean, the number one bacteria…
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, there was just a new study out February 2018. The CDC stated that seven out of ten chronic degenerative diseases they believe is coming from oral microbes, to your point.
Dr. Curatola:
Absolutely, and a study out of Harvard finding that the number one bacteria found in colorectal tumors, colon cancer, is a Fusobacterium nucleatum, one of the most common bacteria in the mouth. This amazing oral-systemic link and understanding this is one factor. What you are digging into—when you say you have these testimonials of people, I can tell you that—and I’ve been practicing for over 35 years. It’ll be 36 years in June, and I want to tell you that I am so excited about the work that I’m doing right now because I see people getting better. We are able to identify stealth infections in the mouth and the very profound effects they have on the body, and so many people are suffering with all kinds of illness. I believe that 90% of the body’s toxicity outside of the environment around us is what’s going on in your mouth.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree. I couldn’t agree more. Let’s talk about a case. I can use this gentleman’s name because he did a Facebook Live for me, and he gave his story. Matter of fact, he’s so excited because he has his life back. He’s coming to the seminar that you and I are both teaching at next week.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s great.
Dr. Pompa:
Tommy, if you’re watching this, yeah, I’m talking about you. He literally was sending me a text on the way out of this office. He said, “Dan, is it possible that my 20 years of pain could be gone already?” I said, “Yeah, Tommy, it could.” You know what? It is. That was getting one cavitation—and we’ll talk more about what we’re talking about. We’ll actually show you, but these are infections in the jaw that typically don’t have pain. Tommy didn’t.
Dr. Curatola:
It’s also very important to point out that these types of defects in the jaw, what we call cavitational osteonecrosis, before the advance of technology that we’re using now like 3D cone beam, we—most dentists would ignore them. They didn’t even know they were there.
Dr. Pompa:
No, I know, yeah. We’ll show these. We’re going to show you how to detect these because advancements in this area have come a long way. Tommy, literally, so he—20 years of pain, lived through pain for 20 years, went away before he—that was just getting the infection out. By the way, there was still one more infection, which I don’t know if you know this. You just worked on Tommy a few weeks ago. He had the exact—what was basically still there after the first one, another miracle, I mean, it lifted again.
Dr. Curatola:
Wonderful.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, some of the other conditions he had were lifted after that infection was basically taken out. That doesn’t happen all the time.
Dr. Curatola:
No, it doesn’t, and that’s a good thing to point out. We’re not here to say that, if I do this, you’re going to get…
Dr. Pompa:
Right, that happened to Tommy, and it’s happened to others.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is eliminating these potential sources of stealth infection. It’s an opportunistic area. A cavitation is a colloquial term we use for a hole in the jaw. A hole in a tooth we call a cavity. A cavitation is a hole in the jaw. The technical term is cavitation necrosis.
There are areas especially around extracting wisdom teeth where the tooth is removed, and the area doesn’t adequately heal. The bone doesn’t grow in, so what you’re left with is a perfect hiding place for all kinds of pathogens. They have biopsied and taken lung spirochetes, candida, mold, all kinds of pathogens that can harbor in these areas. Why? They’re like little dark caves.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, exactly how I describe it.
Dr. Curatola:
They’re warm. They’re dark. They’re moist. Prior to actively engaging in getting these areas to regenerate and close—and we’ll talk about that. This has been treated for years and years, especially in Europe. Biologic dentists in Europe recognize these. These also form around teeth that are failing and dental infections, which we had a technical term called [periapical] area. In actuality, it could be a cyst, but it is generally creating this resorption of bone in this area, this dead area that is often—I often like to say that you really—these are supercharged pathogens.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, oh, man.
Dr. Curatola:
They’re able to come to critical mass there and do what we never used to believe but really affect the body in ways, very interesting ways that your teeth connect to your body.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’re going to talk about that. Let’s talk about why these create a disease just to bring it to them. They’re saying could this be me? I’m right on the statistic here. If you had a wisdom tooth out 25 years ago, you have an 88% chance of having a cavitation. Each tooth forward it gets a little less.
Dr. Curatola:
It’s in the 80s. It’s like 86 to 80. They’re finding now through the use of cone beam and screening patients, anyone who had their wisdom teeth out should really have a CBCT, a 3D, what’s called a cone beam. It’s cone beam computerized tomography.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to show you one.
Dr. Curatola:
It gives us a 3D representation. When you take a regular dental X-ray, you could have a lesion in the middle here, but because the bone is superimposed—the two sides on the lower jaw, the cortical bone on each side, it’s superimposed. It’s very difficult to see what’s here. Now with the use of 3D computerized tomography, cone beam technology, we’re able to get this 3D image of your jaw where we can see lesions that were never visible before.
Dr. Pompa:
Two mistakes, number one, people go to their dentist. They take a plain film as he’s describing, and they say, oh, you look fine. You can’t see it on plain film. Here’s the other mistake. They get a cone beam, 3D X-ray that he’s describing done. They end up sending the disk to the dentist. The dentist puts it in and reads it. He doesn’t have the correct software. He reads it as a plain film. Gerry, that’s happened many times.
Dr. Curatola:
So many times.
Dr. Pompa:
I said, no, no, no, you’re going to send it to Gerry, and Gerry actually does—you do Skype with people from all…
Dr. Curatola:
No, I do Skype consults all the time. I’m able to get this digital—people can get them taken anywhere in the world, and I’m able to get this digital image and read it correctly and let them know whether or not indeed they have these potential areas that could be problematic for their systemic health.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, let’s talk about why this would make someone sick. I made the comment in the beginning I was blessed to be in the surgery and see that surgery going down with that young lady. She had all of these health issues. How is this connected to why someone may not be feeling well, have a hormone problem, or whatever they’re dealing with?
Dr. Curatola:
There’s three different ways that a bacterial infection in the mouth can communicate with the rest of the body. One is the direct—in other words, you have cesspool of bacteria, and these pathogens enter the bloodstream and can go to different places and cause issues.
Dr. Pompa:
Drive inflammation.
Dr. Curatola:
Right, and another way is by really creating a chronic inflammation. That’s a big thing is that chronic low-grade inflammation. GV Black, by the way, the father of modern dentistry in the early 1900s spoke about cavitations, and he said they were these unique areas where there wasn’t a fever. There wasn’t swelling, and there wasn’t pain.
Dr. Pompa:
I had none of that.
Dr. Curatola:
No fever, no swelling, no pain, yet it’s an area of infection. It’s very interesting that that is a source of chronic low-grade inflammation. What people need to realize, one of the largest sources of chronic low-grade inflammation is gum disease. These areas where in the jaw become areas of chronic inflammation, that’s a second way. This chronic low-grade inflammation has a huge cascade of events systemically.
Dr. Pompa:
Your immune system, your microbiome.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, I mean, everything from the liver releasing C-reactive proteins, which has inflammatory effects on the entire circulatory system. There’s all kinds of ways that chronic low-grade inflammation puts your body on alert. It’s like a silent alarm bell going off that’s not being answered. It has devastating effects for body organs everywhere. The third way is another very, very interesting way that I’ve become so fascinated with and that is that there is a tooth-organ relationship that has been spoken about in the literature for years, in Chinese medicine especially, that there are meridian pathways, energetic pathways from teeth to organs. I’m going to share a story this summer that was so compelling that brought tears to me by a patient who had a very specific infection related on an energetic meridian to a particular part of her body. This is documented and fascinating that your teeth—and what I explain to patients now, Dan, is that your teeth are like circuit breakers.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I heard you describe it yesterday. I was like that’s a perfect explanation.
Dr. Curatola:
What people have to understand is that you don’t just—you don’t catch cancer. You don’t just wake up one day. Oh, I caught cancer like you caught a cold or you got a virus.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s just your genetics. You got cancer. You were doomed.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, or you got genetics. Yeah, my mother had breast cancer. I got breast cancer and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. There is something very, very—our bodies are fighting cancer every day.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Curatola:
We are fighting cancer every day. Why? We have this shield of an immune system. We have a shield. It’s like the starship Enterprise. I tell patients about the starship Enterprise. When the shield is up and the Klingons fire those missiles or those torpedoes, the Klingon torpedoes don’t get through the shield, so the shield is there. When that shield is down, the torpedo gets in.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re in trouble.
Dr. Curatola:
For example, the energetic meridian on the upper first molars is connected energetically to the breast, the right breast and the left breast. Does it mean that an infection in your upper first molar is going to give you breast cancer? No. What it means is you have an infection, a failing root canal in your upper first molar. That’s like flipping the breaker off.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great.
Dr. Curatola:
Energetically, the shield is down over that part of your body, and as a matter of fact, there was a correlative study done by a good friend of mine, a brilliant doctor and dentist, Stuart Nunnally. He was actually on that movie, the Root Cause. He did a study. He did a study on I think 300 women and found 90% of them had a root canal on—that 300 women with breast cancer, 90% of them had a root canal on one or the other first molars. It’s huge furor about it. The fact of the matter is is that root canals and molars are very difficult. They don’t sterilize the tooth. We’ll talk about that. Why do root canals fail? Why are root canals a source of chronic inflammation? What is the new advances in root canal therapy that might show promise in this area?
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm, I want to talk about all that.
Dr. Curatola:
The conventional techniques, in my experience of 35 years, they often do not work. This woman came to me, and I’ll just share the story quickly. She was from Houston and referred to me by, actually, a functional practitioner who is actually a friend of yours. She was down there, Deb Lance. [Deborah] referred this patient to me. Deborah said, “Gerry, I just had a patient come in who’s a friend of mine, and she was diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s her left lung.” The first thing I said is, “Does she have any root canals?”
Dr. Pompa:
That’d be the first thing I ask, yeah.
Dr. Curatola:
I said, “Does she have any root canals?” She had one root canal. Where was the root canal? On the lower left lower first molar. What is the lower left first molar the circuit breaker for (left lung, lower mandibular first molar)? She comes up, and I said, “Look, Deb, this is—I’m happy to look at it. Let’s see if there’s infection around it. Let’s get a cone beam.” We did a cone beam. Sure enough, there was a massive infection around this tooth, so we removed the tooth. I use a laser that actually…
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that in a piece here.
Dr. Curatola:
The WaterLase, the iPlus actually has the ability to remove diseased tissue, disinfect the area, and then actually stimulate the bone to heal. Remember, with the tooth out, now she has a space there. We don’t want that to remain unresolved.
Dr. Pompa:
Form another cavitation.
Dr. Curatola:
Form another cavitation. We treated it. We used PRF from her arm, which we’ll speak about a little bit.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that.
Dr. Curatola:
Platelet rich-fibrin, treated it. Five weeks later, she had her pre-surgical evaluation with her oncologist down in Houston. I got a call from Deborah who reported to me that the tumor had shrunk to a third of its size and that she didn’t need surgery. They biopsied it, and it was completely benign. Now, did I save that woman’s life? I would like to say that I played a part. By the grace of God, I played a part in helping that woman recover because God gives us this amazing ability to self-regulate and heal.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know.
Dr. Curatola:
We have this amazing ability by the Divine to self-regulate and heal, so when we remove what’s offending…
Dr. Pompa:
Remove the interference.
Dr. Curatola:
I think all we did was flip the circuit breaker back on for her immune system to begin working again. All of the big advances in cancer therapy is all surrounding our immune response, boosting our immune response. They’re using chemotherapeutic drugs in this regard. They’re actually even planting viruses to trigger immune response, but everything is about getting our immune system working. I call that the shield that goes back up.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, to go full circle on Weston Price, he took—I mentioned the rabbits. He took these root canal teeth that have these anaerobic nasty, nasty pathogens, bacteria, viruses. He put those in rabbits. Describe that. Describe what happened.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, well, those rabbits developed tumors and cancers.
Dr. Pompa:
The very disease that was in the person.
Dr. Curatola:
The very disease that was in the person. I mean, there you have this. You have this, and I’m like, okay—the thing is is that—the problem I have, I’m an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Cariology and Comprehensive Care at New York University. I have a constant thirst for knowledge and understanding and the ability for us to help people get better. You sent me a text that was beautiful, and you said I love helping people get better. You know what? There’s no greater feeling than to help somebody on their path to live a longer healthier life. I mean, that is what this is about.
Dr. Pompa:
He said don’t ever change that. I’m like the moment that changes I’m out.
Dr. Curatola:
I did. I texted back don’t ever stop that.
Dr. Pompa:
Don’t ever stop feeling that way.
Dr. Curatola:
Don’t ever stop feeling that way. It is a great feeling.
Dr. Pompa:
It is.
Dr. Curatola:
The disappointing part is when orthodox medicine, which is often unduly influenced by other economic forces and organizations that produce products that they make a lot of money on, pharmaceuticals and things—often these approaches to help people heal themselves is cast as voodoo, and oh, no, don’t do that. There’s a fear-based mentality that’s propagated, the propaganda, fear-based propaganda. People, we live in an information world now. Do your research. It’s podcasts like this that hopefully will stimulate something in your own journey…
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Curatola:
…to find the knowledge and take the steps to help your body heal itself.
Dr. Pompa:
Share this episode for that very reason. Let me tell you something—I want you to talk about Root Cause, the movie. I thought it was a great documentary. I thought there was an entertainment factor that just kept people’s interest. It was a story. It was the producer’s story, the guy who produced it actually. His story about how his root canal unknowing to him is why he was sick. It took him how many years? I love the way it started. I would describe it as my story.
Matter of fact, I watched it with Tommy who I mentioned. He was like, “You have to see it, Dan. This is our story.” He did everything. He did this. He goes through everything. He did acupuncture.
Dr. Curatola:
Shaman.
Dr. Pompa:
He goes through this whole thing because he went through—he was the doer. He was me. I was going to do everything.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, how he started, it started, he broke up a fight between a guy and his girlfriend.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, gets punched.
Dr. Curatola:
Then the guy punches him in the face. He breaks a tooth. He goes to the dentist. The dentist says I got to do a root canal. Now, unfortunately, in 36 years, I’ve seen a lot of bad root canals. I would say that—or something happened. They worked on the tooth. They did it afterwards.
It leads me to believe that it probably wasn’t a sterile tooth that got busted. It probably got infected, and then they did a root canal. The root canal basically sealed the infection there. There was that classics of oral-systemic thing. This guy couldn’t get out of bed.
Dr. Pompa:
Pain, weight gain, and everything.
Dr. Curatola:
Pain and even sexual dysfunction with his girlfriend. It’s like that was the…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I know. You know what? See, that story, I hear that story all the time. You know I work with clients all around the world, man. I hear that story, and that story was me, man. I did everything. Then I got to the cause of why I got sick and that’s the—hence the name.
Dr. Curatola:
I had so many colleagues of mine who said, oh, that’s BS and this and that. I have a buddy…
Dr. Pompa:
They took it down.
Dr. Curatola:
I think the American Association of Endodontists, I mean, there was—some of it was a little sensationalized. The message was true, though. The message was true. They took it down. They actually filed a lawsuit because they didn’t want everyone to think that everyone who has a—oh, I’m sorry. Everyone who has a root canal should run to their dentist and get their teeth ripped out.
Dr. Pompa:
Of course, I knew that’s why they took it down.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s why they did that but reality is…
Dr. Pompa:
I will say this, if you have a root canal, get a cone beam. Get a cone beam.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, that’s the right answer. The right answer is this, a dental X-ray—and I had a woman yesterday who was here at the end of the day. Literally, she came with her dental X-rays from her previous dentist, and her previous dentist said—she had a root canal on an upper bicuspid. The root canal was failing. The dentist said, “Oh, I don’t want to take that out. You don’t have enough bone for a dental implant. Get the root canal redone.”
She said intuitively, “I don’t think I want that, Doctor. I think this tooth has been bothering me ever since this root canal was done. I want that tooth out.” The dentist said, “No, no, no, if you were my wife, I would tell you you got to get a root canal. It’s crazy. They’ll retreat it. It’ll be fine.”
She went and spent thousands of dollars to retreat the root canal. It is far from fine. I had her get a cone beam. Even looking at her regular X-rays, you can see a little inflammation around it. The cone beam showed a massive infection. It needed to come out immediately.
Dr. Pompa:
That one yesterday, you pulled a root canal out. It looked massively infected to me. I mean, when I saw the cone beam, I could see it [00:27:45].
Dr. Curatola:
What you’ll see is you’ll see black areas around the tooth on there. We can talk about that now, about root canal and why they work and why they don’t work. Most don’t work. I have to say—and I went into practice 35 years ago. I took over a practice from a dentist who had passed away of a heart attack, and he was mercury toxic. I could tell you that because the whole office…
Dr. Pompa:
Of course he was.
Dr. Curatola:
I opened the drawers, and there was mercury rolling around the—I literally had to get HAZMAT suits in there.
Dr. Pompa:
Sickest profession on the planet, by the way.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it and a lot of dentists don’t stop to think about it. Dentists have the highest rate of suicide who have graduated, the highest rates of depression, the highest rates of neurological diseases, many like Parkinsonism. I know dentists who had MS, but I know dentists who committed suicide too. Yes, was it the mercury? I would say that the mercury predisposed them to going into a neurological depression, and that neurological depression is fueled by this—a lot of psychological transference and countertransference of behavior between doctor and patient, what their sense does and all—I mean, I know and I’m embarrassed to say that dental amalgam came out in Civil War days. Actually, they were putting lead in teeth, so I guess the mercury was the next evolutionary leg. There were pro-mercury dentists and anti-mercury dentists even then. The pro-mercury dentists formed what we know of as the American Dental Association.
Dr. Pompa:
ADA.
Dr. Curatola:
Which actually held the patent on dental amalgam. Dental amalgam is 52% mercury, 26% silver, so to call it a silver filling is really a misrepresentation. Any dentist doing that can actually—I think has a problem with a violation and fraudulent misrepresentation. If they say, hey, Dan, I’m going to put a silver filling in, you’re like, oh, it’s in the back. It’s not going to show. If the dentist said, hey, Dan, I’m going to put a mercury filling in…
Dr. Pompa:
I don’t want that.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, so 52% mercury, it should be called a mercury filling, not a silver filling.
Dr. Pompa:
It leaches mercury the life of the filling.
Dr. Curatola:
It’s off-gasses. When I was in dental school—that’s another very interesting point. In dental school, I was told that the mercury was magically locked in. I remember that. I’m like how is it…
Dr. Pompa:
People are still being told that. People are still being told.
Dr. Curatola:
How is it locked in? Oh, when you mix it together, the mercury stays in. Now we have mercury vapor analyzers.
Dr. Pompa:
We can read it. It’s leaching mercury the whole…
Dr. Curatola:
In the wet environment with saliva because…
Dr. Pompa:
Hot, cold, acid.
Dr. Curatola:
If you clench your teeth or grind your teeth or you drink hot liquids, it off-gasses, and it continues to off-gas. For that percentage of the population that is deficient in the ability to eliminate and excrete, these people get very sick.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, listen, it vaporizes mercury constantly. It gets worse with hot and cold. Obviously, even the acid in your mouth creates it. That mercury vapor crosses the blood-brain barrier and turns to inorganic mercury, and there it’s trapped for life unless you do the right process. Here’s the other frustrating thing for me is people have these things in their mouth, and they’re doing all this detox. Meanwhile, it’s pouring into the filling, so that’s another subject.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, no, and I had breakfast this morning with a brilliant physician, a brilliant osteopath who understands brain and gut and this and that. Over here, he was talking to me about Xylitol, and it’s good because of [00:31:27]. I mean, he doesn’t understand that it’s disturbing the—here’s a brilliant doctor.
Dr. Pompa:
I wish were in that breakfast.
Dr. Curatola:
Here’s a brilliant doctor…
Dr. Pompa:
You should’ve invited me.
Dr. Curatola:
Here’s a brilliant doctor who’s completely at a loss because of this wall that’s existed between medicine and dentistry, and that wall needs to come down. One of the things that I—I spent a breakfast educating him about the oral microbiome, about cavitation. He knew that there were diseases in the mouth that have profound effects on the body.
Dr. Pompa:
Just to finish off the root canal conversation, these root canals—I think it was Boyd Haley who did—he had all of the dentists sending him root canals, even non-painful root canals. They were sending root canals. In the study, they found anaerobes, anaerobic bacteria, nasty bacteria, the ones that make you sick in every root canal. I mean, they all had it. It’s because there’s all these…
Dr. Curatola:
It’s a perfect anaerobic environment.
Dr. Pompa:
It is, but there’s all these tubules that they get in, not to overcomplicate it.
Dr. Curatola:
To educate those who are watching this podcast about root canal, the concept itself of saving the tooth was something that dentists always want to do. We always want to save teeth.
Dr. Pompa:
Rightfully so.
Dr. Curatola:
I know some endodontists that are artists at getting the canal instrumented and sealed at the apex. Here’s the problem. The problem is there are thousands of lateral—a tooth is basically like a sponge. There are thousands of dentinal tubules. As a matter of fact, you can tell…
Dr. Pompa:
Miles of them.
Dr. Curatola:
Even though these are microscopic tubules, bacteria can be stacked two and three across one of these tubules, and there are thousands of them in the tooth. You can’t really sterilize a tooth and put this inorganic filling material in, what you call gut [approacher], and allow this to remain without some sort of—any bacteria in those lateral tubules, they don’t often die off. In fact, they set up a little party. Now anaerobes don’t want to be anywhere near oxygen or blood supply, so you’re really sealed off from oxygen and blood supply. What happens is you get a powerhouse of anaerobic activity. Second thing is is that very often what happens in these situations is most dentists can’t sterilize even the central canal. Most dentists hit obstructions in this canal, and they fill short or they overfill. You have all these areas of chronic inflammation.
As a matter of fact, I was on the phone with the head of oral pathology at New York University just a few weeks ago. She was saying to me—I often biopsy what I find inside cavitations and try and get a picture. There was a foreign material that was in a cavitation that I was treating around a former root canal area, and there was just a giant void in the jaw. It was actually a packing material that was still in the jaw. Then a topic of root canal came up, and she said, “Dr. Curatola, I have never seen a biopsy of tissue around a root canal that didn’t show signs of chronic inflammation.” She said, “We call—we joke around our pathology office. We call root canal the voodoo that you do.” I laughed. I said, “What was that, the voodoo that you do?”
Dr. Pompa:
They do.
Dr. Curatola:
The reality is it—I have changed my position on root canal therapy as an optimal treatment. As a matter of fact, the dental literature and the dental research is now showing that dental implants—and we could talk about that because I see the move into ceramic dental implants an important one, especially metal implants, peri-implantitis, all kinds of problems but a new study from Germany showing that the new 5G cell net actually eats the implants.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you mean from a cellphone.
Dr. Curatola:
Cellphone, 5G network is a—do your research on 5G, everyone. It has a lot of major health problems. There’s been no biologic studies on the effects of 5G. They are coming out now, and it is not good of what we’re finding out about 5G. Anyway, getting back, the problems of chronic inflammation, whether it’s from around a root canal, whether it’s from a cavitation, whether it’s from gum disease, these are all areas of chronic low-grade inflammation that has very potent effects systemically.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about solution here. We’re talking about cavitation for teeth who are extracted, heals over, creates a hidden infection. Twenty-five years later, it creates a problem. Saw it yesterday in the chair. I mean, here was—I just have to show this picture because there was a few problems, obviously. That hole that you’re looking at right there, that’s where the root canal came out, Gerry. That’s what they’re seeing. Let me show them…
Dr. Curatola:
Oh, I want to go back to that picture.
Dr. Pompa:
Go ahead. Show them.
Dr. Curatola:
This is what the bone looks like. I don’t know if you could see that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, they can.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s what the bone looks like. When I removed this tooth yesterday, the bone wasn’t a healthy color. The bone around that root canal that had infection around both of the apexes and there was a fracture in one of the roots, the bone was brown. Often, I’ll remove a root canal where not only does the root look a horrific color because of necrosis. It’s the only area of the body—and believe me, I’m in the business of saving teeth, but if I see something that could be a source of infection not just for the mouth but for the entire body, that needs to be eliminated. Root canal is the only procedure done in medicine and dentistry where you leave something dead…
Dr. Pompa:
Dead, yeah, right.
Dr. Curatola:
…in the human body. There is a natural process of necrosis that does go on. A lot of endodontist—and I’ve had a lot of heated debates with friends of mine who are endodontists who claim that, well, there is a peripheral circulation to the roots from the tiny ligaments that are attached to feed the bone. That’s not nearly enough to keep that root from necrosing.
Dr. Pompa:
This was her cavitation, so that was a root canal.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s behind the [00:38:09].
Dr. Pompa:
He broke through with laser. What you’re looking at is the top of the bone. Then right through it is where he broke through into that dark hole. That’s the cavitation right there.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s not even the size of it.
Dr. Pompa:
No, it’s what’s underneath.
Dr. Curatola:
What I do is I access it. The lesion is actually this large. I access from here. I just need access with the laser to disinfect and clean it out and then use PRF and some graphing material…
Dr. Pompa:
Which we’re going to show you.
Dr. Curatola:
…to basically get this lesion to heal.
Dr. Pompa:
It was interesting because you said this girl had gut problems her whole life, diagnosed with Lyme, as I said, low immunity, etc. No wonder she wasn’t healing. No one got to the cause, but that was also in the meridian of her small intestine, her colon.
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah, gut, gut and heart. Your wisdom teeth, everyone, energetically on a meridian chart are connected to your gut, small intestine, and heart. I’ve had people with irregular—they were having conductivity issues. Actually, I had a patient who was scheduled for a cardiac ablation. That’s where they go in and burn these fibers that are causing fibrillation to the heart. They burn, ablate and cauterize this tissue to stop the irregular heartbeat, scheduled for that. Patient was scheduled for that, had a huge—similar to that one, a huge cavitation and treated the cavitation. He began to have the abnormal—the arrhythmia reversed itself, so the body can heal. Our bodies can heal.
Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. All right, let’s talk solution because a lot of changes have been made, and I’m going to show you a video here in a moment of my wife. I tell people now laser, to me, has taken this to a whole other level. The old days even done properly they were using just some injected ozone, which is fine, but 50, 60% of these things a year later, two years later would still go bad. There’s been some changes. Laser is one of them. Something called PRF using bone graft, we’re going to show some of these things. All of that has made this much, much better.
Dr. Curatola:
Absolutely. Cavitation surgery, a lot of it originated in Europe. Here we were never taught this in dental school. Some oral surgeons used to go in. Really this whole seemingly epidemic of cavitation is only because we’ve become aware of it. We were sort of in the dark.
We have panoramic x-rays. Cone beam ten years ago wasn’t really very common place. A lot of times oral surgeons would be looking to put an implant in. We used to actually classify the bone. That classification came around later when implants started becoming popular.
We had type one bone is like plywood. Type two bone was like pine. Type three was like balsa wood. Type four was like wispy nothing like this void. They would say oh, that’s type four bone.
Well, isn’t it interesting that the type four bone is in the shape of a wisdom tooth that was extracted? It just happened to form like the wisdom tooth did. Then we started realizing—wait a minute. Then G.V. Black spoke about this. There’s a lot of literature about this.
This is not something that’s new. It’s not something that we just discovered. It’s just something that we’re better able to diagnose. That’s the first thing. The second thing is the way they used to do this is they would take a dental drill and take away—often there’s like an eggshell of cortical bone that grows in there.
Dr. Pompa:
We kind of saw that in the picture.
Dr. Curatola:
Even in the picture we’ll show of Merily here, she had a little thin bone and then just hollow, like a hollow cave. What they used to do is they used to take a dental drill to the jaw, drill out this whole thing with a dental drill, which is terribly traumatic. Any time you stick a dental drill on jaw bone, on living tissue like that, there’s a huge inflammatory response.
Dr. Pompa:
Now you’re doing that with laser.
Dr. Curatola:
Laser is ingenious because the laser—there’s only certain lasers that do work that you can use on hard tissue and soft tissue. This laser, the Waterlase iPlus by Biolase, was being used. I was using it to regenerate bone around periodontally-involved teeth. It’s a wavelength of light that stimulates what we call mitotic division of the osteoblasts.
In English that means it stimulates the cells that make new bone to divide. When you get mitotic division, you get cell division. You grow the bone back. I use my hands a lot because I’m Italian. Getting the bone to grow back, here’s the great thing about using the laser; much less trauma.
Dr. Pompa:
You know what, I don’t even know that [00:43:25].
Dr. Curatola:
I have patients come to me, and the next day they are not swollen. I think the combination of that and using the platelet-rich fibrin from their blood—
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to see that. We take the blood. It’s basically like putting stem cells in there, to make it simple.
Dr. Curatola:
I draw a couple of vials of blood from your arm and then we spin it down on a special centrifuge that separates the plasma red blood cells. Then there is something in the middle like a yellow jelly that’s in your blood called platelet-rich fibrin or PRF. It’s got platelets, but it is loaded with—we found that it’s a rich source of mesenchymal stem cells.
Stem cells are wonderful, as you know. You’ve done a lot of research in the stem cell area. It’s got some growth factors, everything good. It’s a biologic tissue from your body that’s going into another part of your body to help and heal. That’s wonderful.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s brilliant. I say if they’re not doing that, don’t get it done. Make sure you go to a dentist that’s doing that procedure. A video is worth 10,000 words. This is my wife, Merily. You’re going to get to see the bone graft.
You’re going to get to see the PRF. You’re going to get to see the laser, and you’re going to see all that. Then we’ll come back. Then you can make some comments. We’ll actually show you the before and after of my wife, Merily.
Gerry, we went in because we saw a little area here on the cone beam. You can point it out right back there. We will go back and remind you of what the first one looked like. As you can see, there’s a lot of it.
Dr. Curatola:
The reason why we like more support here is because this [00:45:21]. When you’re this close to the sinus, there is something called oroantral communication, communication from the mouth to the sinus; infection in the mouth, infection in the sinus. Very often we see these. Sometimes you’ll have a sinus infection that will feel like a toothache. Sometimes you’ll have a toothache, but it’s really a sinus infection.
Dr. Pompa:
When we jump from this, we’re going to show you these side by side. This is the new one. You can see the sinus. You’ll see on the other one about a centimeter of inflammation and now you don’t. This is all bone except for this area we were concerned about.
Dr. Curatola:
Go down to where that blue line is. I don’t know if you can see that on here. Where the blue line is is the area that we really want to kind of clean out and fill in with the platelet-rich fibrin, which we took from her blood.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll show you that in a second.
Dr. Curatola:
Also, with bone grafting material that we need to place in there, we’re going to be doing that right now. I can show you the material right here. This is actually what platelet-rich fibrin looks like.
Dr. Pompa:
We spun down her blood.
Dr. Curatola:
We spun down her blood. We get this material, which is almost like a yellow jelly. There’s a little bit of blood with it, but a yellow jelly. It’s loaded with the [00:46:40] stem cells, and it’s loaded with [00:46:44]. What we find is that this is an excellent biological grafting material that is readily accepted by the body. It comes from the body.
This is an excellent way of stimulating regeneration. We’re using it in bone. We’re using it in gum tissue. We’re using it even in teeth. We can use platelet-rich fibrin. Here’s another batch of platelet-rich fibrin mixed with a little bit of allographic bone. Allographic bone is human bone. You use it.
The bone grafting material is strictly a scaffold for your body to make bone cells to grow from. That scaffolding helps fill in and support this area. As your body makes bone, the grafting material reabsorbs and disappears. What people don’t understand is we’re not sticking bone in there and that’s the bone. We’re actually assisting the body to heal itself. That’s what fixes the gap.
Dr. Pompa:
The old way of doing it is we would open these cavitations and we would inject some ozone in there, hit it with some ozone. A year later, which is where we are on her, 50% of them go bad.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s right. I like to say that the old way of treating jaw osteonecrosis or jaw cavitations was sort of like a right church, wrong pew. There’s a right church, but it can be a problem. [00:48:20] left alone. We have found Lyme spirochetes in there, mold, Candida. All kinds of different pathogens have been identified in these areas in the bone.
When these areas are opened up and cleaned out and we use ozone, all that is good. Using ozone as cleaning is good. The problem is there wasn’t an effective regeneration of the teeth that was there. What we want to do is regenerate. How do we regenerate? We use this laser.
Dr. Pompa:
Which you just did on her; you used the laser.
Dr. Curatola:
We just used this laser. This laser debrides the area. Then it does something called bone decortication. Bone decortication is a way of stimulating the cells to make new bone grow back. It stimulates mitotic division of the osteoplasts to grow new bone.
Dr. Pompa:
I always say that this new method, number one, is the laser. Number two is using the PRF with some of the grafting material. Now we’re at about a 98% success rate a year later without re-infection.
Dr. Curatola:
It’s a little over 98%. Remember, the key with any lesion in the jaw is to get it to heal, get it to grow back. You could kill everything that’s in there, but what you really want to do is promote regeneration. Regenerative dentistry, regenerative medicine is the most exciting thing. The advances in laser and stem cells, as you know, even generating [00:50:00] cells like you talk about in some other programs, all of this is the future of medicine, regeneration.
Dr. Pompa:
We did a Facebook Live and we had a gal kind enough in this chair right here an hour ago that was so sick. No one ever [00:50:19], diagnosed with Lyme disease, got problems for most of her life. All these years nobody went upstream. What we found was horrific. What you found—I just happened to be in the surgery here—
Dr. Curatola:
One of the largest cavitations—
Dr. Pompa:
It was horrible.
Dr. Curatola:
One of the largest cavitations I’ve seen.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Spirochetes in there, black stuff, these things that just are unidentifiable came out. It was a sad case because she also had a metal crown over amalgam that you said you pulled out about three thermometers full of mercury out of.
Dr. Curatola:
Two-thirds of the tooth was amalgam, which is 52% mercury. Underneath another metal crown of a dissimilar metal, so it creates galvanism. Galvanism actually cranks mercury out of the amalgam.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll talk more about that on this show, as a matter of fact. This was a year ago. We just wanted to do a cone beam just to make sure she was healing. Obviously, we want to be better safe than sorry.
You saw that little [00:51:25] and said let’s just go in and take a look at it. You stimulated the healing again. We’ll put PRF in there again. At least there was no infection. This will speed up the healing.
Dr. Curatola:
Three things; her sinus look so much better.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re showing before and after here on the show.
Dr. Curatola:
Sinus looks so much better. She had a lot of healthy bone there. In the area where she didn’t have any, the only reason why I wanted to put in some additional and clean it out, disinfect again, and put more PRF and graft is because we want to support the sinus membrane. We don’t want there to be a lack of bony support under the membrane.
Dr. Pompa:
Last time it was a mess. We’re going to learn more. Stay tuned. I want to tell you about one of our sponsors, CytoDetox. Podcasts cost money. There’s a lot of production going around this. We are grateful to have CytoDetox as one of the sponsors.
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Dr. Pompa:
All right, Gerry, any comments on what we just saw?
Dr. Curatola:
Yeah. What I wanted to say, I want to talk about bone grafting for a minute. People have a misunderstanding about bone grafting. All bone graft, we have four different types. We have human bone from your own body, which is a painful thing to take bone from the body sometimes. We’ve actually done [00:53:31] grafts and all kinds of things, so bone from your own body. You have human bone, which people are like oh, a cadaver. Well, you take the kidneys. You take the lungs. You take the heart.
Dr. Pompa:
You take blood. You get a blood transfusion or blood from somebody else.
Dr. Curatola:
There is human bone, which actually tends to work best, either your own or human bone. Then we have synthetic bone. Then we have animal bone, often pig or cow. There’s porcine and bovine.
Dr. Pompa:
Which one do you like?
Dr. Curatola:
I like the human bone. Here’s the thing about the graft. There are cells in our bodies that make bone called osteoblasts. There are cells that remodel or take bone away called osteoclasts. Any imbalance in the osteoblast and osteoclastic activity, you end up with things like osteoporosis. You end up with osteopenia.
There’s all kinds of problems. The bone that’s grafted is actually a scaffold. It does not stay. It’s a scaffold for the osteoblasts to kind of grow and make bone on.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re putting the stem cells in there around this scaffolding. Now we’re able to fill in the hole, the void, so to speak.
Dr. Curatola:
In one of those dishes with Merily we had pure PRF. Then we had PRF mixed with some human bone.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I saw that.
Dr. Curatola:
That is the bone that acts as a scaffold for Merily’s body to make new bone and grow over.
Dr. Pompa:
You packed it in that deep hole. You saw these deep holes. I showed you on the video. You’re packing it in there now and then you stitched it over. Now that forms.
Dr. Curatola:
What we do is we’ll use—
Dr. Pompa:
He packs it in those deep holes there that you’re seeing there as well as that big hole.
Dr. Curatola:
There are times where we don’t need to use the bone grafting when it’s a smaller—in some single root extractions we can just put PRF, and that’s enough to stimulate the bone for the osteoblasts to use that. Then there are times where we will use the grafting material. What I want people to understand is we’re helping the body heal itself so that graft material becomes a scaffold. The osteoclasts eat away at that old bone. That reabsorbs. What you’re left with is new bone that your body made.
Dr. Pompa:
I get this a lot. I went to my biological dentist. He injected that with ozone, and it killed all the infection. Now I’m okay. The pain is gone. Hey, that does feel better. Even I feel better. What’s the problem with that?
Dr. Curatola:
The problem with that is ozone is wonderful as a very—what I love about ozone, it has so many wonderful properties.
Dr. Pompa:
Your laser produces ozone, by the way.
Dr. Curatola:
The laser generates ozonated water. We used ozone gas, and we use separate ozone water too. The key to think about here is ozone is not magic. Ozone converts to peroxide. It has a wonderful effect.
Another good thing about ozone is it brings blood supply back. It helps to open the blood supply. There’s this little laser you’ve got. When we see blood, we’re very happy. Blood is a life force. It’s an important part of the healing process.
We want to bring blood back to this dead, necrotic area that didn’t really have a blood supply. Ozone has its place. The problem about using ozone alone is you just basically nuke everything. You bring a little circulation, but you don’t regenerate everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the example I love to give. It’s like you can chase the bears out of the cave; as long as there’s a cave, more bears are going to end up in the cave. That’s the bottom line. You have to get rid of the caves, and then the bears don’t come back.
Dr. Curatola:
The name of the game here, Dan, is regeneration. We want regeneration. Does ozone have a place? Absolutely, but I’ve seen people—this is an interesting point. I’ve had many patients come to me who have had several cavitational surgeries in areas where the bone looks like Swiss cheese. The bone has not healed.
They’ve gone back and the biologic dentist is saying let me do another ozone injection. Let me do another ozone here, ozone there. Ozone also nukes the biofilm. You need a balance. I do believe in ozone. I do use ozone, but I use it responsibly.
A lot of biologic dentists are taught use ozone. They’re ozonating all the gums every time the patient comes in because they have a little gingivitis. Gingivitis is a biofilm imbalance. You don’t want to use napalm and scorched earth policy. What you really want to do is promote rebalancing. That’s why I developed this.
Dr. Pompa:
I use it every day, by the way. It’s on our website.
Dr. Curatola:
This toothpaste is prebiotic. We have vitamin K2 and B3. We have CoQ10 and vitamin C and vitamin E were the first to put on it.
Dr. Pompa:
Here’s what I love about it. You can actually eat it.
Dr. Curatola:
It’s a dietary supplement. The reason why we found gums stopped bleeding in a matter of days, the reason why we found that you get close to a 70% reduction of gingival inflammation in 2 weeks with double-blind clinical research we did in Europe and the United States is because we are fostering microbial homeostasis. We’re not nuking all the bacteria. We’re actually getting the same bacteria—this was the biggest breakthrough understanding that I had in my research in developing this.
By the way, toothpaste is regulated as cosmetic, so you can’t make these claims, but we can show lots of pictures. Unless we want to go through an IND. You have to file a new drug application. It’s called an NDA. If you eat this much of commercial toothpaste, you have to call poison control.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s true, fluoride alone.
Dr. Curatola:
When you understand the science of the microbiome, you realize that commercial products like Listerine, Colgate, all of these other products kill, kill, kill. The natural companies came around and said why don’t we use tea tree oil instead of triclosan? Tea tree oil is just as toxic to the microbiome as triclosan is.
Dr. Pompa:
Most of the natural toothpaste out there, they have these nasty killers in that wipe out the microbiome, which also infects the gut. Let’s tell Merily’s story here very briefly. If you saw the last show, it was a year ago. My wife had this sinus drainage coming down. She started getting abnormal cells in her nose that weren’t healing. It started worrying me.
I said, “What side did you have your wisdom teeth out on?” “The right.” If you know my wife, if I tell her right, she goes left. If you go left, she goes right. That’s true.
I’m the dumb one here. I believed her. For the first time I believed. Okay, it was the right. No, it was the left, exactly where her drainage was.
Dr. Curatola:
Whenever my wife corrects me and she says, “Honey, make a right,” I’m like okay, it’s the left.
Dr. Pompa:
When she tells me it’s on the right, I should have said left. What was I thinking? Bottom line was we ended up getting a cone beam. Let me just show you what we found. I’ll have you explain it.
Let me see if we can see this. I want to bring it down to this one. I think we can see that. Go ahead. That’s her sinus that you’re looking at.
Dr. Curatola:
Here’s the area where her wisdom tooth was. All of this black here is empty. This whole area, about the size of the end of my finger, is all cavitation. This whole area of cavitational loss is right there where that was. What’s interesting in addition to that is, whatever the heck is going on in there, she sure has a lot of schmutz in her sinus.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a centimeter of schmutz.
Dr. Curatola:
Just go to the other side.
Dr. Pompa:
There’s the other side.
Dr. Curatola:
Can you see the other sinus here?
Dr. Pompa:
You can see there’s no inflammation around there.
Dr. Curatola:
Then you go here and her sinus is a bit of a mess. This is a good shot. Another angle of her sinus—actually, we can show it up here, Dan. Let me just show you right here. She has areas where the congestion in her sinus is almost [01:02:39].
Dr. Pompa:
You’re looking at a cone beam.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s a cross-section.
Dr. Pompa:
This is all a cone beam.
Dr. Curatola:
That’s a good point. The good thing about a cone beam is that we can look at this from many different angles. For example, you can go down here. Now I’ll show you a cross-section up on the top, so where this blue line is.
If we go up here, you’ll actually see black, black, black, which is all void in this area between the dotted line, the solid line, and the dotted line. That area is all just empty. Right above it, look at all the congestion in her sinus here.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, massive. That’s what was happening to her.
Dr. Curatola:
She had to have a constant postnasal drip, what we call PND.
Dr. Pompa:
Now let’s show the one we did yesterday. We did another cone beam a year later approximately.
Dr. Curatola:
I actually talked about this. This is a really important point. Now this area has healed. If I bring this over here—
Dr. Pompa:
What we were doing, there was a little void. He went in to check it.
Dr. Curatola:
This is not black. This is fill. If you remember, Merily flew shortly after and we took a cone beam. Most of it’s filled in. She has a little area here that still has not filled in.
Dr. Pompa:
Let me make sure I got that. Show it again.
Dr. Curatola:
Can you see this little area here? Look at her sinus—clean. Sinus clean and even up here if we look here. Let’s see if I can bring her sinuses back.
Sinus is pretty clean, especially there. [01:04:20] in the sinus she had a little something there, but nothing down where that third molar was. I want to make a point about this. There’s an area here. This bothered me.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s when you went in yesterday, which you saw. You saw the video.
Dr. Curatola:
We can talk about that right now. This is very interesting because the success of the healing response, what I’ve come to learn is I have a lot of patients who travel into me to have these procedures done. The most important thing is I have to ground you for a little while. You can’t jump on an airplane because they found a major contraindication to healing, especially in these delicate areas where bone is healing. You’re up near the sinuses. You really can’t be in a pressurized cabin. I don’t want you flying or doing scuba diving.
Dr. Pompa:
I was stubborn. I had to go do a seminar, the whole thing. On the flight I got this massive headache that was coming from my neck. This was two days after I got cavitation surgery.
Dr. Curatola:
Way too soon.
Dr. Pompa:
It ended up literally going into my neck. I tell that story because that’s how I got the stem cells.
Dr. Curatola:
Anyone who is going to or traveling to a biologic doctor who is doing cavitation surgery, you cannot fly. You cannot fly. Of course, I grounded Merily. Let’s talk about that.
Yesterday I went into that little area. I was intrigued because I was like that should have been solid. That should have healed perfectly. I went in there and there was a small amount of bone. What I did is I put PRF and I packed some more grafting material to give her a nice, solid base of bone in what’s called that third molar tuberosity area.
Her sinus is right above that. I wanted to give her some protection and some support for her sinus. The important thing, again, is no flying, no scuba diving, and really it’s important to understand that the healing process right after the procedure is done is very important.
Dr. Pompa:
If it’s a big cavitation, how long would you keep them here if they flew in?
Dr. Curatola:
If it’s not near the sinus, generally patients can come in midweek and leave by the Monday after.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve had people from all over the world come and see you. As a matter of fact, every time I’m here, I love it because I get to actually meet them.
Dr. Curatola:
Everybody who flew in over Christmas got to see the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. I had tickets for everybody for the show. I’m like go to a show. Have a nice time. Go to some restaurants.
What do you call it when you go to Mexico for destination medical surgery or medical treatment? It’s a great thing if you can relax, enjoy, and take a peaceful trip home. I like to see patients generally three days after when they’re healing. I generally follow up by Skype. I’m able to actually have a Skype consult, one of which I’m going to have a postoperative consult today with a patient who was referred by you and who was treated [01:07:44].
Dr. Pompa:
I get to meet all of clients. I have clients all over the world. I get to meet them here. I love it. Let’s talk about you’re expanding. We have an exciting thing that’s happening. Tell them.
Dr. Curatola:
This is the most exciting thing. The wall between medicine and dentistry is coming down. The health centers, the wellness centers of the future are going to bring—what Dan and I do are two of the most important aspects of helping people get well. That is the oral systemic link. It’s dental and detox.
Look at this; there are patients who are toxic. Their functional medicine doctors are like you’re loaded with metals. Eliminating heavy metals from the body is not just a science, but an art. You have gotten that down because you lived it. You lived that, and that’s what I love that you’ve helped so many people, Dan. You’ve put them on a protocol that is personalized for their particular circumstances.
That involves not hitting it with a hammer where if you try to get the mercury out of the rest of you, you may get mercury out of your mouth, but if you’ve been found by your functional medicine doctor, your biologic doctor—I never know what term to use anymore. I use biologic a lot because it’s easier. Everything is biological. If your biologic physician has said you’re showing up in examination with heavy metals in the diagnosis, I highly recommend that you follow Dr. Pompa’s protocol. He is intuitive. He is experienced.
What I love that you do is you don’t address this in a heavy-handed way. Mercury is a very insidious metal. I find a lot of nickel, by the way. A lot of people have old porcelain fused to metal crowns, which is basically a metal thimble with porcelain on top.
Just this morning when I was walking in my office, every crown I removed from the patient’s mouth with metal, I analyze the metal. I’m actually going to publish on it because I’m finding a high number of crowns that were done in the 1980s when the price of gold went very high, the dental laboratories were using non precious metals. They’re up to 77% nickel. That’s like pure nickel. Many times a lazy technique that dentists have is they make the crown and leave the amalgam in the tooth.
Dr. Pompa:
Here’s one, that poor gal yesterday. I don’t even know if you can see that. That shiny part in there is amalgam. There was a crown that covered this big amalgam. He said enough mercury for three thermometers, and it was covered by metal. That’s called galvanism. It creates more mercury vapor. It poisons you basically. It’s an electrical current, so now you’re a battery.
Dr. Curatola:
Galvanism, what it’s been found to do, especially with metals or metal like amalgam, it cranks the mercury out of the mouth. It off-gases more because of the electrical current created by the galvanism. That’s one thing. The center in East Hampton is opening in June. We’re very excited about it. We’re incorporating so many wonderful therapies that have shown great promise in helping people.
Dr. Pompa:
At the end of June here. We’re bringing out all this good stuff together.
Dr. Curatola:
Fran Drescher is supposed to get—my good friend, Fran, if you’re listening, she is amazing. She is a cancer survivor, and she has become a wellness activist and using her celebrity position to promote wellness and taking charge. She said, “If people want something to stop, they should use their consumer purchasing power to get bad products to go away. Stop buying them.”
Dr. Pompa:
I couldn’t agree more there. Detox done right is critical. I think that’s another mistake people make is they get things like amalgam fillings out. Then they go okay, that’s it. The mercury is in the brain.
One of the things that my passion is is teaching people to process. One of my pet peeves is I did mercury detox for three months. Meanwhile, 25 years, 30 years this mercury was going into your brain. It’s three months. You have to learn the process, and that’s what I tell my doctors.
Teach people the process. Are my docs listening? We teach people the process. Then they do it long enough to actually matter. We covered a heck of a lot of material.
Dr. Curatola:
We sure did.
Dr. Pompa:
I love you, man. I could hang out here all day and look at this stuff. As a matter of fact, I’m ready to do a surgery now.
Dr. Curatola:
Let’s go.
Dr. Pompa:
I would love to. That was fun though yesterday. I got teared up in there several times because I was watching all this money, time, and heartbreak, and I was watching it change.
Dr. Curatola:
Dentists out there, my dream is to take good dentists—so biologic dentistry is not a specialty. I’m a very confident, very good restorative dentist. I do beautiful cosmetic dentistry; all that is well and good. Just put a biologic cap on it.
One of my biggest regrets was in 2006 I gave a naming gift to New York University for a clinical research wing. It’s the Curatola Wing for Clinical Research. That was to promote translational research. I was doing oral microbiome research. I was passionate about getting greater understanding of our microbial composition and what we’re made of.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s here, by the way.
Dr. Curatola:
I wish I had instead given the money to open a center for integrative dentistry so that dentists could start to put this biologic cap on and take the most talented, graduating fourth year dental students and train them to think biologically, looking at root causes of disease and not treating the symptoms. Don’t look at the patient as a walking tooth. Look at the patient as this living, amazing life force that’s in a tent of the body, as Paul calls it. The reality is that we have this divine God-given ability to self-regulate and heal. Understanding that and just understanding that mindset, to be able to look in patients’ mouths and be able to diagnose toxicity, they’d be able to look at the root causes of disease in the mouth and work in tandem with doctors like you.
Dr. Pompa:
Root Cause movie, we’ve mentioned the movie, Root Cause. If you want to see it, it was taken off Netflix. It’s rootcausemovie.com. Ashley, you can put that up when we actually spoke about the movie as well on the bottom. You should see it. Share this episode with many. This is a life changer, man. Thank you, Gerry.
Dr. Curatola:
Thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s go check my bite.
Ashley:
Well, that’s it for this week. The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you would like to purchase some of the supplements mentioned on this show, please visit the site asseenonchtv.com and use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. Again, that’s asseenonchtv.com; use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. As always, thanks for listening.
362: Discovering Upstream Stressors: Breast Implants, Mold, Metals, and Hidden Infections
