Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Airway First, the podcast from
the Children's Airway First Foundation. I'm your host, Rebecca Downey. My guest today is Dr. Michael
Gale, a world-renowned inventor, lecturer, NYU professor, and the author of the best-selling
book, Gasp, Airway Health, The Hidden Path to Wellness. Known for his breakthrough work in TMJ,
Airway Center Disorders, Sleep Apnea, Sleep Disorders, and Chronicetic Treatments, Dr. Gale
has pioneered and coined Airway-centric dentistry and is transforming lives at a scale by helping
people feel better and breathe better. Dr. Gale has been featured in The New York Times,
The Chicago Tribune, Fox News, CBS, CNN, Women's Day, The Globe, and ABC News, just to name a few.
A board member and chair of the Development Committee for the Airway Revolution Foundation,
a co-founder for the Foundation for Airway Health, the American Academy of Physiological Medicine
and Dentistry, and the Gale Institute. Dr. Gale was an entrepreneur, a mentor to many,
and an inspiration to all, with a mission to transform and save millions of lives through
Airway's centric dentistry. Dr. Gale is a graduate of Tufts University and Columbia University,
and is the son of Dr. Harold Gale, who pioneered TMJ treatments and linking it to the rest of the
body. You can find out more about Dr. Gale at galbscenter.com. And now, here's my interview with
Dr. Michael Gale. All right, thank you for joining us on the show today, Dr. Gale. I really appreciate it.
Rebecca, it's great to be here. Thank you. Thank you. So let's just jump right in.
For everybody that doesn't know, your dad is Harold Gale, who pioneered the treatment for TMJ,
and you've spent your career building on this and have connected that to Airway and Sleek.
So let's just talk a little bit about how you made this connection and how it's changed the way
you approached dentistry. Yeah, so in 1990, I got exposed to, I had just taken over the program at NYU,
the TMJ and Facial Pain Program, and we brought in Jonathan Parker, and then maybe a month later,
we brought in Wayne Halstrom. They were dentists that were working at that time with sleep apnea
and snoring. And they inspired me and they showed me how the jaws were related to the Airway.
No one spoke about Airway, actually. They told me how they had figured out and come up with the fact
that the upper and lower jaws, actually, by putting them in a different position, we could
maintain an open Airway. And so I took my dad's work that had brought the jaws down and forward.
You see, dentistry had been pulling the jaws back, had been retracting the face and retracting the
jaws for about 75 years. And what we can talk about, this has been happening for the last 300
years or so, to a large degree, for epigenetic reasons, so environmental reasons, let's say.
And soft diet. So I think my dad would go to these conferences on fatigue,
and he would say that when he fixed the TMJ, he got rid, he allowed them to have more energy.
And he thought it was because he had gotten rid of their pain, and they were able to probably sleep
better, but he really attributed it to his work with the TMJ. And what my dad didn't, I think,
realize at the time, but he was really, really one of the first Airway dentists that he and Bill
Farah and those few dentists, Barney Janklison, that were actually pulling the jaw down and forward,
were in effect opening the Airway. Okay. And it wasn't until I got a CAT scan, a comb beam scan,
CBCT, in, let's say, 2010, that I was able to image and I was able to show that by bringing the jaw
forward, I could get a double, a triple, a quadruple the size of the Airway. And then around the same
time, we started coming up, Dr. Remers, John Remers came up with the first home sleep test.
Okay. The two technologies that we got in the last, let's say, 15 years were the imaging,
where we could finally see the Airway and measure the Airway. And then we could also measure your
sleep. And before that, it was a $5,000 test, you had to sleep overnight, you had to get all the
electrodes wired up to your brain, and a lot of people were not doing that. And so the advent
of home sleep testing in the dental office being given out by the dentist was a huge, huge step
forward because for the first time, not only could we visualize the Airway, but we could measure
the quality of a patient's sleep, how many times they stopped breathing, their oxygen every second
of the night, whether they slept on the right, the left, the back, the stomach, and actually start
to measure how much deep sleep they were getting and how much REM sleep. Wow. And so you mentioned
the CBT. So for people that don't understand or have never, it's still kind of a new phrase.
You know what? It's still really new. So when I say CBT, I'm talking about basically a three-dimensional
scan the dentist take, it's about 1 40th to 1 50th amount of radiation.
And we get the results within five minutes form almost immediately, we get the results.
We send everything out to radiologists, but it's just the most beautiful images of not
only the TM joints and of the face, but of the Airway, the teeth infections, you know,
what we can talk about early systemic later. But because we're taking cuts through the bone,
we can often find infections that regular two-dimensional x-rays would never ever see.
So you go to a dentist, they say you don't have a problem, but we're able to cut the tooth in
sections like the $10 million machines do. We can do the same thing for a fraction of the price.
Wow. That's amazing. And it's not, you know, I've learned this from other dentists, it's not everywhere.
Right. I mean, so this is, is it a cost thing or is this a training thing or a little above?
Well, dentists have been taught to be, my father taught me dentists look like this. Dentists,
you know, dentists are looking to focus on a tooth on a margin on microns. And I'm trying to,
I'm an advocate of the big field. So I have a very big field view. It should be the standard
of care in every office. It will become the standard of care because if we want dentistry
to move into towards children's health, if we want dentistry to move towards health and wellness,
and of course, all the, all the healthcare specialties are supposed to be about health and wellness.
Right. So we're not supposed to be repairmen. We're not supposed to be fixing teeth.
What dentistry is really about is supposed to be furthering and enhancing our wellness.
Okay. And I'm a big, I'm a big spokesperson for taking dentistry into that next era,
or maybe back to the era where maybe some of us started and people like Weston Price
and people that have looked at nutrition and Dr. Barkley. And there were, there've been others
along the way that have, that have, that have talked about this, but it's never really been
widely embodied that dentistry, and we can talk about some of the things we're able to do now
dentistry. But I, when I went into this field because of my father, I thought it was pretty cool
to be able to get rid of people's headaches and pain and change so fast. But I never imagined
that I'd be able to do what I can do now that I'm able to open the airway.
Yeah. Yeah. And for those listening, I'll put a link to a podcast episode we did many months back
with Dr. Becky and she digs into Weston Price. So, you know, people can, some great information
in that segment. And this kind of leads me into something that I heard you say actually recently
on a YouTube video that airway trumps everything else and dentistry,
which to me, you know, with somebody with a dental background, that's a pretty big statement to make.
I mean, why?
Well, you know, it's for, for people like me, it's, you know, it's fairly obvious, but
when we say that airway trumps everything, so you can go two weeks without eating.
You can go maybe four or five days without drinking water.
You can go maybe four minutes with that breathing, with that oxygen, with that air. And so,
I believe the reason we have teeth, the teeth is the scaffolding that supports the airway.
And because the dental profession, because we treat the upper and lower jaws and because the tongue
and the soft palate are attached to the jaws, basically 50% of the airway are things that the
dentist encounters and works with every second of the day, every patient. And then the nose,
the other 25% of the airway, which is the nose, is controlled by the upper jaw. So,
the top of the upper jaw is the bottom of the nose. It's the same bone. And so, the dental
profession really are the ones, and, you know, I came up with airway-centric dentistry, how we
hinted in an eye, talk about airway and airway-centric, and we wrote the book, Gas. But the reason
that it trumps everything is that when you breathe and you sleep, the way that you breathe at night
determines systemic inflammation. So, in other words, when you stop breathing or you don't
breathe so well, two things can happen. You can get drops in your oxygen, hypoxia, you can get your
oxygen to goes down, or your sleep gets fragmented or disturbed. You don't get good, you don't get
good, you don't get into deep sleep. Both of these can lead to systemic inflammation,
which is basically aging. It's aging, it's heart disease, it's Alzheimer's. And in addition to
systemic inflammation, when you get hypoxia and sleep fragmentation, you get oxidative stress,
you start resting, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction, which means your blood vessels,
like hardening of the arteries, your blood vessels don't dilate the way they're supposed to.
You're not getting nitric oxide. And so your blood vessels, when they don't dilate,
you're not getting, you get ischemia, you don't get blood to the brain and you don't get blood to
the heart. In addition to that, your sympathetic nervous system, your fight or flight nervous
system gets upregulated. You get increased sympathetic activation, which leads to high blood
pressure, which leads to more cortisol, which has very negative stress on your liver. And so if you
really look, you just think about it, that when you manage the airway, now that I manage the airway,
I'm able to get rid of people's anxiety. Because look, the patient's being choked,
the patient, the patient's being choked 100, 200 times a night. I'm not going to tell you what
time someone's going to come in and choke you, or they're going to pinch you in the nose. You're
going to get panic attacks, anxiety, depression. And by the way, that type of depression is drug
resistant very often. Really? Yeah. So those people out there where they try all these different
antidepressants and they don't work, when you open the airway, all of a sudden, either you
don't need the antidepressants or the antidepressants you were taking start to work. So if you look at
drug, high blood pressure, same thing, arrhythmia. But there's about an 85% correlation for people
that don't breathe well at night that have sleep apnea. 85% of people with cardiac arrhythmias
have sleep apnea. And if you want to lose weight, I mean, that's why they say, if you want to treat
airway and sleep, it's a lever. James Nestor says it gives you leverage or a lever to treat things
that you are never able to treat. So if you're trying to get rid of those first 10 or 15 pounds
or last 10 or 15 pounds, I will guarantee you that if I get you sleeping well through the night,
you will just lose 10 pounds without even thinking with same diet, same exercise. So when Howie and I,
when I talk about the pillars of health, which is exercise, diet, nutrition, and a good mental
attitude, the one that trumps all of those is airway, breathing and sleep. So the fact that
the dental profession is probably the best specialty. And we work with the NTs and we work
with pulmonologists and we work with, you know, butteca, we work with a lot of other people,
but the dental profession are the ones that biomechanically anatomically, we can not only
grow the airway, we can stabilize the airway with devices, but we can also grow the airway
in children. And I believe we can prevent children from ever getting becoming a snore or
becoming a sleep apnea. So those of us that I think they're forward thinking, like Christian
Guimenault was, and I was with him in India, we believe that these disorders are ultimately
optional or they're preventable. Okay. And then so this then is what you,
this is what was at the core of what, when you said that, you know, being airway-centric
is about brain development because it's all about that oxygen and everything hitting the
brain and feeding it. Yeah. And also you got to understand that if you go back in dentistry to
1924, it's also a play on words. Okay. Because when my dad used to have the fights with Peter Dawson
and with Panky, when the rest of dentistry was shoving the jaw back into what they called
centric relation, which was a way that you could mount models on a study model. It's the way that
they would build dentures. It was the way they would build your teeth and you had to shove the
jaw back into a repeatable position. Now, when they shoved the jaw back, which they started
doing 1924 and they did up until 1985 and they're still doing today, the reason that I'm now friendly
with Whit Wilkerson and we become good friends and I'm friendly with Mark Murphy and I'm friendly
with people from Dawson and Panky, we agreed in the Swiss tradition, we agreed that as long as our
academies agreed that opening the airway was more important than the TMJ, we would not argue
any more about TMJ. We wouldn't argue, as long as we all took a treaty and we took an oath,
that we all agreed that anyone that agrees that opening the airway is important for children
and adults, we're now all friends and we're getting along great because our mission is so much of a
higher and more profound level. It's so much more important than arguing about the TMJ because
actually my airway-centric philosophy says that if you open up everything, if you get someone,
a woman or a man, but particularly a woman to sleep through the night, she probably won't have
TMJ. If you give someone good restorative sleep and oxygen, it's probably going to relax all the
muscles and it's going to get so the airway trumps the TMJ. So if you do the orthodontics that we're
going to talk about, if you enlarge the maxilla of the upper jaw, you're going to untrap the lower
jaw and you're probably going to prevent TMJ, you'll never get a TMJ problem. So you understand
how profound it is? So the whole conversation changed 10 years ago when Gary, Katie, with
Wilkerson, how we, Hinden and I were in a restaurant in New York City and we said we're going to form
the Swiss Dental Society, that means we're going to be neutral. We're not going to say we're going
to all agree, we're going to put up our white flags and we started having these white flag events
through the APMD and we were bringing people with different opinions and because we were all
airway focused, airway centric, we could really move a lot further. We were started to collaborate
much, much more and we realized that we needed individuals like lactation consultants, doulas,
we needed speech language pathologists, we needed OTs that are working with feeding issues and kids
and we started to allow everyone to come to the table as equals, not in this position dominant
and the dentist is subservient, but in a very parallel and equal tract where the speech language
pathologist is just as important as the physician and the myosophageal therapist and that gave
everyone a really nicer way to communicate a safer space and it just became the dialogue
that gets better and better and better. Yeah and for anyone that has never listened, I'll include the link
to the APMD and the show notes because there's for parents as well as medical professionals,
there's always events online that people can can join in and I personally have learned
so much and this was the first time that I had really actually seen this kind of
cross-functional I guess, a lot of cross-pollination and talk about these issues and
for me it's really fascinating and then to see how they all play on each other.
Yeah and listen, we now have airway centric physical therapists like Brad Gilden, so now we
have a whole group of airway physical therapists and now they're talking with the speech language
pathologists and they're learning more about myofunctional therapy and the myofunctional
therapist are learning more about the physical therapy and now we're starting to expand diaphragms
and we can treat ribs and we can treat injuries that people might have had and we can actually work
with they're doing botanical breathing, they're doing wim hop breathing and so this whole thing
and then the book Breath got published and you know we're coming out with movies now and documentaries
and so you know we got to understand Rebecca only 15% of these patients have been diagnosed that's
terrible. So 30, we've only moved about two to three percentage points and last I've been doing
this 32 years, we have failed, we've only, we haven't failed in that more people are talking about it
but the pace for me has been so slow in that we've only achieved a 15% diagnosis rate that means
85% of the kids and the adults out there have never been diagnosed with this problem. Wow,
which is just, I mean that's astonishing to me.
Kind of along these lines I mean about you know undiagnosed and I can't remember where I saw this,
if it was something you said or something I read but the research estimates 25% of kids are actually
born mouth breathers which that alone that just blows me away and 50% of people with orthodontics
are going to have more breathing issues down the road because of the treatments they're getting now
and I can see me bear yeah we're talking about what retractive braces. Such a good question so
you know when I when I kept reading the work of Christian Giminal. So Christian Giminal from
Stanford he invented upper airway resistance syndrome, he was there at the beginning with
Bill Dement and he came from France and he settled in and he was always a good thinker but he's the
one that made me aware that you know all preemies so if you're born before 35 weeks you're a mouth
breather and then if you try to suck and then I learned this from Lois Lane and Patty Otter if
you're trying to do suck swallow and breathe an infant that's born too early cannot suck
swallow the milk and breathe through their nose at the same time they can't they don't they can't
coordinate those three reflexes because they don't have the development of their nervous system.
Oh okay and I also never knew and this affected me personally I never knew that a kid could be
born as a mouth breather I mean I never realized that but then I see all these pictures of these
kids like this and I know that whether it be the anatomy and and one thing that I that I told Joe
McCarthy the famous plastic surgeon he said one of the great regrets of his career was that he
never realized that the kids with Pierre Robin, Cruzon, all these kids that are syndromeal that
have birth defects, what the kids die of what they die of is sleep apnea so he never realized
that the kids were dying they weren't dying of the syndrome they were dying that they couldn't
breathe and the treatment actually when they trach them they would have to trach those kids
and then they didn't die so we treated some kids at NYU that had syndromes and they all had trachs
so when I started learning this I mean that was fascinating to me because I never and then I was
a mouth breather my mother became a myofunctional therapist but too late for me and that's why you
know children airway first and early early early intervention that was really profound and we can
talk about Karen Bonick later but the second thing was with the orthodontics okay now the
orthodontist started taking out by cuspids so if you believe in what James Nestor talks about if
you believe that our skulls and you could just look at skulls from Smithsonian Institute you
can look at the Morton collection at Penn like Mary Anna Evans and Kevin Boyd have you can look at
the Natural History Museum in New York if you look at skulls that are 500 to 1000 years old
you're gonna see that the midface is much more developed if you go back and you look at Neanderthal
man you'll see that they had these big broad and wide yeah they had wide faces they had
projecting snouts I mean they had like and what's happened is as our brains got bigger
our admit faces started to go back and retract okay we didn't need the orthodontic community
taking out 14 and then then then they pulled it back more pull it back yeah and my father
was arguing against this for 40 50 years but I think what's so sad is that there's at least a good
percentage of the orthodontic community that is stuck in the dogma and is still using retraction
they're putting brackets on teeth they're putting wires on teeth they're using interproximal reduction
in other words they're shaving between the teeth like with Invisalign so that they can make everything
smaller and if they have a jaw well you have buck teeth instead of moving the lower jaw forward
they'll they're moving the upper jaw back which again pinching the airway at that point and pushes
the tongue back which blocks the airway right and so you know the orthodontists had a conference
in Marko island and basically they're a guild they're trying to protect their own instead of
admitting that you know there are better ways to do it and that airway trumps and that Gilben
Hinden are right as well as many people like David Gazal, Ron Chervin, Steve Sheldon, Karen Bonik
I mean we know the relationship is there between ADHD prefrontal cortex issues and the airway and
Steve Sheldon has said it he's written chapters he said probably 50% of the kids out there that
have ADHD and these behavioral issues probably don't have ADHD they probably just have a sleep
problem an airway problem and we know that we and we can get them off of medications once we take
out the tonsils and adenoids or once we expand the airway the kids are perfectly fine and and
we're thinking that that's because it goes back again to air and the brain and the whole connection
well you got to realize that the brain yes the brain develops between birth and age six or seven
so the most rapid period of brain development is also when we get those tonsils and adenoids in
and so by the orthodontic community waiting until 11 or 12 which is what they did for 100 years
now they put it back to seven but the brain tissue is already developed by seven
Kevin Boyd has told us you got to get in there earlier than age five so we'll get in there
in one day of age we'll treat a frenectomy we'll cut the tongue tie so the kid can latch on because
breastfeeding is the first best defense breastfeeding is the way that you start to develop the airway
at birth right a lot of these kids that have feeding issues are also kids that are mouth
breathers are also kids that they can't suck swallow and breathe so the same kid that has
sensory integration issues the same kid that's going to have issues with speech later on
is the same kid that also happens to have a narrowed airway and then as adults the same people
that are getting laryngeal spasms that are choking on food they're also the ones that have a narrow
they're narrow in this part of their body that's where your air comes down and that's where the food goes down
you're listening to airway first with today's guest dr. michael gelb you can find out more about
the children's airway first foundation and our mission to fix before six on our website at
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or send us an email directly at info at children's airwayfirst.org as a reminder this podcast and
the opinions expressed here are not a medical diagnosis if you suspect your child might have
an airway issue contact your pediatric airway dentist or pediatrician and now let's jump back
into my interview with today's guest Dr. Michael Gelb
so because our skulls have changed and because of our atrogenic dentistry because the way the
dentistry has been done it just makes a bad situation worse and we think the orthodontist
or the pediatric dentist should be the superheroes but working with the allergist working with ENTs
working with pediatric sleep specialists and we know that there's a way out of this so yeah my
father looked at orthodont the orthodontists didn't want to listen and of course they were
in the orthodontic literature people like linda erinson and big and uh you know with the monkey
experiments um the people like uh you know rickets and brody they knew that the airway they know the
airway is very important but it's kind of been forgotten from their literature and now there's
a new young generation of orthodontists coming up and they're great ordrey ewn some of the people
at stanford the whole generation of orthodontists coming up that are very good and they're starting
at a very young age and people like myobrace out of australia chris parrell healthy start
vivos there are these myofunctional devices appliances that you can use starting in age two
two and a half so they're out there it's just that we're encouraging more general dentist pediatric
dentists to get into this and not wait for the orthodontist to see the patient at age seven
when they're seven or as dr boyd refers to then geriatric which they're old already they're like
geriatrics at age seven i mean kevin boyd said like steve shellen they're like geriatric patients
in this practice seven year olds yeah which is that's just such a mind that'll i mean it's when i
remember the first time i heard him say that and i thought there was such a strange comment but the
more i thought about it i mean that's kind of a profound statement that they're it's too late i
mean they're geriatric we listen kevin boyd has taught me a lot we all feed off of each other right
yeah and then finally we got bill hang now now bill hang is teaching course on early
childhood intervention backup so now finally we got bill hang bill hang would would would would
go in an age eight with bio block but after listening to people and we were all part of the
course at nyu that i started we had barry rafael there kevin boyd we're all in the same wavelength
is that and moralia we got to get in there in an early the earlier you get in there the better
listen orthodontics is all about brain development orthodontics has nothing to do with teeth okay and
his dentistry is not really about teeth dentistry is about the health and the wellness of the patient
attached to the to the teeth and i used to like to listen roger price would talk about that we've
got to treat the person who's attached to the teeth the teeth only go in the foundation and the
foundation like barry talks about and ben talks about our foundation our bone every generation
we're like rats our bone and our faces get more narrow more collapsed and we don't have the
architecture we have to make everything wider and then the teeth will be straight again and we
can do things like i guess there's two points just to clarify this is why that whole cross-functional
team this this mindset we have to shift to instead of everyone's siloed you have to come at it as a
team because the lactation consultant early on could spot some of these things and help some of
these things so that the child can breastfeed and work on that jaw development and the tongue
in the tongues yeah strengthening the time getting it where it needs to be in the tone yes the tone
getting the tongue the proper rest or a posture so getting the lips together and getting the tongue
up on the palate and get the tongue to get the tongue being up there as a muscle to start to
expand and get these muscles to relax and get the swallow to be correct get the tone the tone to be
better and so we have to work with our myofunctional therapists our speech language pathologist our
hygienist and then the ot's have to start talking to the slps have to start talking to the physical
therapists right and we can't all be siloed so we that's the educate we're getting the ot's in
there now because artificially we've given the ot's we give the kids to them from zero to two or
zero to three for feeding it and they have it and then they hand it off but it's too artificial that
there shouldn't be that designation between the ot and the slp it goes down to curriculums it goes
down to turf wars and we know that the curriculum is so outdated at least i know in the dental
curriculum but i've said the same thing has to be true in the ot curriculum and the slp curriculum
right and that's what we're hearing that it's um i've had many pediatricians make comments about
we didn't even talk about the airway or we spent three hours and that's it so and i wasn't even
allowed right i when the iam i wasn't allowed to speak about airway seven years ago wow they wouldn't
allow it they didn't think it was in their charter they didn't think it was in their uh
description of the specialty that they should have anything to do with airway they thought their
profession was about speech it's like dentists think it's about teeth orthodontists think it's
about straight teeth orthodontists is not about straight teeth right but they think that a lot
of them think it is and the public within busyline they think it's about aligning teeth aligning teeth
is sometimes not the best thing for the airway or the tm joint okay sure and i see this um in your
practice and anyone that goes to your website will put a link on there as well but on your website
your hygienist are actually it's in there as the oral systemic wellness hygienist um and to me it's
just again it's a simple thing but that really does kind of set the tone for how you and your
practice approach well listen i missed the boat so at that same dinner that i had with gary katie and
witt worpison howie gary said why don't you come down and meet me in nevis and when i went down there
to talk to his group about airway bailyn denine brad bailyn amy denine we're talking about the
harmful bacteria that live in the mouth the oral microbiome and they explained to me how p gengivalis
and a and other and now we know there's really five but they did the studies that showed that
these bacteria made it increased inflammation so remember we talked about inflammation
you have these harmful bacteria not only do they make the gut the epithelium more permeable we used
to call it leaky gut but it leads to systemic inflammation and then the wall of the artery
they call it the atherogenic triad they're more susceptible to strokes they're more
acceptable to mild cardinal infarction so they say we will guarantee you patient you'll never get a
heart attack of stroke or diabetes but you have to go to a dentist that has a CAT scan a cbct you
have to do a disinfection protocol so if you have these five or these eight bacteria in your mouth
you have to neutralize the bad ones leave the good ones alone because they're good for you i mean
our microbiome runs the show and then it's been evolving with people like you know Doug Thompson
and guineatis still alive and him kush with tarry free and so we have these mechanisms now
that we can start to manage oral systemically now a part of that like how he says to me and
Michael the first part of that is doing this right because you're right you got to close the mouth
and what what people don't talk about when you get increased oxygen in the system it kills a lot of
those anaerobic bacteria so in other words the ph the ph balance and and and kim kush and susan
maples talk about the ph balance is very important part of maintaining that ph balance and it's got
to be between you know it could be off by point one or point three but breathing through the nose
at night and having an open airway is also part of the oral systemic balance and interacts with
how the the the environment where we allow these bad bacteria to get away and live
okay so so so the oral systemic is directly related to the airway but we have to have the
hygienist out there and the dental practices i believe should be anti-inflammatory dental practices
anti-aging so you could call your practice i'm an anti-inflammatory dentist basically what you're
saying is i care about your health and i realized that i'm not just treating teeth i'm treating the
structures the hiding areas the gums the periodontal and i i'm treating the bacteria that reside in
your mouth because i understand that there's a relationship between oral health or the oral
microbiome and the brain by a microbiome and systemic health so in other words the oral the
oral microbiome talks to the gut microbiome because it goes down there and lots some of those
bacteria survive but also if you have leaky gut and the p-ginge of alice gets out p-ginge of alice
which starts here in the mouth number one offender bacterially for Alzheimer's disease
so in other words you would never think you would never think that if you had a relative
or you wanted to prevent Alzheimer's you wouldn't think that the first person you should go to is
your dentist no no but i'm telling you that the dentist plays a key role in Alzheimer's prevention
now people don't care as much about the heart because you can get bypass surgery
there is no brain there's no bypass for the brain you can't put in a new brain there's no
the replacement you can't put stents in right so there's a lot of us out there we know by 2050
half the baby boomers are going to have Alzheimer's so i think it behooves us to make sure we're
getting enough slow wave sleep delta sleep it behooves us in our 50s in our 60s to make sure
it's good for sleep tests and going through an airway centric dentist
that we're getting good oxygen we're getting good sleep because that will stall or put off
or prevent so Dale Bredesen says that Alzheimer's is now optional
but he's got to fill up the 38 holes in the roof you've got to fill up at least 12 of them
number 13, then the other ones tend to fill in.
So in other words, you got to exercise.
Okay.
That'll cut Alzheimer's by 50%.
But you also have to have a dentist
and Chip Whitney is teaching us now.
It's called the recode protocol.
You've got to have the recode protocol.
Okay.
You've got to have a dentist and a hygienist on the team
along with a neurologist, along with your trainer
who's going to have you do exercise.
Okay.
So it's a, again, it's a team.
It's a slightly different team,
but it could be part of the airway centric team
because we want our team also to be,
and at our meeting at APMD,
we're going to have more and more lectures
and we, Dale Bredesen is going to be the keynote.
And he's going to be telling the dentist
how you can prevent Alzheimer's in dementia.
And that to me, that's just,
I come from a family where Alzheimer's is rampant.
So to have somebody that actually can,
that to me is just so groundless.
Tomorrow you should go get the HR5 test
or oral DNA or oral vital,
get a bacteria test for your mouth
and see what your profile is
because I bet your family members are susceptible
to having some of these bacteria like P. gingivalis.
And you guys may have high levels
and you may have to do certain type of treatment
that decreases the level of something like P. gingivalis.
And these kind of conversations,
I mean, to me, this gives a whole new meaning to,
as a biology major, and you went through this,
this is the gateway for everything.
This is the gateway to your body.
But the way we were taught,
it has more to do with what we're putting in it.
And, yeah.
And this is just, it is the gateway,
but it's a very different gateway.
It's different.
And also when everyone talks about sleep,
it's all about how many hours did you get?
Right.
I don't hear a lot about quality.
I just hear, well, do you need to get eight hours, seven to eight?
Well, I know people to get 10,
but that are exhausted because the quality of the sleep
is so poor, the oxygenation is so low,
and the sleep fragmentation is so high,
they can get 20 hours of sleep
and they wouldn't feel refreshed.
Right, because they never get to where
they need to.
And so is this where these oral appliances,
these oral sleep appliances specifically like the air,
that air VEDA?
So the air VEDA, the air VEDA, the air VEDA,
that's the new healthy night guard.
So let's talk about that.
You've got to understand that 90% of the dentists in America
are putting in night guards that are closing the airway.
So we were taught in dental school,
we were taught if you want to get an A
and pass your boards, we were taught to put the jaw,
sometimes in a backward position,
cuspid guidance to have very smooth platforms on it.
So I'm telling you, the literature says 50%.
I'm saying it's 50 to 90% of these night guards
that people are wearing every night
are actually closing the airway,
they're increasing snoring
and they're increasing sleep apnea.
And so Lane Martin and I came up with the air VEDA,
which we have the airway promises.
So the airway promises means with our,
with the old primitive night guard,
it would prevent you from wearing down your teeth
and breaking teeth.
Yes, it did that.
But at least a 50% chance of closing the airway.
With the new night guard with the air VEDA,
we open the airway,
you wake up in a better mood, more refreshed,
no clicking, popping, locking,
decreased clenching and no headache.
So does more obviously more than just prevent the grinding,
somehow you're helping open a little bit?
Well, you're opening.
So instead of pushing it back,
it's what my father was saying.
Okay.
It's in a phonetic position like 66, Mississippi.
So when I speak, when I say the S sounds,
my jaw comes forward.
So we're putting them in an airway open position,
airway friendly position,
airway centric position, airway centered position.
We're aware of the airway because we can image it,
we can test it.
And anyone that gets a night guard
gets a home sleep test first.
Okay.
So the American College of Prostadonics,
they're the ones, look,
it wasn't Michael Gelbeth said this,
the American College of Prostadonics said,
look, you guys are gonna have liability out there
because they showed the studies
that showed that 50% of these devices
were closing the airway.
That their members have been making.
And then look, there's nothing wrong.
We didn't know any better.
Right.
Don't know what you don't know.
But once you have the me too movement,
once I tell you can't sexually harass a woman,
once I tell you that this behavior is not allowed anymore,
it's not the way that we do business,
the dentist are no longer allowed to close the airway
as of today.
So anyone that listens to me,
it's like Gary Katie said, it's like Thomas Cune,
you can't see it.
Once you fried the A, you can't unfry it.
Once you see the arrow between the E and the X
and the FedEx logo, you're always gonna see the arrow.
You always see it, yep.
So once you see someone who's worn down their teeth
or once you see someone that has a large tongue,
scallop tongue, or once you see a cross bite,
or once you see someone that's breaking restorations,
or once you see a kid that has a high narrow palate,
or when you see a kid that has circles under their eyes,
you can't unsee it.
But dentists never looked at the tongue.
You know what dentists think the tongue is?
Something that gets in the way when they do a filling
on your lower molars.
That they have to move it.
We got an assistant, can I get a mirror?
I gotta keep that tongue out of the way, so I don't,
the dentists don't even know there's a tongue.
The tongue is just in a nuisance.
And we never lift up the tongue.
So look under, yeah.
Well, we never were taught to do that.
So that's missed like 98% of the time.
And we never look at the size of the tongue.
We don't grade the tongue.
So we have to start doing that on every patient.
Every dentist, Rebecca, is an airway dentist.
They're either closing the airway
or they're opening the airway.
They're opening.
Everything that we do in dentistry
has an impact on the airway.
How as parents do we find these dentists though that are,
whether they're certified airway-centric
or at least they're just focused.
They've made that shift in their mind.
How do you find them?
So I think, you know,
the foundation of airway health had an airway pledge.
So on the foundation for airway health,
on that website airwayhealth.com, I think,
we have people that have taken the airway pledge.
Now we're not certifying, we haven't gone,
but they believe that opening the airway is the right thing.
And then if you look at the AAPMD website,
we have a list in every state and internationally.
And then lately, we're forming liaison groups
now around the United States.
So people want a curriculum.
If people want to have meetings and meetups,
these collaborative groups that you and I are talking about
that we have to work collaboratively.
So these groups will get together,
let's say once a month, like a study club,
and either we can provide the speaker or they have a speaker.
And so we have these liaison groups around the country.
So this is like a movement, a groundswell movement,
because everyone asked me the same question.
I got the same question last night in New Jersey
at ProSemile, they go, well, how do I find,
the ENTs are telling us that it's fine to have big tonsils
that we choose to leave it alone.
So 80% of the ENTs out there are not trained in airway.
So we have to look for those one or two in each community
that have had the training from the right school,
they've been to the right lectures,
they understand how important it is to have an open airway,
and they're willing to go in and they're willing to treat,
and they're not gonna make the parent
or the kid feel like they don't know what they're doing
or the dentist, they're not gonna contradict
what the dentist said. So you gotta be on the lookout.
And that's the way I would do it would be
to go to that website.
I mean, everyone has the same issue
and we're trying to find providers
and we're trying to get a list.
There is the AEDSM, American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine.
You know, these are dentists that have been trained
in their interest in sleep apnea and snoring.
That's another group.
And that's it, it's kind of like a grassroots movement
at this point.
Yeah, and I'll make sure that we add those other two
on the Children's Airway First website.
We do have a link to the Airway Health Solutions,
to their list.
But we'll comment here that we have the others.
And Airway Health Solutions, like Ben Moralea,
Lauren Geitz, Airway Health Solutions is another good group.
They probably have a thousand dentists now
that Ben and Lauren have trained.
I'm training them on TMJ, and I talked to them at Airway.
So look, we're trying, we're educating,
we're out there at all these meetings,
attempting to spread the word.
Yeah, yeah.
So as parents, I mean, aside from finding an Airway
centric dentist, which at this point,
there is no argument,
that's what we all should be looking for.
What are some things that we can do on our own as parents,
just to help with our children's oral development,
just to get them off, aside from breastfeeding, obviously.
Yeah, what do you have over kids?
The number one thing,
and Jeremy Montrose talked about this last night,
my associate, maybe the number one thing
is that they become nose breathers, nasal breathers.
Okay.
So you said at the beginning, you said 25% of kids
are probably, I think you're probably about right.
So those kids are gonna be at risk,
though they're gonna grow up looking like me,
they're gonna become vertical growers, long-face growers.
So in other words, my face could have grown differently
if I was breathing through my nose.
And my prefrontal cortex would have,
so beginning like North American Indian mothers do this.
Oh yeah?
They teach the kids, they train them like therapists,
the mothers do this.
And so if your kid is making noise when they sleep,
but they're noisy breathers,
if they sleep with their heads arched back,
if the kids, I wet my bed until I was six,
when I had my tonsils and adenoids out,
I stopped wetting my bed the next day.
So my daughter went into speech language,
we treated this kid who was wetting his bed at age 13.
The day that I put a prosomeness device in,
he stopped wetting his bed.
Because he's out of that fight, flight mode at night,
he's actually resting.
Look, you and I will get up to take a pee,
we'll go to the bathroom.
The kid's in such a deep state,
the kid doesn't, he just goes in the bed.
He doesn't, he has to go,
but it's related to angiotensin,
it's related to these factors with the kidney.
And once you open the airway,
you get rid of night terrors,
you can get rid of clenching,
you get rid of bedwetting,
and sometimes even narcolepsy can improve
when you treat the sleep apnea.
So I'm saying, if you're beating yourself up as a parent,
the kid is having feeding issues.
All they want to eat is potatoes, they're very particular.
A lot of those kids really have airway issues.
And if your kid's been labeled
as having oppositional defiant disorder,
don't wait for a school psychologist to label your kid.
We got two types of kids, Rebecca.
We got the lethargy kid, we got the heavy kid, low tone,
like Joe the fat boy in Dickens.
We've got the heavy kid, who's lethargic.
And we got the thin kid, he's running around,
he's hyperactive, he's bouncing off the wall.
So it goes in two ways, right?
The phenotypes go in two ways,
but they're both kids have problems.
The same thing though.
It's the same thing.
Sometimes it goes to the cardiac
and sometimes it goes to the brain.
So sometimes it's more metabolic,
sometimes it affects the way that we concentrate our behavior.
We're beating up other kids, we're aggressive
or we're overly shy.
So I'm saying, you're gonna know if your kid,
and this is much more true for ADHD than on the spectrum.
Kids on the spectrum growing up will have insomnia.
They'll have a lot more behavioral issues.
But what most people believe is this,
look, give your kid the best possible diet you can
or organic food.
As much as you could afford.
Let your kid get out and exercise,
keep them away from pollution.
Get them in a pollution-free environment,
let them exercise at least an hour a day,
reach your kids at night,
and make sure they have an open airway
and that they're nose breathers.
But if you're a parent,
you're gonna be starting to notice the behavior of your kid
when they're two months, three months old.
And then once they can run around,
you're gonna see if they wanna run around
or you're gonna see if they're...
No, but you're gonna know something's wrong with your kid
when you compare them, the other kids in the playground.
And look, you're gonna look for the best in your kid,
but what I'm saying is there interventions that you can do
as early as day one or day two in the kid's life,
like go look under their tongue and see if they have a tongue tie.
So there should be nothing holding it down at all under there?
Well, it shouldn't be restricted. So sometimes they can't...
They can't press the nipple up against the palate
because the tongue can't extend up that high.
So they can't express the milk, they can't latch on.
And so they should be able to latch on easily.
They shouldn't have a lot of reflux, a lot of gas.
And so the lactation can sold in Brazil, you know,
there's a law that you have to do a tongue
of freedom inspection at birth.
Right.
We should have the same thing in the US,
but every parent should be doing their own freedom inspection.
And meaning just look to see...
Just go like this.
And see if you can elevate the tongue.
Just lift your kid's tongue up and see if the skin,
if that piece of tissue, the attachment is so tight,
you'll see it.
I think it lifted.
You'll see it at birth. You'll see it.
Okay. Got it. Got it.
So that's easy.
An easy thing to do.
Yeah. Very easy.
And you're talking about these, these gatherings.
There's one coming up December 9th through the 10th
in Savannah, Georgia, which is their way, Palooza.
Um, calf will be there. A lot of people are going to be there.
I believe, you know, you and James Nester,
maybe Dr. Boyd, y'all are all speaking there.
Dr. Boyd is going to be there.
Ben Moralia is going to be there. Scott Siegel.
He does the tongue ties.
He's going to be there.
Susan Maples who talks about the way he's doing it.
He's going to be there.
Susan Maples who talks about oral systemic health is going to be
there.
Yeah. Also on our board. We, um, so there's just.
What makes this, this event though,
different than a lot of the other dental gatherings.
And why is this, you know, why do we want to tell Dennis,
if you haven't already gets us to Vanna in December.
Well, first of all, it's always a treat to have James Nester,
who's a journalist.
And then, you know, he's a journalist.
He's a journalist.
So he gives us all more credibility because he,
he doesn't have a vested interest. Right. Right.
And he's looked at this with the journalist.
I, he's interviewed a lot of people.
And so it's very rare that we've got,
it's very rare that you get Kevin, Ben, me, um,
Scott, see that you get us all in the same place at the same time.
And that there's a lot of social time.
And so you get to know each other.
You know, you get to know each other outside the lecture hall.
Sometimes then you learn in the lecture hall.
And so if you have a question about your own kid,
if you have a question about a patient, you're treating.
It's a really good time to get together and to.
You know, mingle and get to know some of these people.
Because look, they, they shape my career. They mentored,
helped mentored me. I'm sure I helped mentored some of them.
But, you know, we all learn from each other.
And, and I think that's the most important part of this,
and I guess it's really important to look at what the latest information
is and, um, you know, like this whole phenomenon of lip-taping James,
James Nestor,
probably has done more to promote nasal breathing than probably anyone
in, in, in history.
Yeah.
So I got to give him a lot of credit and he's a great speaker.
So we first heard him at panty Steve Lamberg's event on Long Island.
really the second time that I'm going to be with James Nester and it should be, it should
be a really wonderful event with a lot of time to spend with these speakers.
Yeah, and actually, I just did, he's on our board as well and I just finally, because
he's been traveling, he's been all over, got to sit down and talk with him a little bit.
Oh good.
And it's funny when you talk to him about lip taping.
He's funny about it because he makes it clear.
I'm not telling you to do it, but hey, it worked for me and I did some research and it's really
good and now because of the book, that is actually, people talk about it now in mom
groups and we talk about lip taping and it's, I think you were, your perspective that why
it's so profound is because he doesn't have skin in the game.
He really has come at this from a journalist standpoint and just looked at the research
and here's what I've got.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's made all the difference.
Right, right.
I mean, look, I'm a dentist, I'm bested, I'm really out to do what's best for kids.
Like I want to change the way that we're practicing.
Yeah.
You know, that's why I'm a little critical sometimes of the dental profession because
like my father before me, I think we can be better and I think we need to strive to be
health and wellness people to add to the health and wellness of the family and the children
and I think that certain things that we're doing may not be really the best for kids
health and I think we need to go in a little bit of a different direction and to intervene
earlier and to focus on nose breathing and to be more collaborative and to find our community,
wherever that community, wherever you are in the United States of the world, there will
be a community of people that believe in what we're talking about.
Yeah.
And I guess I'll not note, typically at the end of every episode, I like to turn it back
over to the guests because I'm already experts.
Any last thoughts that you would like to leave with parents or with others in your industry?
Yeah, you know what?
If you find people that don't know, I mean, Sharon Moore's book, Sleep Rec Kids.
So all you need to do is pick up Sleep Rec Kids or Shereen Lim just wrote a book, Sleep,
Read and Thrive.
Yeah.
That's a great book.
You can pick up the book, Gasp.
So we're trying to give you resources that you can take to your doctors and what I would
say to the parents out there, keep looking until you find a practitioner that will understand
what you're saying.
And you guys, unfortunately, you still have to be, we're in the minority now, right?
We're not, this is a movement that's, we started it over 10 years ago with the APMD.
And you know, I've been in this field 32 years, so we want more people to come over and just
give it, listen a little bit and see if it makes sense to you.
I think it makes a lot of sense.
But then I had my father mentoring me for 28 years.
He just passed away on November 7th.
So I had him for a long time.
But he was speaking about these types of things for 60, 60 since 1947.
And he worked until he was 87 years of age.
So you know, I have a little bit of an advantage, which why it seems kind of very simple to me,
very straightforward that an open airway is better than a closed airway.
And the dental profession is part of the answer, part of the answer.
Not all of it, but part of it.
Yeah.
So thank you enough for coming on today and sharing all of your insights.
I really appreciate it.
It was a pleasure and you were, you asked me some great questions and it was, it was terrific
talking to you, Rebecca.
Thank you.
Thanks again to today's guest, Dr. Michael Gelb for sharing his medical insight and to
each of you for listening to today's episode.
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