Episode Sixty-Eight – Mary Ellen Chalmers DMD
Carolyn McMakin, MA, DC Kim Pittis, LCSP, (PHYS), MT
0:03 Mary Ellen’s back story – 6:17 Patent for FSM in dentistry – 13:26 Integrative dentistry – 16:05 Metal allergens – 25:53 What frequencies to run for a root canal? – 29:45 It all plays together – 37:05 Tooth extraction – 42:27 Burning mouth – 47:14 re-building jaw bine after infection
https://vimeo.com/790166021
Episode Sixty-Eight – Mary Ellen Chalmers DMD: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Episode Sixty-Eight – Mary Ellen Chalmers DMD: this mp4 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Dr. Carol:
This is my dear friend and my dentist, Mary Ellen Chalmers. Her CV is really long. She is practicing integrative and functional dentistry, and I suspect she’ll explain what that means. She’s a regular dentist from Tufts School of Dental Medicine. And then, just because she didn’t have anything better to do, which is an understatement. She’ll receive or Masters in Orofacial Pain and Oral medicine from University of Southern California this year. She’s a naturopath from the American Naturopathic Medical Association and the American College of Integrative Medicine and Dentistry, as well as a certified functional medicine practitioner with IFM. The rest of her CV would take the rest of the hour, so we’re just going to go ahead and have the conversation. We’ve been friends for a really, really long time. Hi.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Hi. Since 2006. That’s when I took that sport class in San Francisco.
Dr. Carol:
And what made you take that class?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Sandra, Megan and Patricia Lawless. Megan had been saying to me for a couple of years because I think they got started around 2001, 2002. With your 2001 with you. And she started saying to me, because I was her patient and close friends with both of them, because we’d been in Berkley for years. And she started saying to me, I think there’s applications for dentistry in this. And I was so overwhelmed with starting the new practice up here in Santa Rosa. And we were building our house and I had these two girls and I was, yeah, Kristen got injured playing soccer because, you know, that’s both girls were highly athletic from eight or nine through college. And so she got injured and it was a hip flexor and she got cleated up around her hip and I took her in Pat. I think Patty was actually the one who treated her and the contusion went away. And I said, and she was able to play. She had a tournament coming, a big tournament coming up. And she was able they were talking about not having her play. She walked off the table. She was fine. And I said, what is this making sense? This is what I’m telling you about. I have been talking to you. She said. So there and there was a that was June and there was the sport class was in July.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And she said, take that sport class. Pat and I are going to be there. Take the sport class with us. She said, I think there’s applications for dentistry and if there isn’t, you’ll have something that you’ll be able to use with the girls because they’re going to need this for… Then of course they still do. But so that’s how I got started, was I started at the sport class. And what hooked me was the cytokine paper. You had just published the cytokine paper, you had gotten the data, you had finished everything and you had just gotten the cytokine paper and that was ready to go. And it was watching that cytokine data because in my world I had made the connection that our job, our primary job as dentists, is to eradicate inflammation. Remember I used to talk about a mouth at peace before functional dentistry. I used to talk about creating this mouth at peace, that our job was to create a mouth that wasn’t inflamed, whether it was periodontal disease, whether it was reaction of the metals, whether it was mercury, whether it was root canals, whatever it was. We had to address those inflammatory factors within our patients and create a mouth that was inflamed. And that’s what hooked me was cytokine.
Dr. Carol:
And the thing that I remember was because you’re a dentist, you wouldn’t touch anybody.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I came back and took the course in December. That was it.
Dr. Carol:
And so in December you were dodging it. And I remember grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and saying, sit down and put your hands on this person’s neck. And you. But I love the phrase mouth at peace. That’s what a wonderful way of describing reducing inflammation. That’s just delicious.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And that’s what hooked you then to. I think that’s when I think you said because you use that same phrase back then, because that’s that was my perspective. Now, of course, it’s bigger and I have different language to describe how we interact and how we need to interact. That was the beauty of FSM and 2006, December 2006, I took the Core and then got a CustomCare, not a CustomCare I had HomeCare. All you have is a HomeCare and an AutoCare, and you taught me how to manually program the AutoCare because there was nothing really short of a Blue Box and but I needed to be able to run automatic protocols while I was treating people and I to develop the dental protocols. I sat at the chair. Manually programing in to figure out the frequencies for all the dental protocols. So then I came back. My first lecture anywhere was for F for you in 2008 when I laid out the rationale for FSM in dentistry and where to use it and how to use it.
Dr. Carol:
There was something about from the mouth to the gut to. It was about how health starts in the mouth and the digestive system and how all that is connected and how FSM can help.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Exactly. Exactly. We can eradicate oral inflammation. And using FSM as a tool to do that. I used it with periodontal surgery patients right off the bat. I used it with implant patients. It was the implant patient was how you wound up treating horses because yeah, I don’t want to say her name because HIPAA, but that’s how.
Dr. Carol:
That story is in the book.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It’s already in the book. She gave us permission. Yeah. Yeah. But it was an implant. It was an implant patient of mine.
Dr. Carol:
And then it was orthodontia.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
So that was Jackie. And that’s what led to the patent, And it was new injury. Jackie did phase one where you just have the four brackets in the front and the little wires, and she was miserable and she made John and I miserable. And so when we were looking at phase two, where they put her whole mouth in appliances. We thought, Oh, we’re never going to survive this. There’s just going to.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Jackie Ball by the time she’s a month in. So as a lark, I thought, Shoot, why don’t I? Why don’t I? So I put two pads here and two. Actually, I didn’t. I put gauze, I got alligator clips and figure it out. We put gauze in her mouth, wet gauze in her mouth and electrodes on the back of her neck. And I ran new injury because we didn’t. I had dental protocols, but. We didn’t have CustomCare at that point. This is this is February 2007.
Dr. Carol:
Just before it came out.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Yeah, just before the CustomCare came out. We yeah. And that was a game changer for dentistry was to have the CustomCare’s. But no, I put the electrodes on and we ran it and we never heard from her. I don’t know. For any of you who’ve ever had braces, it’s excruciatingly painful, especially for the first few weeks, because as you’re putting pressure against that periodontal ligament, all the sensory fibers, what you’re putting pressure in order to stimulate the osteoclasts and the osteoblasts. But in the meantime, the sensory nerve fibers are just on fire. And it’s I still remember from when I had my braces on at 12, so we put it on. She never she had no pain. And I thought, that’s great and completely missed her. six her six-week review. We were busy and went, oh my gosh, 12 weeks in. I went, Oh gosh, I’ve got to get her back there. So we took her back. She’d been in the appliances for three months. The orthodontists came out and said, Oh, my God, she looks amazing. And I said, Oh, that’s nice. And then she said, Yeah, And everything is moved so quickly. We’re putting her in rectangular wires in a month. And I thought, Oh gosh, isn’t that cool? And I started to walk away and then it hit me that it was the FSM that basically rectangular. So they put round wires. So you have a bracket that’s rectangular and around wire just minimally engages the bracket and it’s to induce a softer, more gentle force rather than when you put it in a rectangular wire, you actually lock in the bracket and that’s when you really can start to tip and talk and move the teeth.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And normally rectangular wires are put in anywhere from 6 to 9 months. So we were dramatically ahead of schedule. And in fact, Jackie finished a two-year treatment plan a year. And I said to the orthodontist when she said, Yeah, she’s going in rectangular wires, I said, I’ve been we’ve been using this Frequency Specific Microcurrent. And she said, What does it do? And I said, It eradicates inflammation. And she’s had absolutely no pain with her braces. And she said to me, That doesn’t make any sense. You have to have inflammation in order to be able to move teeth. And I said, Yeah, but what if you don’t? What if at the end of the day, you really don’t? And so then I dove in and it’s actually working on the I01 beta and all of the inflammatory cytokines. I think because it’s I01 beta. So people with the I01 beta snips are going to get the shortening of roots. I think it has real efficacy so when I happened to mention this to our dental supply rep, he’s the one that said shut up right now, patent it because we were within the one year and everything else.
Dr. Carol:
And you haven’t lectured yet.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Hadn’t lectured yet exactly that the patent was put into because I was lecturing in February 2008 and the patent was we had a provisional patent in a hurry because this all I think it was January when he said you better patent it. And I remember having a conversation with you and we didn’t think it could be done. Actually, no, it was the fall. It was the fall of 2007. And my sister Eileen had a patent attorney. Happened to have a patent attorney because you said no, no way it could be done. My sister Eileen happened to have a patent attorney over for Christmas and was talking to him about that, that we had figured this out and nobody else in dentistry was using it. And he’s the one that said he said, have her give me a call. And so I gave him a call after the first of the year and he said, I don’t know, let me think about it. And he called back. Two days later, I was in that office and everything went from there. But yeah.
Dr. Carol:
There’s just so people listening because we have both practitioners and patients, just so people listening, when you can’t patent number one, you can’t patent something, you have to taught it. So FSM was not patentable.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
For you.
Dr. Carol:
In medicine. You can’t patent a medical procedure. So if you develop a new way of doing gallbladder surgery, you can’t patent your surgical technique. But if your surgical technique can require a gadget, you can patent in medicine, you can patent the gadget that it takes to do your special surgical technique. So that’s the way medicine works and the way Mary Ellen patented or Dr. Thomas patented FSM in dentistry is that there is something called the dental exclusion. So dentistry is exempt from the patent rules that regulate medicine.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
So we patented the intellectual property we the application of the frequencies from. Point one or 0 to 9 nine nine. Yeah. With my protocols.
Dr. Carol:
Yeah. And so that’s how it is. You came to have the Ruth Johnston Award in 2000. Nine.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
14, 14.
Dr. Carol:
It has to be in 13, 13, 11, 13 somewhere. Yeah. Talk about you make the distinction between. And this is fascinating to me. We have to. Two avenues I want to explore. The difference between biological dentistry, which always makes you make funny faces, and integrative dentistry, which is what saved my life. And then what it is that you’re going to be talking about at the symposium, about how head, neck and face pain and the neurology of head, neck and face pain affects what we do with FSM, but practitioners and patients alike, the difference between biological dentists and functional dentistry.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I put integrative dentistry in because it just means I work with a bunch of different practitioners. I’m going to work with these DOs DCs acupuncturists head and neck. We work with a variety of practitioners, but it’s really functional dentistry. And dentistry really had its birth when Lisa Patera, and I started practicing together and she was treating you and I was treating you from 2010 to 2013. And what functional dentistry does is it actually allows us to individualize and personalize care using the functional medicine matrix and the timeline, antecedents, triggers, mediators. How it’s different from biological dentistry is that I think Biological dentistry is a wonderful place to start. It’s critical. I think everybody should be, at a minimum, a biological dentist. The principle is that our mouths are attached to the rest of our bodies. I think we all agree with that, though. When I think back as to how much we’ve changed in 15 years. When I took AMFPT in 2008, Tom O’Brien was talking about the gut and for all the IFM graphics, the gut stopped here. Who started here. This whole part of the gut was not. So it’s a good start because it acknowledges that the mouth is attached and has direct impact on the rest of the body and that it’s incumbent upon us to use biologically compatible materials that we need to restore patients with biocompatible materials.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
What functional dentistry is and Lisa and I started out calling it functional medicine based dentistry We toyed with a bunch of different names, but it was really in 2013 when I developed the Matrix, the functional dentistry matrix, which anybody who has taken an AFM class is aware of that we really it’s morphed into functional dentistry and it’s the application of functional medicine which one of the tenets of biological dentistry is absolutely no metals in your mouth. I don’t and I don’t believe that. And I think that it depends upon an autoimmune response to metals, then you shouldn’t have that particular metal. But there’s a man within IMT, the International Academy of Medicine and Toxicology, of which I’ve been a member for many years. It’s a wonderful biological dental organization. Just Clifford, who developed the Clifford test, his perspective, what it is is that the fact of the metals, it’s the dissimilar metals that are at issue.
Dr. Carol:
So mercury is not a problem.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Mercury is a problem. No one should have mercury in their mouth. No, nobody should have mercury in their mouth. Mercury is a toxin, mercury, the metal. But it’s also above and beyond the toxin.
Dr. Carol:
But they use for fillings that aren’t mercury.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
We use something called enormous or we use voco. There’s composite resin. But the problem with a lot of the composite resins is that they contain BPA. So there are materials out there that are BPA and phthalate free. We use a VOCO product in our office. We’ve been using it since January of 2016 and it’s wonderful. It lasts and lasts. It’s very esthetic. And then in addition, we are using ceramic implants, but ceramic implants are tricky. And the it’s they’re not equivalent to titanium implants. We do have patients with with titanium implants, but I’m very careful to use like strawman and I have no commercial affiliation with any of these companies whatsoever. It’s just what we use here and what we’ve found to work well. But I mean, you’re a perfect example, if you don’t mind me going to. The only metal you have in you is titanium, because we took everything else out. So it’s when you have the.
Dr. Carol:
Just let me interrupt. Just so everybody knows our background. I had a stent in 2007 and by then you were already my dentist and you said, that doesn’t make sense. You don’t have any risk factors. This is single vessel, single lesion. What’s going on? So we went to Stanford and we did a CT scan. And then was at eight or nine? It was right after my first hip surgery I think. So would have been January, February, January of 2009, maybe March of 2009.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
We did the CBC.
Dr. Carol:
Yeah, the three-D cone beam came out. And what you were looking for was an infection in my mouth that was causing heart disease, which is completely new concept for anybody. From my cardiologist, for my GP, for anybody that’s listening. The fact that root canals never fail, never don’t fail. And you were looking for something in my mouth that caused me to have a 99% blockage of the LAD. And there it was.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And the hip deterioration.
Dr. Carol:
Oh, yeah. It was after my right hip. It must have been just before my left hip or something. And that’s it. You found it. So that’s when we started nine jaw surgeries, somethingn like that and lots of implants. A lot of tests for metals allergy.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
We did. We tested you for metal allergy, and you came back positive for metal allergy. At the same time, Lisa tested you for methylation defects. And she and I had already put together this piece that if we see a patient with that, that a methylation defect, a metal allergy. The third part of this is celiac. And it was we took a look at that. And you up until that point had no idea that gluten wasn’t your friend.
Dr. Carol:
No.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
No. So it’s a pattern that we’ve seen over and over again. This pattern between methylation defects, metal allergy and celiac, and it goes the other way. If they’ve got a methylation defect and we’ve diagnosed them as a celiac, you better be darn careful that they’re about metals in implanted metals. So that’s an application of functional dentistry where we’re not using this absolute rule that nobody should have metal but making sure and the only metal that works for you because you are allergic to gold, you are allergic to nickel. That’s why all the gold had to come out. But you did really well with titanium and. Yeah, and so it’s I remember the conversation with the orthopedist who.
Dr. Carol:
That was hilarious. I’m sitting there with six fractures between here and there and drugged on fentanyl. He has he comes in at 3:00 and says, We’re going to do a shoulder surgery tonight at six. And I said, What kind of hardware are you going to use? He said, Stainless. And I said, No, you’re not. And he said, Why not? And he said, I’m allergic to chromium. There’s just a little bit of chromium. I said, That’s like being a little bit pregnant. Then the fentanyl hit. I dialed you and I said, Mary Ellen, he needs he wants to use stainless. And then I said, Yeah, you talk to him.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And.
Dr. Carol:
Had him on the phone. You should have seen the look on his face. He did a surgeon thing well. And then you started talking and he went and then he was really quiet for 30 minutes. And then he hung up the phone. I came to and said, he said, Yeah, I have to find titanium hardware and have it be here by noon tomorrow. And so he did. It’s He’s an amazing surgeon But it was that conversation.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It’s actually well accepted now within the orthopedic literature, this year’s presentation I annually I’m part of the environmental health team and I have found for the advanced practice modules and. In the early days when I was presenting this material, I was presenting dental studies around metal allergy. Now I’m presenting orthopedic studies and orthopedic studies that are actually saying that this Melissa test, this lymphocyte transformation test, the LC test which identifies delayed type or hypersensitivity reactions, that is actually better than a patch test. And there’s evidence about that and there’s all kinds of literature.
Dr. Carol:
IDE usually the problem it’s IGG, it’s like it’s tight.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And actually this is that is and it isn’t even IGG, it’s lymphocytes, it’s T cells.
Dr. Carol:
Oh my gosh.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Delayed type four hypersensitivity is your t-cell reaction. And IgG is another part of it. But the problem with dentists is and God bless Jeff Clifford. I love the man. He passed away a couple of years ago. He was just an incredible human being and a brilliant man and lecturer. And what he he taught me so much about metals. It’s basically electrochemistry. We divide that anode and cathode table. And when you when you’ve got titanium at one end and mercury in the middle and then your gold or platinum down at the other end, you can set off these tremendous arcs and batteries. And I remember we you had that going on.
Dr. Carol:
What do we what did you it was it.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Was a potential meter that Neil Nathan was the one who had me. Yeah. Get that he. Because I worked very closely with him when he was practicing in Santa Rosa and he called me one day, 2009. He said, I want you to start testing current in the head. And my first thought was really? Really? He said, Mary Ellen, I’m not talking about EAV electro-acupuncture, according to . He said, I don’t want any of that. He said, I just simply want to know, is there a battery going on at the base of my patients brain? And when he put it that simply Which he does right? He just he dials it all down into simplistic. I said, Oh yeah, maybe you should be paying attention to that. And I was of course immersed in, developing the protocols on FSM and everything at that point. We’re talking 15 years ago. So it all made sense. And particularly if we were going to talk about efficacy for Frequency Specific Microcurrent here, if we had competing galvanic currents, I don’t know of, I don’t there’s a study. It just to me intuitively we should get rid of the Galvanism in patients’ mouths.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And so that’s part of our exam. We check for that routinely. And patients with galvanic reactive mercury, it’s a real simple cell to have them understand why that particular lesion needs to come out. But the other thing that functional dentistry does is, for example, with our patients with hypertension, we have the conversation about the 2011 Mark Houston paper that talks about hypertension and mercury and the fact that it that the mercury actually damages the endothelium and will lead to hypertension. And so when we’re talking with an autoimmune patient, that’s the biggest change. I think our biggest thing, many more papers on the effect that Mercury has on autoimmunity and in terms of ANA an elevated and a pre-clinical symptoms. That’s a NHANES data from 2015. So we’re having conversations about patient’s disease and then relating that to what the different ways in which their mouth is be restored or the disease they’re exhibiting and then functional FSM comes in there FSM and Functional medicine and they are it’s Yeah. And that the results together are exponentially more than.
Dr. Carol:
I don’t know how you can do one without the other, correct?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Yeah.
Dr. Carol:
Functional medicine is awesome, but it takes too long and it cost too much. And FSM by itself, without the stable state that’s created with a functional medicine approach to health and a stable state, FSM by itself won’t hold most of the time. And so you combine the two and each one, it’s synergistic.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Synergistic it is, yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Carol:
Speaking of which, Kevin has a question. What frequencies would you use to treat a potential root canal? And I don’t know what your answer is, but. My answer is none.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Exactly that.
Dr. Carol:
We do not treat infection. Period. End of discussion. And you can correct me.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
No, I’m not, because we figured that out in 2009. Remember, that was my 2009 presentation With the use of FSM here, I had Periodontist using it in her practice. We had Eric Gordon and Gordon Medical using it, but we were it was really being widely used within Santa Rosa Periodontist who was using it, had a patient you put in an implant on a patient in an upper molar and within 24 hours that patient was in the ER and IV vancomycin with a very serious infection. And our first response because remember you and I having this conversation, our first response was, Oh, how do we know about these deep space infections. And where we came to was that, what would have happened if we hadn’t used FSM is that she probably would have had a failure of the implant here. She would have developed chronic health issues that these deep infections, and I’ll be talking about the fascial plains and the deep space infections during my presentation. It’ll be a little bit most of it. It’s going to be about pain pathways. But without running FSM in these deep space infections, they’re all encompassed by scar tissue and fascia and by running the frequencies for fascia, we allow these infections to drain.
Dr. Carol:
It was inflammation. You treated her to reduce inflammation.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
42. 41, 42 Yeah.
Dr. Carol:
Then you came back the next year and said, remember last year when I said we shouldn’t run inflammation if there’s infection. This year, I’m telling you you have to run 40 or reduce inflammation to discover the infection and there’s no way to fix the infection unless you remove the inflammation that’s encapsulating it.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Capsulated Yeah, yeah, yeah. So FSM is critical for that. So what’s evolved? We learned a lot. We learned a lot in those few years, but with respect to Root Canal, so how I use it currently in my practice we develop that surgical systemic protocol that we treat patients with when they’re having dental work done it, the kidneys, the liver. It’s basically supporting the adrenals, liver, kidney and then concussion at the end. And the patients do very well, particularly. Have you had used a lot to treat Lyme? My medically compromised patients who find it difficult just to sit in the chair and have their dentistry done. We use it with surgery, surgical cases. Surgical cases. It’s magic. Yeah. You don’t that the patient with the implant, you could see that there was an incision made, but there was no swelling, there was no redness, there was no bleeding. And you knew you could open up and see that there was a surgical site, but it was simply a line where the incision was with sutures, that there was no obvious, no other evidence of trauma.
Dr. Carol:
So when I tell people it’s like I’ve had nine jaw surgeries, so we had five to take out the infection and the failed root canals and then another four to put in implants and do this and that.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
And but we didn’t understand at that point.
Dr. Carol:
There was no swelling, no bruising, no pain. And we were by then you had developed the surgical systemic protocol. So I didn’t even have an anesthesia hangover. So it was pretty fun.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It was fun. And I think what we ultimately understood with you, though, is it was the mold, right?
Dr. Carol:
Eventually. What? Yeah.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
So and that’s an important piece.
Dr. Carol:
I have the what happens just so everybody is on the same page. 2014 I’m sitting there with Neil Nathan eating lunch, taking my digestive enzymes. And he said, Why are you taking digestive enzymes? And I said, I am in pancreatic failure. I don’t make amylase, they don’t make lipase, so I just take enzymes. And he said, You need to come see me. So I came in June to see him and he said, I want you to test your gag reflex. I didn’t have one. My palate didn’t raise. He said, Your vagus nerve doesn’t work. He tested me for mold. I had Stachybotrys exposure probably in 1998, accommodated for four years, and then how to re in 14. And what ended up happening was the jaw infection. When Jarvis did it, you could see a fistula.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Everything was into the signs, right? The infections were communicated with the sinus.
Dr. Carol:
And then on the right side, it was like a screen. It wasn’t a fistula. There were multiple holes through the bone up into the base of the sinus. Then there was biofilm, then there was mold, then there was biofilm, and then there was an aerobic infection. So I had the layer cake of anaerobic from the jaw. Mold. A biofilm. Mold. And then aerobic. So I was on antibiotics for six years. From four to maybe 13 until 2019 was when we finally got it. But it was a combination of all of them that we had to deal with, like, why are you on antibiotics for six years? Because I have a bone infection. So it’s on oral antibiotics for the bone infection caused by the root canals. I was on nasal spray and binders for the mold infection that was layered on top of it. And. I’d say with actually starting about four or five years ago, I started treating the Vagus every night to turn it back on. And so it all plays together.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It does. It does. I have a this will be one of the cases that I present. I’ve got a bunch of cases to present both at the symposium and with the advanced and patient with six Root Canal Center Maxilla. I’m going to talk more a little bit about root canals and the push-pull that we have. But the saying in our office is root canals are good till they’re not, and I don’t advocate taking them all out. The infection. I once had a patient patient participant in a seminar and say to me, why do you even you hate all root canals? And my late husband was an endodontist right? And he was very much a part of this. Now, he retired in 2012, referring to himself as a preacher that didn’t believe in God anymore. And he was a part of all of this. But we’ve made significant strides with respect to eradicating the pathogens. Valerie Kantor in LA is really leading the charge with that. She’s Mercola. I interviewed her actually two years ago. Now here it was either this past January 21 or January 22. So I’m not an advocate of root canals per say, though it is important. There’s there was studies that started being published in 2010.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
So let me just say I’m not an advocate of root canals, but I’m more mushy on those than I am Mercury. Mercury, nobody should have mercury in their head. Some of the dental schools aren’t even teaching it anymore. My younger daughter is a third year at UCLA. She’s going to get through UCLA without having to put Mercury in a patient. Yeah, and they don’t even have it in the pediatric clinic. The FDA stance on Mercury dramatically broke lockstep with the FDA in 2020 September of 2020. Finally With respect to the brain and this concept of proprioception that when we tap our teeth together, there’s proprioceptive impulses that go to the hippocampus and it’s a long body of research. I could talk for 20 minutes just simply about that research The old biological dentists where again, Jarvis has done so much, Dr. Bob Jarvis, because when they were taking these teeth out and just raising the bone and patients couldn’t have implants and it was really problematic. So in our patients that are nearly evidentialist, It can’t be infected and you have to manage the infection. If there’s a periapical radiolucency.
Dr. Carol:
Cone beam or x-ray.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Or either. Three D cone beam is going to be much more sensitive. If there’s periapical radiolucency. Bye bye. I am not a fan of retreatment. It just simply doesn’t work. maybe if you have a patient that bumped their front tooth. If they needed a root canal on a front tooth because of trauma, there was no infection. They don’t emotionally they can’t lose. The front tooth. Root canal was probably not done well when they were a child, we might see those teeth recover. We tell patients, fine, do it. But know, it’s a temporary fix and it’s a terrible financial investment. You may as well just take it out and put an implant in. And that’s more my perspective on that. However, Val Cantor has made and she’s using Frequency Specific Microcurrent in her office.
Dr. Carol:
Yay! Well done.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Yeah, she is. So all of her patients are getting it and using it. She’s using it to right now. And again, this will be another case that I present. We have a auricular cancer case with 70 gray of radiation and there’s a defect. Stanford actually was going to reconstruct her mandible with her fibula, but when she was told that she would never walk the same again, she said, I need another way. So actually we’re using Epsom, we’re using Ozone, we’re using PRP, PRP and Val’s laser. And this is a patient with osteoporosis. Yeah, But so when you have your osteo radial necrosis patients, you take that tooth out. It’s a disaster. It’s just a disaster. So we are indigenously treating those teeth, but they’re being treated with ozone, they’re being treated with a laser, they’re being treated with a gentle wave, all of these advanced technologies. So to have a run-of-the-mill root canal done at a general dentist or is very picky about the endodontist we use because they have to have invested in advanced technologies because standard endodontics just doesn’t cut it. And the literature is full of studies, systematic reviews, very high-quality studies, that talk about the level of systemic infection with respect to economically treated teeth.
Dr. Carol:
Speaking of infections, David Shen has a question. Tooth extraction due to root canal gone bad. We’re talking about this on Facebook, blah, blah blah.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I saw it.
Dr. Carol:
Waiting for antibiotics to fully work both bone graft a fully broke back. If I remember correctly. It takes six weeks for bone to heal.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It needs a minimum of six months. I remember. You waited six months. It’s 5 to 6 months. So your bone heals. But it doesn’t. That socket isn’t fully filled in for a minimum of six months. You have to. it’s all about the integrity of the quality of the bone. Sometimes they can do an implant in 4 to 5 months. We’re always safe if we wait six months and integration time.
Dr. Carol:
I remember going almost a year with no fillers.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
That timeline really hasn’t changed much in this office.
Dr. Carol:
No, I’d rather have an implant into healthy, solid bone. And even at that we had one fail. Remember this one over here or whatever this one was?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Immediate implants are a possibility.
Dr. Carol:
There is. How do you do that? If you remove an infected tooth and you put…
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
On an infected tooth? No, you’ve got someone who have a patient who doesn’t have a root canal. The tooth broke off at the gum line to carry it. Take it out, put it back in. Yeah.
Dr. Carol:
Have you ever seen FSM on its own resolve and infected root canal?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
No.
Dr. Carol:
Me either
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Nor have I have been able to get FSM to regenerate the pulp. My biggest hope in the early days was that we’d be able to, because I had some inflammation protocols, that we’d be able to intervene and stop that puzzle death. Now Val and I are working on it and we she’s written some protocols and I’ll have to check in. I can check in with her before I speak.
Dr. Carol:
It makes more sense to run the frequencies for infection, to change cell signaling around the infectious agent. So we’ve got what are the normal what are the infectious agents that have occur in the mouth? What I had into amoeba.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
You had amoeba, you had staph. You see everything. It can be HP.
Dr. Carol:
Staph, strep, all of it.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Mycotoxins and mycotoxins. And we weren’t running frequencies for mycotoxins and you had Mycotoxins is part of it. So there’s just the number of organisms is just massive. But particularly if you look at the microbiome and we’re really beginning to understand they’ve identified back in 2015 we started to identify the pathogens within the oral microbiome, and now we’re having a better understanding of how the pathogens change with. Or not how the pathogens change, but how the flora changes depending upon whether you’ve got a cancer patient versus a periodontal patient versus the changes in the oral microbiome is significantly different. Dependent on that. Would be that’s my dream. I will say we do not expose the nerve. So when I’m treating a person with deep decay, if they don’t have obvious symptoms, I’ll remove as much as I feel comfortable with because I don’t want to actively expose the nerve. That typically doesn’t work out very well. But if even if I leave a thin a millimeter or two of tooth structure that’s got some infection, we ozonate, ozonate. And then I use a product called BCC liner, which is a glass monomer based product. And sometimes I’ll use another product called Endo Sequence, but we’ll use something that goes then on top of these deep areas to mineralized the tooth structure and then put a composite or vocal products on top of that and put a provisional crown on. And very rarely do we have to go to Endo. I used to run frequencies in those instances, and I don’t at this point anymore. Because what would happen is we’d end up, if it was a tooth that was going to die it would die a painless death because we take we get rid of the inflammation. But the nerve, would still die and we’d take an X-ray six months later and there’d be a periodical release and see in the bone.
Dr. Carol:
Did you ever use the frequencies for infection and inflammation?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Pardon?
Dr. Carol:
You’d use the frequencies for infection and inflammation?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Infection and the whole. Yeah. I think maybe tweaking it. Val had some thoughts. My. Honestly, when Val and I started to work on it and I was knee-deep in this master’s program that I’ve just finished, so I think that will circle back around.
Dr. Carol:
You’re all very glad that you’re finished with your master’s program.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Dissertation done. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I think that will resurface again and I can take a look at it and have more bandwidth to work with. But I needed this piece for my education to be able to really put the FSM functional medicine pieces together and to have that foundational academic understanding of orofacial pain, oral medicine, central pain. That’s it was a rigorous program.
Dr. Carol:
What was your dissertation on?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It was 18 cases, right? It was 18 cases. I showed you some of the cases when you were at my house earlier this year. So it was 18 cases. They ranged in anything from that cancer case that I’ve told you about. One other case that I’m going to be presenting was a patient that had an intralipid, a big polyp in the sinus cortical it was remains from a root canal extraction that didn’t go well. There were tooth fragments in there, there was mercury, and they were going to purge it. It was just this nasty mess. And everybody kept injecting her with ozone. And it wasn’t until she got to Bridget Foss who started who referred her to me, and I went, This is coordinated. So we had Jarvis did the surgery and took it out. Bridget did the FSM and he took it out. He did Ozone, he bone grafted. But the FSM made a huge difference because she was in chronic pain and she also had two different types of parasites. Her gut was a mezzo. That will be a case I’ll be presenting in detail. Tinnitus. I this is my research paper at USC was is on tinnitus and TMD and the dramatic link between the two and I think well treating the tensor valley appletini and the tensor. Both of those muscles are dramatically affected during tinnitus. So I think FSM has a foothold in there. I’m anxious to get going on that. I think we need to use FSM with Burning mouth. I mean Burning mouth, a lot of burning mouth is traditional. There’s a lot of reasons patients complain about burning mouth, the gold standard, burning mouth, burning tongue where they do the tongue biopsy. It’s due to neural atrophy. So why can’t? We treat that right? We do.
Dr. Carol:
When you look up Burning mouth, it says it has something to do with food allergies.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Or that too. It can. Burning mouth is so a diagnosis of burning mouth is a diagnosis of exclusion. But there’s also there’s a feature where the nerve fibers have atrophied.
Dr. Carol:
Basically, it’s phantom limb pain for your tongue. I’ll be damned. Well limb pain is easy.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Exactly.
Dr. Carol:
89.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Exactly. Exactly. So you just have to understand, is it a nutritional deficiency that we’re dealing with it. Is it a B12 deficiency that we’re dealing with? I have a burning mouth case that we can talk about it I basically have a four-step diagnosis that we start with the low hanging fruit, right? And then we go from there. But I have a way in which I progressively rule out burning mouth, but traditional oral medicine or an oral face with plain pain, God bless them, they’re treating it with Clonazepam, right? We’re going to do our Clonazepam or Klonopin. Klonopin, the swish. Swish Klonopin, Spit it out because you don’t want to swallow it. You’re going to get addicted. But that’s basically how they’re treating it. And well, yeah, it works, but there’s long-term consequences with that systemically. So there’s so much that FSM can add to this field of orofacial pain and oral or mucositis. Look at with the throat cancer patients and we don’t have patients have oral mucositis anymore. So Mike, the 18 cases were a range of cases. I was very fortunate. The program director, what I learned from one of my friends who are functional medicine friend Andrea Ellen Bass, who preceded me in the program, was shot down routinely and she said, Don’t let anything come out of your mouth unless you’ve got studies to back it up. And of course. Having presented for IFM now for 13 years. I did. And I know how to talk the literature. And you’re all about the literature, right? FSM is all about science, the science and the scientific literature. So it was easy for me. And so every case had an element of medicine, and the majority of the cases also had an element of Frequency Specific Microcurrent. And so there’s presenting the literature with that along ozone, but staying within a traditional oral facial pain or medicine diagnosis, but using some of these different modalities to be more effective in our.
Dr. Carol:
Treatment and they accepted the FSM part of the case reports.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I have data, right? And because you can’t, the science doesn’t lie when I have your neuropathic pain paper, when I have the cytokine data paper, when I presented the data and the papers to go with my treatment rationale and people get better, how do you argue with that?
Dr. Carol:
That’s so exciting.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
It’s fun. It’s fun. And yeah, it’s just I’m nowhere near ready to retire.
Dr. Carol:
So I know the feeling. Oh, David, I think we’ve already answered this. David said he’s always wondering if FSM alone could have returned the remaining 60% of the lost jaw bone due to infection.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Won’t put back what’s not there.
Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Can’t get it done. Not when it’s infected. Because what people need to understand is that the first thing. The anaerobic bacteria do you taught me this. The root of the tooth is like straws. And you take the nerve out so it doesn’t hurt. But you can’t sterilize the straws.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
The technology that fails using can. She’s got unpublished UCLA research showing 98 to 99%. I’m not going to use the word sterility because it’s not sterile, but disinfection. So we’re better at it.
Dr. Carol:
But older root canals like the anaerobic bacteria, go out into the bone, kill the blood supply. And end of story. You can’t build that bone without blood supply. And the blood supply. The bacteria take care of. Is that correct?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Correct. Would you say that FSM would stimulate angiogenesis? Do we stimulate angiogenesis? I know ozone stimulates angiogenesis. There’s a medication called Pentax lined with vitamin E that stimulates angiogenesis. So maybe that’s why Val is using plasma pref, stem cells, in this woman FSM is playing a very vital part there in maintaining the inflammation. The osteo is using the osteonecrosis protocols that we’ve developed. So it’s an integral part of it. But you’ve got to have an agent that’s stimulating angiogenesis and I don’t know that in and of itself alone it will do that. I don’t know.
Dr. Carol:
We’ll find out. We have 2 minutes left, and that gives me time to ask you. So. We have now a number of dentists that have taken the FSM course.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Yeah.
Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Like it’s. We’re in the double digits of dentists. Yeah. And the next question they always ask is, when is there going to be a course for dentists?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I have the bandwidth now.
Dr. Carol:
Whats that?
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I have the bandwidth now.
Dr. Carol:
Yeah. Bandwidth. Now that you have your masters finished. So I promise everybody that we’re going to talk about that. We don’t have dates yet, but we have a plan.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I think the collaboration. I’m excited actually, because it was pretty I was a lone wolf for a while. But I think what I have seen with functional dentistry, I think we’ll also see with FSM is that it’s the collaborative knowledge with if we can get a dental group together, we may be able to figure out these issues of what are our protocols for growing bone back. Maybe we can keep those teeth working with Val because she’s her. She’s all about regenerative antibiotics. So what role can FSM play in regenerative antibiotics? Because we know it affects cell signaling. So as we dive deeper into these emerging topics, I think I think the future is limitless. I really do.
Dr. Carol:
Oh, that’s so exciting. And I’m excited that you got Val on board and you have the bandwidth and you have the connections and the dental world and the functional medicine world to bring all three of them together to. Do what you’re doing with FSM and dentistry.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
I’m excited. It just as I said it, it’s work is not work. It’s just fun. It’s fun. Fun.
Dr. Carol:
It’s why we do this. It’s 4:00. I told you this would be the fastest hour of the week. This would be.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Fun.
Dr. Carol:
And I think we got alf says thank you for a wonderful webinar. Yay! And that’s no questions. So we’re all good.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
Well, I look forward to seeing everybody in February.
Dr. Carol:
I’ll see you in February. Thanks so much.
Mary Ellen Chalmers:
All righty. Bye.
Speaker3:
The Frequency Specific Microcurrent podcast has been produced by Frequency Specific Seminars for entertainment, educational and information purposes only. The information opinion provided in the podcast are not medical advice. Do not create any type of doctor patient relationship, and, unless expressly stated, do not reflect the opinions of its affiliates, subsidiaries or sponsors or the hosts, or any of the podcast guests or affiliated professional organizations. No person should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content provided in any podcast without first seeking appropriate medical advice and counseling. No information provided in any podcast shall be used as a substitute for personalized medical advice and counseling. Fss expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on or any contents of this podcast.
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