Your teeth stick out through the skin like stalagmites.  While your teeth are located inside your mouth, they are technically outside of your body.  Any hard object, such as a tooth, under these conditions, will attract a film on its surface, sticky, full of proteins, bacterial colonies, and sometimes calcium deposits.

The same process occurs against the underside of industrial pipes, filters, hulls of boats and ships, support pilings under water.  Any hard object will attract these sticky films.

Now, tooth deposits that occur at the gum level create problems.  Gums act as a physical barrier to deposits.  They serve to protect the insides, biologic machinery inside the body.

At this point in our lesson, if we are ever to understand healing, we need to step away for a few moments and look at a much bigger picture.

These words that we use to describe different body parts and these diagrams that we draw are not real. The words are real enough, as well as the diagrams, but they only represent reality.

In a sense, they’re just maps that we use to navigate and understand reality, that is, the real territory.  You have to realize at all times in our thinking that the map is not the territory.

For example, look at this map of the United States, a rather large piece of colorful paper.  This map doesn’t depict anything about the reality of the United States.  This particular representation helps you navigate along through reality so that you arrive at a real destination.

Always remember this important distinction, because even the smartest scientists forget that the map is not the territory.  This forgetfulness leads to two big mistakes.

One can be called the component mistake, where individuals, human beings, are divided into separate components, or anatomic parts.  You have the brain component, the kidney, the skin, the teeth, the bone, etc.  Diseases of these parts are known as anatomic pathology.  Medical treatments directed toward anatomic diseases are largely successful, but there is something missing.

These anatomic structures appear to be real and distinct, like as components of a machine.  But they’re not parts at all.  They’re you.  You are you.  You are the total of all of you.  And you’re not the sum of your parts.  A person is a total self.  And on the cellular level, it is one for all and all for one.  Each one of us started out as a one-celled organism, a fertilized egg, containing all the information and potentials and energy for differentiation and a lifetime.  Please think about this critical distinction.

If you look much deeper, at something called the quantum level, you find that each individual, every human, is composed of unique energy, an unimaginably complex energy field.  We are all about vibrations. Communications within our personal energy field, our insides, are more than just fast.

They are simultaneous.   At the core, every individual consists of a unique vibrating signature.  And this energy field, this simultaneity, this indivisible wholeness, composes the real territory.

Our maps, our familiar words and diagrams, help us study and understand the human territory. Unfortunately, everyone has become so familiar with our representational maps that we mistakenly regard these maps as the actual, real territory.

The second mistake that science makes is related to the first.  We can describe it as reductive analysis.  Western science believes treating individual “component parts” or “systems” such as the heart or the circulatory system will lead to general improvements for individuals’ lives.

The pharmaceutical industry generates enormous business based on this misconception. This industry has, along with expensive and sophisticated marketing, produced specific purpose drugs for hundreds of diseases, real and imagined.

This simply cannot be done. Every drug you take affects all of you. Any possibly desirable effect is offset by all of its other effects.  Nobody knows all the so-called side effects of even one drug, let alone the drug combinations that most adults are taking.

When Western science begins to treat human life as an irreducible, simultaneous, dynamic, interwoven whole with an individual purpose for self survival, only then will our maps and diagrams become truly useful. Until then, the spirit of life will remain shrouded in mystery for science.

Okay, back to the words and our map about teeth, but with a new understanding of self and what survival means.  How does the whole individual deal with the teeth?  What kind of survival instincts are we seeing occur?

Well, on a visual level, we see that the gum, the epithelium acts as a barrier, preventing bacteria and any products from getting in.  If deposits are successful in causing the gum to be concerned, the first visual changes we observe are swelling, redness, and sometimes bleeding.  And yet this is really a purposeful adaptation that the body is making.  It is bringing much more blood to the area to fight bacteria at that battleground.

If the bacterial challenges intensify, gums begin to migrate away along the side of the tooth to buy some distance and time from the bacteria.  The body is literally redrawing its own boundary.  Gums give up some of its own tissue in order to protect the biologic interior.  Once again, the purpose is self-survival.  Gums redraw their boundaries. Over time gums can and will redraw a stinky tooth right out of its socket.

So that’s the visual level or most superficial map of defense and healing.

The next is the cellular, the microscopic view, the next deeper view.   We talked about increased blood flow that occurred when the gum became red and swollen.  Well, actually, blood flow is bringing a tremendous, vast, defensive network of cells and fluids to that location.

Here is a simple way to look at this.  There are carnivore cells that eat the bacteria. There are policeman cells, which literally handcuff and immobilize bacteria.  There are fireman cells that literally hose down the whole area.  And then, there’s a waste management team that carts away all the debris and waste products.

During this dynamic process, we have general contractor cells getting ready to rebuild and repair, directing carpenter cells, plumber cells, electrician cells.  This is called healing.

And your body does exactly what it needs to do at every moment.  It’s terrifically complex.  Our maps can’t do it justice.

We looked at the visual and we looked at the cellular.  Let’s go a bit deeper to the chemical and molecular defenses of the body.  The body produces a stream of disinfectants, detergents.  We know about gas warfare with nitric oxide and other gases being produced.

Other fluids contain pH neutralizers to deactivate acidogenic bacteria.  Maybe tartar or calculus formation is really a body defense to preserve its reference pH of 7.4.  The biochemistry of immunity activates a whole cascade of defensive chemicals.  And all of these are orchestrated in the most efficacious manner to insure survival of the self.

For our deepest understanding in 2016 we have to go to quantum energy fields.  Way below the molecular and chemical level, there exists an unimaginably complete universe of vibrations, wave propagations, and energy fields, where solid matter ceases to exist as if it never did at all.

Quantum physics describes our most fundamental level of understanding.  It is necessary to view gums and everything else as within an energy field.  On the quantum level, all matter, including our visible being, exists in the form of energy or vibration.  Our “self” or individuality is bounded by a unique, defined energy field, a unified energy field dedicated toward self-survival.

So, there you have it, some brief, updated maps about healing, visual, cellular, chemical/molecular, and even quantum maps.  If the gums would only just glow and show off their vibrations, their energy fields, then maybe our maps would become a bit more accurate.

You might ask. Why do we get disease if we have such a wonderful process called healing?  Well, let’s look at two reasons.

One has to do with our vast microbial residents.  Each of us is landlord to trillions of microbes and they are essential to our life and well-being.  But microbes also have their own cellular, chemical, and quantum weapons.  And we know that different types of bacteria communicate with one another.  Bacteria developed countermeasures against us, their landlords.  Given the chance they can become formidable opportunists.

But the other reason we get disease is because our own life is finite.  We all walk the road of life with two companions.  On one arm, we have mother nature.  And on the other, we have father time.  They are our constant companions along our road.  It is a toll road.  We have to pay as we go along.  There are no rest stops. Survival gets tougher.  It always ends the same.

Mother nature and father time are batting a thousand.  They win every time. And so, sometimes the body has to let go and give up a little bit at a time, to wall off and redraw defenses.  And frankly, dirty teeth are high maintenance items.  The body sometimes decides it is beneficial for survival to be rid of dirty teeth.

So, that’s what we’re talking about regarding natural healing.  It’s all about the concept of the whole self and self survival.

Let’s take these ideas, these new and improved maps, and apply them to treating dental disease.

What happens if 100% of our efforts are toward removal of tooth deposits?  What happens if we don’t touch or treat the gums at all, just meticulous deposit removal so as not to damage teeth or gums or interfere with the healing?

We have found that by simply removing deposits, the gums will proceed with complete natural healing on their own.  The gums know exactly what to do.  They never make mistakes.  And good health is the result.

For the past 40 years, in our practice, this treatment of removing deposits and leaving gums alone to heal has been our fundamental treatment goal.  It is not as easy as it sounds. We have tried and learned every possible method to remove deposits effectively.

Our therapeutic end-point is a completely smooth root surface.  That’s it.  Once the root is smooth and clean, the gums will heal completely.  We leave the gums alone.  They know exactly what to do.

In our next lesson we need to talk about an old out-of-date map that is still being used as the basis for standard gum treatments.