Cosmetic Dentistry Articles from
Las Vegas Cosmetic Dentist Dr. Michael Miyasaki

Checking Up on Oral Health: What You Should Know
Michael Miyasaki, DDS

Summary

Many of us dread visiting the dentist, often making oral health the least of our priorities. Needless to say, this visit can cause pain and also prevent it. But, what if you had other pain that was somehow connected to your oral health? How do you know if you are visiting the right dental specialist? This was the case for patient, Barbara Hulick, who joins this interesting webcast to share a similar experience that may conjure some of your thoughts about past experiences. Also joining the program is Barbara's dentist, Dr. Michael Miyasaki for an eye-opening discussion about oral health.

Barbara Hulick, a middle-aged business woman from Las Vegas describes how terrible debilitating pain in her head, shoulders, neck, and jaw caused her great concern. What type of specialist would be most advisable? Barbara turned to Dr. Michael Miyasaki, a dentist and clinical director of the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies. He is a recognized leader who has trained dentist all around the globe. In his observation, it was later discovered to be Barbara's jaw and the alignment of her bite that was the root of the problem. As Barbara's dentist, Dr. Miyasaki further describes her condition as TMD or temporal mandibular disorder. After Barbara's problem was assessed, it was determined she would need to be seen by a neuromuscular dentist. Find out more about this type of specialist in a webcast geared towards helping you become a smart investigative patient, like Barbara Hulick.

Listen this webcast to hear Dr. Miyasaki explain what types of procedures are preserving long-term dental health, the latest in esthetic porcelain restorations or composite restorations, and reversible splint type treatments. Learn more about the connection between jaw bones, bites, migraines, and oral alignments in an informative program about oral health that is sure to intrigue you.

Introduction

Andrew Schorr:

Good morning wherever you may be around the country. I'm Andrew Schorr broadcasting live from Seattle, right by the Space Needle where it, well, we think it's hot. In the low 90s. We had records early in the week. We don't have a lot of humanity here so you may be around the country saying, Andrew, you know, let's get real here. We have heat. We have humanity. We have thunderstorms. We don't. We have heat but we don't have humanity so, okay, I shouldn't complain. It was really beautiful yesterday and the day before, and no rain. Not a cloud in the sky.

What's this show about? Week after week we do important medical and health topics and there's no show on the radio like this. So we invite your calls. You're always welcome to call in, and we would be delighted if you did. Just give us a call. You can also send me an e mail, and just send it to andrew@patientpower.

Okay. I want to tell you a story and the story is about pain. And a lot of people have chronic pain, and it may be you drink too much coffee and it leads to headaches. That could be one thing. Some people take too much Tylenol or some other products, they kind of OD on that, and some of those drugs, Excedrin I think has caffeine, and it used to, and you say, oh, my, I'm getting headaches, maybe that's it. Or you could have migraine or tension headaches or whatever.

Well, I want you to meet Barbara Hulick, and Barbara is a businesswomen in Las Vegas now where she moved several months ago. And Barbara, thank you for calling in. You were getting just terrible headaches, weren't you?

Barbara:

Yes, I was. They are just like a migraine but not, I guess not quite as bad as a migraine but just very debilitating. And I don't know what else to say.

Andrew Schorr:

And as a single woman and as a businesswoman, I think, would you say you're in the food service business? How would you describe what you do?

Barbara:

I'm in the food manufacturing business. I process fresh fruits and vegetables for a produce company locally in Las Vegas and before this Cleveland and then before that in Baltimore.

Andrew Schorr:

Okay. So there you were in Cleveland, and you get some work done on your teeth back in January, and something went wrong, didn't it? And what happened after that?

Barbara's Story

Barbara:

I wanted to have some crowns replaced for multiple reasons, mainly esthetic and just they weren't fitting right. And I went to a dentist that I thought was okay, and he did the work and we were in the process of doing bite adjustments and something just went wrong. Like one day it was fine, he made the bite adjustment, and the next morning I woke up with basically I couldn't open my jaw. I had this screaming headache like I never had anything like this before, and it wasn't like a tension headache. It was just like don't touch me kind of headache. And apparently in the bite adjustment it went awry, and my jaw went out of place.

Andrew Schorr:

So you have terrible pain and then you're moving for your work and you moved to Las Vegas, and soon after you got there you knew you had, I mean, I know you needed help along the way, but then you needed it dealt with once and for all, so you started interviewing dentists, right?

Barbara:

Yeah, when I was in Cleveland I talked to a specialist there so I could at least get my jaw open so that I could eat, and then they told me to go to Las Vegas because they're like the number, the LVI Institute was like the best place in the country to get this type of symptoms fixed. I don't know quite the right name for it. TMJ, I guess. And so when I went to Las Vegas I sort of just started looking through the phone book and looking at advertisements and looking at the LVI Institute, and I just sort of picked four names randomly out of a hat type of thing and just started interviewing them because I wasn't going to, what happened to me in Cleveland wasn't going to happen to me here.

Andrew Schorr:

So you end up talking to Dr. Michael Miyasaki, dentist, clinical director at, 0as you said, LVI or Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies, or I think you call him Dr. Mike. What did Dr. Mike do?

Barbara:

Well, all the dentists, kind of the basic thing before is they interview you for about an hour and a half to two hours, which is what he did, and I just, we went through the interview, and I think you kind of just have to trust your gut after interviews when you're trying to pick a healthcare provider, and I liked how he presented it. He says, you know, I don't know if I can cure you cure you, but I think I can fix it. And that was the best thing that anybody could say because all these other dentists went, oh, yeah, I can fix this, I can fix this, I can fix that. And having been a patient for my 47 years for a lot of different doctors they always like to say that, but usually, sometimes the cure is worse than the symptoms type of thing. So I liked how he presented it.

And we went in probably a week later and they put you through a series of tests where they hook up wires to your head and muscles in your face and in your shoulders and the top part of your back, and they do like a computer, Dr. Mike can explain this a lot better than I can. All I know is you see a series of graphs and you can kind of see where the pain and the pressure points are, and it's really very interesting.

Andrew Schorr:

And what happened after that?

Barbara:

He made what, I call it a splint. He calls it something else. Basically having had braces for a lot of years it's like a little retainer, and he just adjusted the bite with this little retainer. And I want to say within days just all the major symptoms sort of just melted away to like, oh, my god, I'm not in pain any more. It's like you're living with it the whole time and you get used to dealing with the pain so you sort of try to forget it, and then all of a sudden one day you wake up and you can move your neck all the way around and you don't have to eat ten Tylenols to get through the day type of thing. You're like, wow, this is starting to be nice. So that's basically what happened.

Andrew Schorr:

How are you today now, Barbara, moving forward? You sort of got your life back.

Barbara:

Well, part of the therapy like to fix all of this is just going to be months just trying to get it back to where it is. We go through like every week or every other week I'll go in and he'll make a bite adjustment to kind of align my jaw the way it should be naturally. And actually I cracked part of it so I'm not in the best of moods today. I'm a little cranky because when it goes off, it goes off. But you call him up and the next day you go in and he fixes it, and then you just keep ongoing, and I've gone three and four weeks with no problems at all type of thing. So it's really kind of a neat thing. I think we're probably in the midway point of the treatment. I kind of see this as being we're pretty close but we're not right there yet. And it's nice, yeah.

Andrew Schorr:

Okay. Well, I'm glad you've gotten some relief from that extreme pain you had.

Dr. Michael Miyasaki, your dentist from the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies or LVI, he's the clinical director. Dr. Mike, you're with us. We're going to be taking a break in a minute but when we come back I'm going to want you to explain what her problem was, Barbara, how typical that is. And then also help us understand what today the range of treatments are, what's the upside, what's the downside, how you go about deciding how you can help someone. So are you up for that, Dr. Mike.

Dr. Miyasaki:

Yes. Sounds good, thank you.

Andrew Schorr:

Okay. And then also during the program I want to discuss, certainly understand TMJ, because often we think of pain related to where you need to take a pill, and I think Barbara you were saying you were taking a lot or is it migraine, is it something else, but where the dental side of it comes in. And then certainly there's been a lot of progress in dentistry and other areas too, and Dr. Michael Miyasaki is going to help us through that, including what a lot of people wonder about, and that is simply whiter teeth, better smile, what are the different ways to get there because certainly that's an interest for many people.

I want to mention just a couple other things about Patient Power. We do this every week and so take a look at our website, patientpower.info. There will be a replay of today's program on there within a day or so too. You can get it as a podcast and take it with you on the go. We'll be right back with more on dentistry today and oral health on Patient Power right after this.

Andrew Schorr:

Thanks for spending part of your Sunday with us on Patient Power and HealthRadio Network wherever you may be. Today we are doing what's called Checking Up on Oral Health, What You Should Know. And we began our program with the story of Barbara Hulick from Las Vegas who had terrible, terrible pain in her head and her shoulders, her neck, just terrible debilitating pain. And it turned out to be her jaw and the alignment of her bite, and she got help in her case from Dr. Michael Miyasaki who is a dentist and clinical director of the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies and there are dentist who trained there who are around the world now.

Dr. Miyasaki, thanks for being with us. Help us understand what you would call the health problem that Barbara has had and how many people have it.

Do Migraines have a Oral Connection?

Dr. Miyasaki:

That's a great question. Good morning. What Barbara is suffering through we would classify as TMD, which is temporal mandibular disorder. And often you hear TMD and TMJ, and actually it gets a little confusing there. The joint, the jaw joint is actually called the TMJ, the temporal mandibular joint, so I think what Barbara is suffering through right now would be better classified as TMD. And it's estimated that there's 28 million Americans, about 15 percent of our population that suffers some kind of debilitating migraine headaches, chronic headaches, and it causes many of them to miss work or to take a lot of different medications in order to block the headaches. And a majority like Barbara are women.

So I think Barbara's story is a great story in that she's very highly educated, she's discriminating, she didn't want to go to any dentist. She kind of sought out the type of dentistry she thought that would provide her with, I don't know if you want to call it a cure but treatment that would improve her condition, and she's been great to work with. And I think the value of having her in this program is that she's kind of in mid treatment, as she's described already. So we've been able to take her from having debilitating headache pain to resolving that. And right now, as Barbara was describing, is we have her in a splint or an orthotic. It's just a plastic overlay that overlays her natural teeth, and with that we've been able to change her jaw position and we've been able to see that the pain goes away.

Right now it's a temporary fix because what we want to do is we want to see if we can make her better and stabilize her there before we do anything permanent. And so as she described to you, because it is plastic every once in a while a little piece may chip or break, and when that occurs it throws her off balance again, the headaches will come back. So we just go back and correct that. So we can see that we can actually modulate. When her bite goes off, the pain comes back. When we get the bite back on, the pain goes away, so we can see that really is related to her bite.

Andrew Schorr:

Let's talk about that a little more. So first of all just in the broader context I've done a couple of shows on Patient Power, and all the replays are on patientpower.info, of migraine headache. So certainly when you have chronic pain like this then you have to say, well, do I have migraine? Is it caused by something in my diet? But it could be your jaw. So what is it about jaw alignment that leads to pain? Is it something we're doing, gritting our teeth at night, or what causes the pain?

Dr. Miyasaki:

You know, it could be all of that. That's a great question. The way that our feeling is that most of the migraines and the headaches, and we can go into a myriad different symptoms, facial pain, neck and shoulder pain, ringing of the ears, tingling of the fingertips, sore teeth, clicking and popping of jaw joints, those can all be things that are related to muscles that are hyperactive. They're in spasm and painful. So if some of your listeners have ever woken up and they've been clenching their teeth at night, they can go through and they can push areas of their face and those areas will be sore because the muscles beneath the tissue are actually sore.

And what we try to do, and Barbara described, is we will use the computer, and we, the little wires that she said that were hooked up to the head, we just use little, just like when you have an EKG at the hospital, we put little pads over certain muscles of the head and neck area and we can actually objectively measure the muscle activity. And what we would like to do is have those muscles be very calm and relaxed most of the time, and so we adjust the bite so that those muscles are relaxed. And by doing that typically we will find that spasm is released and those headaches go away.

Andrew Schorr:

We're visiting with Dr. Michael Miyasaki from the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies, and his patient, Barbara Hulick, who is, as he's described, is dealing TMD. Now, help us understand this approach that you're talking about versus what I've always heard about, the maybe jaw surgery. Like my wife, her jaw is not in the greatest alignment, and every time she goes to the dentist they say, Esther, you may be headed for surgery some day where we're going to have to crack your jaw and move things around and realignment. So where does that approach come in, which I think has been the traditional approach, and what you're talking about now?

Dr. Miyasaki:

Well, what I'd like to do is send your listeners to the website leadingdentists.com, it could be dentist plural or singular, dot com, and on that website we have a little bit more of the discussion on the symptoms and the type of treatment that we're discussing this morning. But in theory depending on like in your wife's condition where that jaw, surgically they want to reposition her jaw and in some cases that is needed, but what we try to do is we try to treat the patients as conservatively as we can is. And sometimes the teeth, when the teeth come together, the little peaks and valleys of the teeth join, that position of the jaw is sometimes forward, sometimes back, sometimes right where it needs to be. And in many cases instead the actually moving the bone we will actually possibly reshape of teeth or maybe orthodontically move the teeth so that the jaw is in the correct position. And when we get the jaw in the correct position, the muscles actually relax, and the symptoms go away. So in certain cases surgery is needed. In other more mild cases we may be able to do something a little bit more conservative than that.

Andrew Schorr:

Now, Dr. Mike, there's a debate about this in dentistry. Why is it controversial?

Dr. Miyasaki:

You know, I think that's a great question again. The dental profession, we have our controversies, and one of them falls into how to manage a patient's bite. And I would say it takes a lot of time to take care of patients such as Barbara, those with headaches. Most dentists don't have the time or the training to do that, so again that's why at LVI we've trained hundreds of dentists throughout the world now to treat patients this way. Most dentists are just trying to treat the patients and keep them in the bite that they entered the office with, so whether it's a good bite or a bad bite they just try not to upset the apple cart and they just try to leave things the way they are. And for most patients, they'll do fine there. The body is able to adapt to a little bit of an imbalance and if we don't make things too bad they'll be okay. There's another philosophy where we look at the jaw joints and actually position the bones in a certain position believing that that will enable the muscles to relax.

Our theory is that we'll start with the muscles first, we will get them relaxed, and then typically the jaw bones will all fall in the correct position that way. So this takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of training. We like the way we do it because we have a computer like Barbara described and we can actually show patients objectively are we making them better, is a different bite position making them worse. And we often see a very high success rate in the cases that we treat with chronic pain.

Andrew Schorr:

Well, we'll talk more with Barbara in a second after the break because it takes a lot of research, and we definitely recommend people being a smarter patient to see what is the right approach for you. And if you have jaw problems and bite problems, I know for a little while years ago I wore sort of a night guard kind of thing to help, and I have my own feelings about that. We'll talk more to see how you get the best care for your dental problems and also find out what's new. We'll be right back with more of Patient Power after this.

Andrew Schorr:

As we continue our discussion about oral health with Dr. Michael Miyasaki, clinical director, dentist, at the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies and his patient, Barbara Hulick, who is in Las Vegas, who suffered from terrible pain in her jaw and her head and her neck, and then it turned out to be in her bite, and she's in the middle of getting that realigned, but she's already seen a lot of relief. Barbara, what my program is about is helping people be smarter patients, and it sounds like that's what you really worked on doing, to be a smarter patient. So how does someone go about that? And in this case with dentistry, how did you do that to make sure that you were going to get the right care, because I think you told me initially you weren't sure back in Cleveland you were.

Barbara:

Yes, when I was in the Cleveland I had just moved there, and I was just looking for a regular general practitioner kind of dentist to do some basic work, or at least I thought it was basic work. And again there I like talked to two dentists and just went with, you know, your gut feel. This guy sounds like a nice guy, it was convenient, blah, blah, blah. And apparently he didn't have the skill set needed for my type of history, I guess, which he knew my history, which was like maybe 12 years worth the braces back when I was younger, and just multiples of different things. And you know he adjusted the bite, put me in a situation where I couldn't open my mouth. I was in extreme pain. It was like an emergency room time. Once I got everything settled and I knew I was moving to Las Vegas I swore I was never going to go through that again, at least with a dentist, and I was going to make sure that I had a specialist no matter what.

So I went and I talked to a lot of people in Las Vegas. I talked to a lot of the dentists that I had known and that I had met along my travels with this particular illness. Since I'm not from the West Coast, I called some friends in California, what do you think, what should I do, who do you know? And then I got a list of four dentists, basically, two of them through, actually the yellow pages type of thing. And then Dr. Mike came through a recommendation of a friend and then another gentleman who is in the Las Vegas area through a recommendation of a friend. And I just sat down and interviewed them, like it was a job interview because this was a lot of money. Insurance is kind of not, is and isn't, will cover it and won't cover it. And I just was like you guys are going, I need to make sure that you're going to fix this or know what you're talking about. I went online and learned everything I could about TMJ, they're calling it TMD now. There's always this mixed names with that. And I wanted to know what they were going to say because I didn't want some, and then I wasn't going to go through surgery. That was like an absolutely you're not going to do this because I think it was necessary. That's kind of how I got,

Andrew Schorr:

Great story. You're a true health consumer. And I think so often on this show, we've talked about it for heart surgery and a variety of different chronic conditions, and I think it's just as important in dentistry and oral health as well.

So, Dr. Michael Miyasaki, we said that Barbara is midway in treatment. Where will she end up when you really have it nailed, if you will, where her muscles are relaxed, she's pain free? What do you do to kind of make it permanent?

Dr. Miyasaki:

That's a great question, and Barbara have talked about that. And I think as we go through her treatment and we figure out where the final bite will be and how much of a change to her bite we have to accomplish, that's when we will decide on the final treatment for her. It could be, for every patient it could be a little bit different. If a patient doesn't get better from our therapy, which is reversible, we would just pop off the plastic off her teeth and she'd be back to where she started from. We may elect to do nothing. Where she is right now with her orthotic, it's just a reversible process. Some patients will like just stay in that for years. If her bite is fairly close from where we started to where we end up, we might just reshape the teeth a little bit so that they meet better. That's a coronoplasty or colabrasion. We might do ortho, move the teeth restoratively because she already mentioned it before where she had some crowns that were adjusted, and that threw her bite off. We may have to do some new restorative work for her. And, as you mentioned, in some cases surgery may be the best option for some patients, although it's probably a small percentage of the patients that we see.

In talking about what Barbara just talked about, again if your listeners go to leadingdentists.com there is a lot of information there in what we're talking about this morning that will kind of arm your patients so that if they go and interview other dentists that they know what they're asking and why they're asking the questions they are. And then also at leadingdentists.com we have a section there to find dentists, neuromuscular dentists that provide the type of treatment we're talking about this morning. So it's a great resource for your listeners.

Andrew Schorr:

And is that the term that somebody should be using, looking for somebody who is not just a dentist but a neuromuscular dentist?

Dr. Miyasaki:

That's the type of occlusal therapy or bite therapy we provide. It's called neuromuscular dentistry, correct.

Preserving Long-Term Dental Health

Andrew Schorr:

Okay. Let's move on to a different area because while that affects many people, you know what you see in all the ads and on the buses driving by and everything is about a brighter, whiter smile. So what's going on there as far as helping people in that way but yet preserving their long term dental health?

Dr. Miyasaki:

Oh, there's all kinds of advances going on. I think a lot of your listeners have probably seen patients being treated on some of the shows, I Want a Famous Face, Extreme Makeover, those types of shows, where patients go in with kind of broken down, ugly teeth, ugly smiles, and they come out looking beautiful after just a few weeks of treatment. A lost dentistry is moving to where we're getting away from all the metal type of restorations, and we have more esthetic porcelain restorations or composite restorations. And a lot of patients are out that that have nice teeth but maybe they're dark so they're going in for cosmetic tooth whitening, so there's all types of new things going on. And it's an exciting time I think in dentistry because of that.

Andrew Schorr:

Now, Dr. Miyasaki, are there downsides to any of this? I mean certainly we went through all this research about whether there was downside to mercury fillings, which we all got, I got as a kid, I got a whole mouthful of that, and I think it worked out that it's not a concern. But is there a concern about these resins or other things that, god forbid, we find out years from now that either they didn't last or that there was some other harm caused by them?

Dr. Miyasaki:

You know, as of now I've elected, I do everything with nonmetal restorations, the resins, and the porcelains, and I haven't seen any downside. They've been around for, some of the materials that we're using, they've been around for decades. So they're not new materials. It's just that our techniques in using them have gotten better so they are lasting longer. And as far as the downsides to the patients' overall health, there are very few. Every once in a while, it's very rare, you might find somebody who is allergic to one of the materials and then we just avoid that, but that would be for anything that dentists use.

Andrew Schorr:

Okay. Let's take a break. We'll talk more about this area of dentistry and get some other guidance from Barbara as a consumer too when we come back with more of Patient Power. We'll be right back.

Andrew Schorr:

Andrew Schorr here live from sunny, pretty hot but not humid Seattle. You know, we don't have bugs out here really, and I miss it. I grew up in the East, and during the summer, and I'm sure our listeners back there know this well, you've got fireflies. You've got mosquitoes but you've got fireflies, and we used to catch them as kids. No fireflies out here. My kids don't have fireflies. They're really missing out, I think, in one of the little joys of summer.

Okay. Well, as we continue our discussion about oral health we're going to be visiting again in a second with Dr. Michael Miyasaki, dentist and clinical director at the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies, but before we do I just want to mention what's coming up next week at this time, and a pretty controversial issue. We're going to be visiting with Dr. Glen Elliot, Ph.D. He is from UC San Francisco, a top medical school, and he is the author of Medicating Young Minds, and the whole question is are we overmedicating our kids for varies psychiatric conditions, ADHD, bipolar disease, anxiety, depression. Is this increasing? Do they have more need for medications or is it a bad thing or how do you decide what's right for your child? So he's written a book about it. We're going to talk about that next week. All the replays are on patientpower.info, and the replay of today's program will be there in a couple of days. It's also rebroadcast several times on healthradionetwork.com. So just check out that.

Dr. Michael Miyasaki, so we talked about TMD and TMJ, what we're concerned about with Barbara. She's in the middle of treatment, and it seems like you're making a real difference there. We talked about cosmetic dentistry. And then you've got people like me who had a lot of dental work. I was the kid who got a lot of cavities, and every time I came home from the dentist my father fainted at what the dental work was going to be. Lots of fillings, gold inlays, I know my father and my mother in law, you know, bridges and inlays and all these kinds of things. And then sometimes those wear out. So you talked about the progress in dentistry. So people who need new kind of restorative work, where are we now?

The Future of Dentistry

Dr. Miyasaki:

You know, I think that leads into what we've been talking about all morning in that as the teeth wear down what most dentists are trained to do is we just kind of take the bite that you come in with, as we discussed this morning, and then we just replace a crown or a restoration of tooth, tooth by tooth. What happens as we get older in most cases is the bite begins to shift as the teeth break, as we wear the teeth away, and as we get older because of that wearing of the teeth, the position of the jaw will begin to change. And it would be good I think to go to leadingdentists.com, find a neuromuscular dentist, have an evaluation so see where the bite should be, and if you're starting to replace a lot of old restorations have those restorations restored to maintain a better bite.

Because a lot of us, as we get older we start to get neck and shoulder pain, and we just assume, ah, it just has to do with our age or work over the years. What we find is that if we do what we did with Barbara, we put an orthotic or reversible splint type treatment in your mouth a lot of the symptoms will go away. So if you're planning on having a lot of restorative done I would consider seeing a neuromuscular dentist and having an evaluation done before that work is replaced.

And going back one step before that as you described your show for next week. What we're tying to do is a lot of children these days are undergoing different types of medical treatments, they're on prescription drugs for attention deficit or listlessness or they're not sleeping, and what we actually find is that a lot of it has to do with their bites also. So we're training our doctors to look not only at the older population, especially this year the baby boomers in their 60s, but we also try to intercept treatments earlier in children so that we can treat them without medications also.

Andrew Schorr:

You know, it's interesting you mention that. My 12 year old, who is going to be tested tomorrow for ADHD, we've been looking into that, she definitely grinds her teeth at night and all sorts of stuff. So are you saying that that's the kind of thing we need to bring up with the dentist or a properly trained dentist to understand that in the mix and whether that plays a role?

Dr. Miyasaki:

Yeah, I would. If I had a child, I've got four children, and if I had a child where they possibly had some kind of attention deficit disorder what I would do is I would have a dentist evaluate them. Typically what we will see in the patients where we can't treat them as dentists is we will see an inadequate airway. They might have what we call shiners on each eye, kind of dark cycles. Their high palate or the roof of their mouth is very high. They're tongue is not able to sit in their mouth properly. And sometimes it's just as easy as taking the tonsils out. But what your listeners have to do is they have to find a professional, dental professional that they trust in their area, have an evaluation done. It's just one of those things that could be very simple, and it's just another avenue that I would explore if it were my child.

Andrew Schorr:

Very interesting. I'm wondering if sometimes these are some ah has. My daughter has huge tonsils.

Dr. Miyasaki:

Yeah. Right.

Andrew Schorr:

Huge tonsils. So it's really interesting, and I think, Barbara, I'm sure you're listening too, is we need to be smarter consumers, and I think what this program, because I've had many medical doctors on, is I think proves that it's the whole body connection, and certainly you can't ignore the dentistry part of it, the oral health part of it, to take a whole look.

We're going to take a break, come back with some final comments from Barbara and Dr. Miyasaki in just a minute as we conclude our program on checking up on oral health and what you should know. Please recommend this program to others too. We'll be right back.

Andrew Schorr:

Andrew Schorr here on Patient Power as we come live to the final section of our checking up on oral health program, what you should know. We've been visiting with Dr. Michael Miyasaki, dentist and clinical director of the Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies, or LVI, and there are many, many LVI trained dentists around the country, many of the neuromuscular dentists that we've been talking about. And then also Barbara Hulick, who is his patient, in the middle of being helped for her jaw problems that led to terrible pain.

So, Barbara, you listened to all this. You had done your research, went over time, you suffered a bit not getting the right care first until you connected with people who could really help like Dr. Mike. So how would you shorten this? For someone else who is listening, what would you say to them so they can do not pass go and get the right care?

Barbara:

It's hard to shorten it because you have to do your own research.

Andrew Schorr:

Right.

Barbara:

I mean, you're stuck in the middle of it. You just have to deal with it, and I think just reaching out. The internet is a great thing, and just knowing what it's called and having ways of researching it, but you have to do the research. There's no question about shortening it up in that way. But finding out that it's jaw related. I mean, I went years with a lot of other symptoms, and I'm like sitting here listening to this conversation now going, oh, maybe it was that all these years. Some of these headaches have come and gone from bite adjustments over the past 30 or 40 years, so it could have been that. I think just knowing that there's another option for a headache or another option for these tension headaches or migraines, just look at that before you start taking a pill or a doctor says he can cure you. Be an educated consumer because, no disrespect to the industry for dentists and doctors, you guys don't know it all, and we really need to ask the right questions as patients.

Andrew Schorr:

Right. Right. If we were buying a house, buying a stereo, we'd ask questions. Do it for your health too. Barbara. Right.

Andrew Schorr:

Barbara, we wish you well as you go on with your treatment and hopefully remain pain free. And Dr. Miyasaki, a final comment from you.

Dr. Miyasaki:

Yes, I just want to reassure the listeners that what we've talked about this morning is nothing new. The treatment techniques that we've talked about have been around for over 30 years. I think it's important in knowing that what we've talked about this morning, whether it be headaches or tingling of the fingers or ringing of the ears, there could be multiple causes. So what I would encourage our listeners to do is go to website, again leadingdentists.com, interview some of the doctors on that website, find somebody you're comfortable with and let them develop the correct diagnosis for you.

Andrew Schorr:

Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Michael Miyasaki from Las Vegas Institute for Advanced Dental Studies. Have a great week everybody.

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