Dr. Stuart Nunnally – Our Dentist Talks About The Dangers of Mercury Fillings, How To Treat Root Canals, Fix Cavitations, & Prevent Tooth Decay Naturally

Episode 180—Dr. Stuart Nunnally—11/18/2013

Bradley: This is Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness. You’re listening to Justin and Kate on Extreme Health Radio. For more information about the Body Code, visit ExtremeHealthRadio.com/BodyCode.

Justin: That just brings the dancing girl out of you, didn’t it?

Kate: I don’t know why that music just makes me want to groove.

Justin: You’re doing the drums and got the smirk on your face.

Kate: So silly. I know.

Justin: Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. My name is Justin and that voice you heard of that lovely young lady…

Kate: Thank you very much.

Justin: …was my wife, Kate.

Kate: Hi, every body. Thanks for joining us.

Justin: Thank you so much and this is just been a dental…

Kate: A dental week.

Justin: A dental week here.

Kate: It’s been amazing. The more we can learn about dental stuff, the better.

Justin: Yeah, it’s going to be a great show. So if you have tooth problems or any kind of oral pathology issues with your mouth, you’re going to want to listen to this show because we have one of the best biological dentists, in my opinion, on the planet. Man, we love Dr. Nunnally. We have been to his beautiful offices there in Marble Falls, back in 2010, and we plan to go again. So stay tuned. We’ll introduce Dr. Stuart Nunnally in just a moment. This is Episode 180, so you can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/180 if you want to make a comment about the show or anything that Dr. Stuart Nunnally says, or check out the show notes, websites and all that good stuff.

Kate: I will be taking notes for you all.

Justin: Kate, the note-taker…

Kate: That’s right.

Justin: …will be taking notes.

Kate: Many shoes to fill.

Justin: Big shoes to fill. And for reference, this is Thursday, November 18, 2013 and if you’d like to follow us on Facebook, we’d love to have you join us. You can click the “like” button on our Facebook page and keep up to date with our shows and all that kind of good stuff. So if you’d like to join the show, there are lots of different ways to do that. You can email me at [email protected].

Kate: Or [email protected].

Justin: And you can also send a voicemail in to our guests that we can play on the air. You can pre-record that straight from your computer or you can join our live chat room that’s happening. Now we are broadcasting live, so if you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live, you can go onto that page and listen and type your question into the chat room and get your questions answered. So there are lots of different ways to join the show. And if you guys are interested in helping to keep this show free, during the holiday season and during any time really, you can actually make your purchases on Amazon through our link, and that would be a really great way to help support our show at ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Amazon. That would be a super way to keep the show free for everybody. Let’s see… We’ve got some great guests coming up here, Kate.

Kate: I know. I was just looking at the calendar.

Justin: Dr. Morton Walker, and he’s going to be talking about cancer, so that’ll be a great show. And then I’m not sure how you say his name—Paul Huljich—stress management. That’s going to be a good one. His website is StressPandemic.com and that’s going to be a great show, talking about how we can mitigate the effects of stress on our lives in a practical way.

Kate: Because I know everyone needs that.

Justin: And then we have Vani Hari from FoodBabe.com and she’s going to be talking about her work. And if you haven’t been onto FoodBabe.com, I’d highly recommend that. So it’s going to be a great show, talking with her. But today we have Dr. Stuart Nunnally and he has been practicing dentistry for over 33 years, I believe, and he is a holistic dentist, practicing out of Marble Falls, Texas—beautiful place. We went there, like I said, in 2010. And just an amazing person doing tons of research. He’s also a nutritionist as well, so not too many dentists understand the nutrition and how that plays into everything. So thank you so much, Dr. Nunnally, for joining us today.

Stuart: Oh, it’s a privilege. I’m just tickled to be with you.

Justin: Oh, excellent. And life is good in Marble Falls, isn’t it?

Stuart: You know, Marble Falls is just one of those little hidden gems that unfortunately has been discovered now, but it’s still beautiful and the air is fresh here and the water is clean and we think it’s a great place for people to come and visit and get a little bit out of the city. We’re about 45 miles west of Austin and 75 north of San Antonio, so we’re kind of in that little niche of the Texas hill country that gives people a good chance to escape and heal and relax.

Justin: That’s great. We had been hearing about your offices and your work for so long and then we decided to finally “You know what? We’re in California. We just need to fly to a dentist” and we needed to come see you. And so we did that in 2010 and had just an amazing, wonderful experience in your office. It’s funny, because people who don’t know about biological dentistry and how important your work is say to us “What are you…? You’re flying to Texas to go see a dentist?”

Kate: “You guys are crazy!”

Justin: “That’s crazy!” But I’m sure you have a lot of people that do that, don’t you?

Stuart: Well, we do. We do. You know, there are physicians around the world who want to send their patients to a biological dentist and so we are in that humbling position of seeing people from all over the world. We never dreamed it would be that way. You know, we’re sort of a—at least I’ve always personally been—sort of an “all or nothing” kind of guy, and when we decided really to make this a biological practice, I wanted to make sure that we tried to incorporate every protocol that would give a patient the optimum opportunity to heal. And so fortunately, there are great folks—practitioners—around the world who want that also for their patients and they refer to us and so it’s a great spot for us to be in because typically we see folks like you, Kate and Justin, who have sort of taken their health into their own hands and are really, really interested in trying to make sure that their dentistry, if it’s maybe a revision where all their dentistry is being redone, that it’s done with proper materials and done with protocols that protect the patient.

Justin: And you had a bit of an experience getting into biological dentistry. Tell people about how and why you got involved with doing biological dentistry to begin with.

Stuart: Well, you know, I had considered myself a holistic dentist because I hadn’t put a mercury filling in in many, many years, but for over 13 years ago now, I began to have neurological issues and to the point of at some point in my treatment, I was finally referred to the Lou Gehrig Center in Houston, thinking that I had ALS. And it just turned out that I had a toxicity issue, mostly from mercury, and even though I hadn’t put a mercury filling in in 20 years at that time, I had been removing them, not taking the proper precautions myself and finally was overwhelmed by the mercury exposure and began to have those neurological issues. So I actually went to see Hal Huggins, who at that time was seeing patients in Montreal and things looked so bleak for me at that time, I would’ve gone anywhere. But at any rate, Hal was kind enough to see me and was my first time to meet him, although I was familiar with the books he had written. You know, I came away from Montreal, after my treatment there—spent about eight days with him—and I came away with hope and with actually, even after that short time, beginning to feel better. As it turned out, I did not have an ALS diagnosis, but I had a mercury toxicity diagnosis. And so at any rate, it took a long time to recover. I went from being a fairly competitive triathlete to not being able to jog for a little over three years.

Justin: Oh wow.

Stuart: But I’m back, you know? And it’s fabulous. So after that whole experience, as so often happens, sometimes we have to get sick ourselves to really make a paradigm shift. And I did.

Justin: Is there any difference between the symptoms of something like ALS and mercury poisoning? Wouldn’t they be pretty similar?

Stuart: Yeah, they are. You know, the differences sometimes are very, very subtle and in my own case, I had many of the symptoms and I also would have had many of the symptoms of an MS patient. You can throw many of these autoimmune issues or disorders into one big basket. Some of them have very, very small, distinguishing characteristics. But at any rate, I’m so grateful that I did have a toxicity issue and the beautiful thing about that is over time, if you avoid re-exposure, you can get well.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, so what were some of the things that you used to overcome and get those toxins out of your body?

Stuart: Well, you know, for me the biggest thing was I avoided re-exposure, so I did everything possible to protect myself and my staff when I went back to work. Of course we wear respirators, we have special air filtration systems in the office—anything I can do to avoid exposure to mercury. And then I’ve also, of course, been very, very careful. I was a big fish eater. And unfortunately, you know our seas have become so toxic that many of the fish are way too high in mercury levels for me, and so I have been without a bite of fish for the last 13 years and I just avoid those foods that might have a mercury contamination issue.

Justin: Wow. Did you use any fancy supplements or…?

Stuart: Well, I did. And not fancy. You know what I chose to do? I chose to go very, very slow as I detoxed. So one of the things that I did is I invested in an infrared sauna, which was huge. That was a big, big part of my healing because interestingly enough, many times patients who have heavy metal toxicities lose the ability to sweat. And I was one of those. I could not break a sweat. And the infrared sauna helped me to retrain my body to be able to sweat. It was a huge part of my overall detox. And then I chose to go slowly, by doing a bag of vitamin C IV once a month—a big, healthy dose of 50 grams at a time—and that is also a wonderful, slow way to detoxify. Vitamin C itself is a poor chelator, but it elevates that wonderful little substance in our bodies called glutathione, which is a great chelator.

Justin: And doesn’t Dr. Huggins say as long as there is more going out than what’s coming in, you’re okay?

Stuart: Absolutely. And I think he’s right. I think he’s absolutely right on that. Of course he’s been seeing this for 40+ years and I think he is absolutely right about that.

Justin: So I saw something on your website just the other day called—this is a term I had never heard before and I’ve been doing this for quite some time—but it was called trigeminal neuralgia. What is that?

Stuart: Well, the reason we’re so interested in that is because first of all, the patients who have it oftentimes feel basically abandoned, except for the use of some potent neurological drugs. So trigeminal neuralgia is described in the literature as the most painful of all human afflictions and what I believe to be true is that most cases of trigeminal neuralgia are caused from an old extraction site, in other words, where a tooth has been removed and usually even that is a wisdom tooth. The toxicities from the extraction site can leach into a major nerve—the trigeminal nerve—and cause a very, very painful phenomenon called trigeminal neuralgia. So we are accustomed to cleaning those sites out. Those sites are most often referred to as “cavitations.”

Justin: Oh, I see.

Stuart: And so if a cavitation is truly causing trigeminal neuralgia, most times by cleaning that out, at least the literature says 75% of the time those patients will be asymptomatic after the treatment. In other words, the pain will go away. So we see many, many patients with trigeminal neuralgia and I think it’s absolutely a blessing to be able to see them because most often, we can have a real impact on their pain.

Justin: Wow. Is it pretty safe to say that people that have had their teeth or a tooth removed have a cavitation? Is it pretty much a guarantee?

Stuart: You know, I think it is—not so much in real young children, for example. Even when a permanent tooth has been removed in a young child, oftentimes those seem to heal in well, but as we get older—even into their late teens and early twenties—when a tooth is removed, that socket can fill up with bacteria before it heals and then a little cap of bone grows over that and the gum tissue and you’re left with a little cesspool of bacteria there, and that is called a cavitation. It goes by many other names, but I think most people know it by that. And so I think the answer to your question is many, many times, especially in the wisdom tooth sites, we end up with cavitations after the extraction. And it’s interesting, Justin, how some people seem to handle the toxicities from those well and maybe live with them for a lifetime and others don’t. And we have now sampled hundreds and hundreds of these via DNA studies and we know now that the bacteria within a cavitation are some of the most potent literally known to man and the toxins that they produce. So they can be a great challenge to the immune system and that’s what we do is we clean those out.

Justin: So if someone gets a wisdom tooth removed, which a lot of people have had—and I have had—and haven’t had those taken care of yet, if they have their wisdom teeth removed, what’s going on in terms of how the doctor is removing or the surgeon is removing those teeth that causes there to be such a thing as a cavitation? Are they doing it wrong?

Stuart: Well, most folks—and probably the most outspoken person on this issue over the years has been Hal Huggins—he over the years has said that dentists need to be removing the ligament that attaches the tooth to the jawbone in order for these to heal properly. And we typically in dentistry don’t do that. We simply remove the tooth. The ligament stays in place. And Hal has felt over the years that that ligament precludes the bone from completely filling in that area.

Justin: Oh, I see.

Stuart: So I think it’s important to remove the ligament. I think there are a number of other things, most of which he has proposed over the years, that we do so that they heal properly. One is that we don’t have a patient driving long distances afterwards, where they are jiggling down the road. Not them driving—just someone even driving them—but where they’re possibly disrupting that clot.

Justin: That’s a big deal, isn’t it?

Stuart: I think it is. I think it is. And of course he, over the years, has always recommended that high doses of vitamin C be given and preferably intravenously because of the toxicities associated with those. And then of course he has always recommended acupressure or acupuncture immediately afterward to restore the electrical network that goes through these. And a cavitation is a known block to the meridians where we have natural electrical impulses going. So all of that is part of the protocol that Hal developed over the years and I think it’s a very important protocol to follow to get these to heal properly.

Justin: When I was with you guys in 2010, I only had my mercury amalgam fillings removed and after that procedure, I had the acupressure, and that was quite a calming… That was pretty…

Kate: You came out looking like you were dead, in a good way. I’ve never seen him more mellow.

Justin: It was such a pleasurable experience to have that right after a procedure like that.

Stuart: Well, it is. It’s overlatching and that’s all part of the healing process is to really be still afterwards and let that clot have time to gel so that those wonderful little cells in there will mature into bone cells. But one of the most exciting things that we have instituted, oh, just within the last six months is now, in addition to doing all those other things I mentioned, we—while the patient is sedated, of course; we do this with the patient sedated via IV—we’ll draw several more tubes of blood and we spin that down and collect the platelets out of that—out of the patient’s own blood—and then we pack that concentrated group of platelets into the extraction site. And that is just like a dose of mega-healing all at one time, because platelets have such a marvelous impact on a healing response. So we are so excited about that. That’s called a platelet-rich fibrin technique. It was introduced in France a few years ago and anyway, we feel like it’s really a game-changer for us.

Justin: Yeah, that’s a brand new procedure that you guys have been implementing.

Kate: Yeah, since we’ve been