# M.E./CFS & Teeth?



## Susan Purry

Having returned from a truly awful dental appointment involving pain, gagging, broken needles and where I was told that the four fillings I need are so large that I have to have gold overlay things that will require a further 3 appointments, and that my teeth are so weak that drilling them is like slicing through butter with a warm knife, I've got to wondering... have any of you found your teeth decaying much more since you developed M.E./CFS than before you had it? This may just be a complete coincidence of course, but I have been wondering about it. This is my eight filling in a year... I'm 25... I'm so not impressed.


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## azvessey

My dental problems took a real nose dive when the mecfs set in.It got to the point where I would go to the dentist and tell him I had big trouble with the nerves in a particular tooth; he would drill it out and tell me there was nothing wrong with the tooth at all, and, it had already had a root canal done so the pain was referred anyway.My teeth were just crumbling away and continued to do so until I resolved all of the contributing factors which were exacerbating my fatigue. I found particularly that the change in diet brought an overnight change for the better. Once I resolved the problem I had with malabsorption my serum calcium levels came up and all of those dental problems just disappeared. I've still got prematurely aged teeth but time once again stands still as far as the decay goes.Cheers. Tony


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## Susan Purry

Thanks for responding. How did you know you had malabsorption, Tony?


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## azvessey

>"How did you know you had malabsorption?"I love easy questions! When my age, sex, and metabolic requirement dictates that I should be holding my own at 2100 cals/day, but, I'm eating my way through 5000 cals/day, still losing weightand my serum levels are borderline low with every element, plus, my hair started to fall out. When I dropped back to 1500 cals/day everything (accept for the hunger) fell into place. That is when I knew that I had to concentrate on the quality rather than the quantity. The result is I ended up doing about 6-7 diets simultaneously; just to be sure. Funny thing is when I relax the rules of any one of those diets for more than 1 day the symptoms gradually return.


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## M&M

Hi Susan!I've not had any problems what so ever with my teeth, but I've only had CFS/ME for a couple of years, so I'm relatively a "newbie". Perhaps the longer you have it the more it affects different parts of your body. Or, as you say, it could be purely coincidental. Who knows!


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## Guest

I've always had lousey teeth, Susan, that decayed badly for years and years and years. They don't seem to be decaying anymore now, but they seem to be weak and brittle, falling apart... I have at least 10 crowns in my mouth and 3 root canals.I just came from the dentist this afternoon as a matter of fact, where I had my teeth cleaned and also had a filling changed in my two front teeth.Always hated having dental work done but my dentist is a jewel.... almost painless.I think I read something somewhere about the possible effects of amalgam on M.S. due to its mercury content, but I don't know if there was any validity to it.Evie


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## christywisty

I have what seems to be the opposite problem. I have dental fluorosis (too much fluoride in the teeth), which causes a discoloration of the teeth, but I've never had a cavity to speak of. I did some research a few years back, and it's really an interesting topic, although many officials won't admit that they're potentially poisoning people with the extra fluoride in the public water system. There are countries around the world who have banned the fluoride water treatment.


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## Stillnaked

I have the tooth problem! I swear I am in pain from one tooth, but the dentist says there are no roots there so there can't be pain! If I stick my fingernail between the tooth and gum, there is a BIG gap there, it HURTS! He says it can't. Sigh. Teeth crumbling too. Anyone know what causes it? Mal absorption of what?Laurie


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## Susan Purry

It was interesting to read your replies, thanks. I haven't found any info linking M.E/CFS with particular teeth problems. I went back to the dentist on Wednesday. One of the bottom teeth is now sorted with a gold crown. The other bottom tooth has an infected nerve - no wonder I've been in absolute agony. So I'm on antibiotics for a week and go back next Tuesday to get the infected root cleaned out and another temporary crown on top. Then go back for another appointment to get the root canal filled and a gold crown put on top. Then two more appointments to fix the top two teeth. So, thats [counts on fingers] 7 appointments in all.







Thank goodness I don't have to pay for any of this. I'm a 'nervous' dental patient, so this is difficult for me. And because of the M.E/CFS, getting into the dentist is tiring, and it leaves me with spasms in the back. On top of that, I now have acute TMJ from having my jaw yanked open wide a lot recently by the dentist. Thoroughly miserable!!Thanks for letting me vent!


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## M&M

It's Monday...Your appointment is tomorrow, yes? Hope all goes well! Check in and let us know how it goes!


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## M&M

bump....How's that mouth and jaw of yours feeling Susan?


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## Susan Purry

Thank you for thinking of me MrsM. My appointment got rescheduled til tomorrow (Thursday), so I'll let you know how I get on. I finished the course of antibiotics today and my teeth are much less painful. The jaw hurts, but it's ok. Fingers crossed for tomorrow (I'm such a wuss!!).


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## M&M

You're not a wuss. I tell you, I think I enjoy getting my yearly at the Ob/Gyn more than I enjoy going to the dentist!!







I hope you'll start to recover from it soon!


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## Susan Purry

Oh don't get me started on Ob/Gyn! That's another trial I'm going to have to muster courage for! Well, now the nerve has been removed and the infection's all gone, my teeth are feeling a LOT better! The appointment itself wasn't so great - after the local anaesthetic I started to shake and the NMH got the better of me so we had to rest for 5 mins whilst the faintness abated. I had two top-ups of local anaesthetic and still experienced a LOT of pain. I'm not convinced this dentist really wants to give his patients the most pain-free experience possible. Anyway, it's over and done with now. I go back mid-January to have the root filled and the gold inlay put on top.


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## Dabombmom49

Hello everyone,Oh My goodness looking through these sight is like i am seeing myself in all of you. I had four crowns in the back since I was 16 and they all had root canals. Well Let me tell you I woke up one day and my mouth was so infected and my teeth hurt where there should not have been pain. Went to the dentist Oh my goodness the news was awful.. I had to have all 4 crowns removed immediately. I went to the oral surgeon.I found out that IbS and Crones and fatigue effect your teeth. So All of you that think it does not effect your teeth I am living proof it does. It also can effect your eyes. It has mine. I thought I had my teeth pulled and it cause me to get pink eye come to find out it was related to all the above problems. The worst part is I have no back teeth, have IBS and cant see a damn thing. So I am still doing research and It can effect alot of things in you body. So If you Dr tells you your crazy slap him in the head because it is all so real.Deborah


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## K9Mom

The girls on my thyroid board talk about teeth problems quite a bit. It seems that the fast metabolism of being hyperthyroid causes calcium to leech out of our bones and teeth.Those that are HYPOthyroid also experience rapid tooth decay....teeth breaking off at the gum line and crumbling teeth (regardless of age). Also, Sjogrens (sp) syndrome, an autoimmune disease which causes dry mouth, can also affect our teeth adversly.Blood tests can check for both thyroid probs and Sjogrens.


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## Barley Singer

Here are our experiences, and what I have learned from a whole lot of online health reading.

*PAIN IN THE TEETH*

My wife and I both have the entire complex CFS/FMS/CMPS/CFS

As for tooth pain where there is no nerve (supposedly no nerve) the nerves in the teeth are connected into the entire nervous system of the body. Each tooth nerve goes out of the tooth toward the spine. So, tooth nerves are not just in your teeth all alone. They pass outside of your teeth (of course) and then into the face, and along the jaw, and even pass through the neck and shoulder region (mastoids, etc). Those neves inside of your face and your neck/shoulder area can make you teeth have horrible tooth pain - EVEN where you don't even have any teeth anymore! I have almost no molars and have days with terribke pain in them. It happens to me all the time. It happnes to my wife,. It is far worse when we have been badly exposed, or have nasty spasms in the shoulder, neck (mastoids). It can also happen from plain old neuropoathy which is common as a side effect to toxic reactions in MCS (toxic exposures).

So - you can get tooth pain from really bad spasms in the muscles of the shoulders & neck. You can get it from trigger points in your fascia. All because the nerves from your mouth pass through that area of muscle. The hardened ground sunbstance (a natura lliquid crystal) in the fascia that makes up a trigger point, or even just muscle spasms, will grab ahold of the nerves and keep the signals from being normal ones (nerve entrapment). Nerve entrapment can cause lots of problems.

*NUMBNESS, PAIN AND BURING IN HANDS
EVEN ARMS THAT YOU CAN'T FEEL OR MOVE*

This sort of issue can affect more than tooth pain. In a related problem, people with really bad spasms in that same area of the upper back, neck and shoulders (the mastoids especially and the part of the shounder up next to the neck) can cause nerve related pain problems - even in the arms and hands.

When the spasms are bad enough, the muscles grab the nerves and compress them so that the signals do not work right. As a result, you can get odd neurological symptoms. The tips of your fingers (even several of them) can go numb (from hours to even days or weeks). Your arms can even go dead (unable to move them at all) until after you change the muscle situation (and trigger points) by shaking your shoulders to free up the nerves. Another terrible result instead of numbness or no control of them, Can be "burners and stingers". These are pains or heat sensastis in your hands - direct nerve pain (neuropathy) in the hands that can even feel like your hands are in very hot water (they can turn red and swell up).

I get this when I have ben in bed a long time (whcih is every night as I am so sick I often sleep 24 to 48 hours). I do not get a choice in this sleep duration. If I try to functin I will just fall asleep while standing up.

We treatr it wsith frequency specific micrcurrent (Dr Carol is a friend and we own a professional machine). I also had to teach myslefv acupuncture to treat my wife. She got all this first and her pain was so bad she was dying of starvation of the nausea caused by high substance P levels.

HIGH SUBSTANCE P = VOMITING

Most people (even docs) do not know this but substance P receptorsmay be all over th ebody, but thay are massive in quantity in the are of the medulla (brain) right next to the bodies "vomit trigger". Really high incontrolled pain (or high substance P levels) can cause uncontrolllable vomiting in pain patients. The ONLY way to deal with this, is very strong pain medicatin until you are detoxed enough for the pain to stop.

We also use many natural COX inhibitors tro keep our pain lower and ThEY WORK (herbs & herb concentrates that we buy by the KG) and we have found that damiana is a especially good nerve pain treatment. We also use Shisandra & Brahmi. Use caution with schisandra!!! It also thins the blood.

Many of these herbs also change blood pressure. mostly they normalise it by letting the blood be thin enogh that you are not tyring to pass very think blood (the thickness of thick maple syrup) through your vessels and capilaries. This thick blood CAUSES high blood presssure, especially the kind that goes up when you stand up or bend over.

*POLYCYTHEMIA (thick blood)*

Many of us have very thick blood from far too many red cells and too much fibrin as well. This gives us secondary polycythemia....just like a person exposed to too much carbon monoxide, we have low cellural oxygen and the body tries to make up for this with extra red cells.

Schisandra dxoes thin the blood...but it also increases the oxygen supply, is good for mood (*look it up online) and it used to be used by "free divers" long ago so they could stay under water longer).

My red cell titers were over double the normal level and they were trying very hard to find ANYONE who would bleed me to lower them. Blood is supposed to LEAVE your body when you get a cut - when you get stuck with a steak knife in the finger or get a shot with a 19 gauge needle (big). I did not bleed even when accidentllay stuck with a small steak knife by accident in the kitchen - right int he wide of my index finger down to the bone & not one drop of blood).

*PAIN FROM LOW DOPAMINE *

Also most people with this illness group have low dopamine, and the herb mucuna is high in natural dopamine. Unlike presrription parkinsoins meds, with mucuna you do not need to keep raising your dose to get relief.

For years I had stopped doing all the tigns that I enjoy and had no idea why. I simply had no BRAIN REWARD function, due to low dopamine.

When you have low dopamine levels, it raises your perception of pain (very common in FMS/CFS/MCS). What a "normal" person will feel only as mild pressure, a fibro person with low dopamin will feel as agony.

.

..

*CRUMBLING TEETH*

As I said, my wife and I both have the entire disease complex CFS/FMS/CMPS/CFS (and my wife also has Ehlers Danlos, schogrens, rads & ruds). I have no saliva issues at all but she does. She also gets stones in her saliva glands and her tear ducts (odd calcium issues abound and nobody has explained them yet).

We were BOTH very much into good dental hygenbe. Even when it hurt like hell to move our arms we still brushed. Yet after a few years of this illess complex, our teeth enamel began to crumble. Brushing took out pieces of tooth (with a soft baby brush). Our teeth just broke and split and rotted away. We now both have terrble teeth & not many of them left. . At the beginning, it was so strange to have our teeth break from soft bread or even soft sticky rice or a soft bit of potato in soup. We have yet to find anybody with an explaination..

Far worse for us, all the dentures made in THIS era, are poisonous. Moast are made of acrylice (plastics - all of which are bad news). When all our teeth are gone, we are just out of luck. Implants with normal metal posts cause autoimmune diseases in 1 in 5 peop;e who get them (same with hip replacements) and we already HAVE trouble there. Ther is a movement to change over to zerconium implats whcih are FAR more biocompatable, but the cost of getting just 2 posts in the top & 2 in the bottom (to anchor porcelain fakes) would be more than our house cost us for just one of us - although they cost little to make and just a few hours work to the dentist (I went into the wrong area of emploment).


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## Barley Singer

*DENTAL PAIN CONTROL*

Many peope (like me and my wife) who have fibro also have trouble getting pain control from the shots given to them at the dentistl In fact most locals do not work at all on us. This is a problem in Fibro patients.

Procaine (novacain) often works very poorly - the worst of the choices - and can even cause terrible nerve pain that lasts from a few days to several months & the pain from the procaine reaction can be worse than the pain from the abcessed tooth was. Many dentists are so ignorant that they donot knwo that this information is well documented and it is why there is a differnt medication around (since the 60s).

Articaine works better in most resistanft people. It is not perfect. It can still give a nasty pain reaction. In me they must use the maximum dose of Articaine 
for an adult my size and wait 45 minutes for it to start to work.

But in many cases the lower cost clinics (like government onces) use procain as the only med available. it is also the least expensive and last longer (expires slower). But in my wife and I - it just does not work anymore. Over time we got terrible pain from the use of it, and less relief. Then it just stopped working.

My wife went without any pain meds for her dental work for over 3 years because the procaine caused her horrible pain for several months after each visit, and it did NOTHING for the drill pain. The topicals were even worse.

I had the same trouble eventualy. When was still on Procaine, I had to book 2 appointments at the govenment (cheep) clinics...1 to get my shots and the 2nd one an hour later for the drilling. They often had to shoot even MORE of the stuff right insoide of the tooth on the bare exposed nerve to get any reaction. Eventually it just stopped working at all and only made me have pain reactions and feel sick. So I stopped using anythig for several years. I just had all my filing and my pulpatins for root canals done with no meds at all for several years (ouch).

In me, even Marcaine given before major surgery to bloch a nerve (which ought to last 6 hours or more) lasts about 2 (maybe if I am lucky). Topicals do not work on me at all.

*ONE LAST RANT*

dentists ARE taught in dentist school, all about trigger points and muscle spasms and the fact that tooth pain CAN and DOES often come from things other than bad teeth.

They are TAUGHT (no guarantee they listened or rememebr it or beleived any of it)...all about the facial nerves and where they go and various things that can make it SEEM that you have a bad tooth...when it is NOT in the tooth at all. Any dentist who did not flunk out MUST have gotten enough information to know that tooth pain, where there is no tooth there...or where the pain moves around...especially if they KNOW the person has any sort of connective tissue issue, fibromyalgia, chronic myofasial pain syndrome, or any spasm problems ... well they were taught about this. They know that the cause of strange tooth pains is usuallty nerve entrapment from trigger points or muscel spasms 0- usually in the shoulder to mastoid region.

However when they have you in the chair in their ungodly poisonous office, and you tell them about your medical history (which they are supposd to ask about - it changes their treatments - or it ought to) - once a dentist knows that you have Fibro or anything like it, and you have been in unbearable pain from your teeth but they also find out (they are supposed to invesitgatetrhing like these :

* is it hard to know which tooth it is...it seems to move a bit - it could be one of 2 or 3

* does the pain go away at times completely, for days at a time

* does the tooth seems oddly uneffected when they tap it...(or not enough effected for it to sound llike a normal problem). Can you get away with chewing, tapping on it, sideways pressure, and cold? Yet it is agonings at times...like after you hav ebeen lyin gin bed for 6 hours and your back staerts to HURT

* does the x-ray *not* show a massive abcess shadow?

They know perfectly well from back in school, that BEFORE they drill into the tooth of a person with any condition that causes spasms or trigger points in the muscles in the upper back, neck, etc......that they are supposed to :

* ask you questions about if you did anythin gunusualy lately that could have strained yuor backj or neck
* exercise of shores you did recently
* if you have any pain in your neck or shoulders

They shoud also -

PALPATE YOUR NECK AND SHOULDER REGION FIRST!!! and not just go for the drill and assume there is anyting actually wrong with any of your teeth. After all, the right ethical and medical treatment MIGHT be to send you off to see a massage therapist, or a person trained in Frequecy Specific Microcurrent. or tp send you to a doc who can put you on things to reduce your spasm problems (like magnesium and mallic acid)

*BUT SOMEHOW*

- once they have you in that chair
- in their poison filled office
- and they see a chance for a $450 charge for the palpation & porcelain filling of a tooth (which could be just fine - or which they already know for certain has a dead nerve) they will often go right on ahead and do it anyway. They might even treat a differnt tooth if there is no actual tooth there to treat in the sopt they normally would go after ...or if ther eis no nerve at al inteh tooth they will just fill it and charge you

Most dentists, like auto mechanics, want your money more than than they want to do the right thing

**NOTES - my experiences and reading on fillings **

amalgum fillings are made of heavy metal that is toxic & has been *illegal *to use in many nations (most of the 1st world actually) fro quite a while. The American Dental Association (the only bg dental group left that had not talked about their dangers) in the process of banning them in the USA (they are calling is *phased out *to make it sound like they really have done nothing wrong in the 35+ years that they have resisted changing to other types of fillings)

Fuji fillings, of which there are several types, are (form my long experiene of having them replaced agains and ahain int eh same tooth - BRFOE I had any serious dental issues with my teeth crumbling) are utter crap. They breake, fail to stick to the tooth, and plain fall out. They also do not last very long even if they are done perfectly (which is rarely the case). The fact that they must be replaced after just a few years, is in MY opinion the entire point of using them ,. so you need to go back to your dentist and have every oe of the things replaced about every 3 to 5 years (max) - can you say $$$$$$??? The dentis sure can. Fuji fillings (the white plastic things) are the dentist equivilent of usig BONDO on your car after an accident

Porcelain filling last. They are more expensive too. They stick far bette to bad teeth that are crumbling fro mFMS/CFS/MCS - still not perfect though as the teeth as falling apart

*ONE LAST RANT*

Most dentists out there are way undertrained, very ignorant of basic science. They are usually only in it for the cash. Many are totally unethical. A small number of of dentist are amazing well informed, know enough to NOT just leave all the bacteria to thrive afte they work on you...know to use dental dams when takin gout olf amalgum fillings...and knowe about the link between tooth infection bacteria in teh mouth, and miscarraiges and also heart disease. In fact a good one will tel lyou thing like how to fix a cracked tooth with hydrogen peroxide (teeth are not dead things - they can heal), or how to use virgin organic coconut oil "pulling" to kil the bacteria i nyou rmouth that makes your teeth rot.|

Most dentists will not do any of that as it cuts down of profits.

very good ones out there are GOLD

Bu then in my opinion, dentistry (*like orthopedics and OB/GYN and toxicology) ought to have long since been rolled into the rest of medicine - it was the AMA who excluded it. It ought ot just be another surgical medical specialty like gastroenterology and should require normal medical school training & a normal medical residency *before *they get to study to be a dentist...just like every other type of medical speciality must do.


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