This Dentist Is Breaking Down The Wall Between Medicine And Dentistry

Who do you see more in a year, your family physician or your dentist? “Most people see their dentist on a more regular basis than they see their medical doctor,” says Dr. Gerry Curatola, a biologic restorative dentist and founder of Rejuvenation Dentistry, a network of wellness-focused dental practices based in New York. The dentist has certainly witnessed this over the past year, as the pandemic has caused a surge in dental visits. “We have seen an explosion of gum disease and tooth decay, just from the wearing of masks,” Dr. Curatola tells Forbes. The heightened stress has caused grinding, clenching and chipped teeth too, and an imbalance of bacteria in the mouth, according to the dentist.

Clearly there is a connection between oral health and overall well-being. It’s why Dr. Curatola believes dental visits are a missed opportunity for checking in on people’s health beyond the state of their mouths. “Dentists should be on the frontline for screening of major health problems,” Dr. Curatola tells Forbes. “We need to bring dentistry, medicine and wellness together to treat the whole patient.” The dentist is leading the way in a more holistic approach, not only to treating oral issues, but to healing the entire body. 

With the pandemic bringing immune health into the spotlight, Dr. Curatola is optimistic that people are waking up to the importance of maintaining a healthy oral microbiome. “Our oral health is intrinsically connected to the ability of your immune system to function optimally,” the dentist says, referencing several studies confirming the link between gum disease and the severity and incidence of COVID-19. Describing the bacteria in our mouths as a “coral reef protecting an island,” Dr. Curatola says, “when they’re unhappy, they de-regulate the immune system, making you prone to all kinds of diseases.” 

With 85-90% of infectious diseases—from tuberculosis to diabetes to leukemia—having manifestations in the mouth, Dr. Curatola says the oral microbiome is not to be overlooked. The six to ten billion bacteria in the mouth do everything from protecting us from illness to aiding in digestion, according to the dentist. While good bacteria tends to get pitted against bad bacteria, Dr. Curatola insists our health is influenced more by the balance of flora in the mouth. “It’s all about the environment; the terrain,” says the dentist. “As naturopathic doctors say, ‘it’s not about the seed, it’s really about the soil.’”

It’s this lack of education around bacteria in the mouth that fuels the misunderstanding that gum disease—a condition that Dr. Curatola says currently affects upwards of 80% of the U.S. population—is caused by bad bacteria, when in reality, it’s the result of a microbiome imbalance. “The same bacteria that cause gum disease in the mouth are benign and even beneficial in a balanced terrain,” explains the dentist. “Bad bacteria in the mouth are actually resident bacteria in an imbalanced terrain, they flip a switch and become bad bacteria, expressing themselves as pathogens.” Rather than eliminate bad bacteria in the mouth, the dentist encourages fostering balance to maintain overall health.

But this has been far from the mainstream approach. “The philosophy in oral care has been this scorched earth policy of killing everything,” critiques Dr. Curatola. With origins in the detergent industry, toothpaste was first developed by soap manufacturers, explains the dentist. “Fifty years ago we thought it was a good idea to kill all bacteria,” he says. While alternative natural toothpastes have since proliferated the market, they often contain sugar alcohols and essential oils, ingredients that Dr. Curatola warns disrupt the balance of bacteria in the mouth too. Frustrated with the prevailing “killing all germs on contact” approach, he created his own vitamin-packed prebiotic toothpaste—Revitin—fifteen years ago, to help consumers maintain a balanced oral microbiome.

It’s this determination to shift the way people think about oral care that impelled him to write The Mouth-Body Connection too. The best-selling book provides a 28-day program to keeping the oral microbiome—and by extension, the body—balanced, with a four-step approach that includes cleaning out the medicine cabinet, eating an anti-inflammatory diet, exercising and reducing stress. “I wrote my book because I want people to understand the mouth is a gateway, but it’s also a mirror for things that are going on in other parts of the body,” the author tells Forbes.

Describing himself as a “wellness doctor who is a dentist-by-training,” Dr. Curatola’s holistic approach to oral care is explained by his diverse background. While the dentist studied complementary medicine at Harvard Medical School in the 1990s, it was his later exposure to biologic medicine in Germany and Switzerland that would plant the seeds to his alternative practice. “The first thing that they look at when someone has cancer or a serious autoimmune disease is what’s going on in the mouth,” Dr. Curatola says, describing the whole-body approach he witnessed in Europe.

Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to treating an illness, biologic medicine believes there are, what Dr. Curatola describes as, five layers of healing in the human body: biologic, biochemical, energetic, psycho-emotional and spiritual. The biologic focuses on balancing the bacteria in the body while the biochemical considers hormonal imbalances. The third layer examines the energy balance of the body, including meridian lines, which Dr. Curatola says, “run from the teeth to every organ system in the body.”

The last two layers of healing—psycho-emotional and spiritual—are focused on our mental health. “I find myself counselling patients as they open up in the dental chair,” says Dr. Curatola. “There are psycho-emotional issues that people have that prevent them from getting well.” The spirit—what Dr. Curatola says is referred to as “Prana” in Ayurvedic medicine and “Chi” in Traditional Chinese Medicine—plays an essential role in healing too.

“For a good part of my practice, I focused on the first two,” the dentist tells Forbes. After 35 years in clinical practice, Dr. Curatola is now embracing all five with the latest incarnation of his holistic approach to oral care—Rejuvenation Health, a wellness center in East Hampton, New York. “Dentistry has been divorced from medicine for over 150 years, and I’m trying to bring the wall down,” says Dr. Curatola. “That’s why I created this center, Rejuvenation Health.”

Guided by the biologic medicine philosophy, the programming at Rejuvenation Health utilizes a wide variety of disciplines to promote balance in the mouth and body. The center offers advanced dental procedures—from traditional root canals to bespoke custom veneers to TMJ joint therapy—but wellness treatments too, such as reiki, acupuncture, intravenous (IV) therapy, nutritional counselling and weight loss programs.

More innovative offerings include EMsculpt, a physiotherapy that enhances the core musculature and improves posture and performance, and FLOWpresso, a spacesuit that uses infrared waves to encourage lymphatic drainage. “It takes patients out of fight-or-flight mode and it puts them into this relaxed, parasympathetic mode of their nervous system,” explains Dr. Curatola. “Within thirty minutes many of them are sleeping like a baby.” The dentist is the only practitioner offering this service on the East Coast. 

Anticipating a busy summer ahead, Dr. Curatola looks forward to continuously expanding the treatments available. “I’m very excited about the meditation programs that are coming,” he says. “I think they’re the perfect icing on the cake for all the other collaborative services we offer.” The dentist also talks enthusiastically about a master health wellness series in the works for August that will incorporate all the doctors associated with the center. “We’ll be doing these evening classes to help empower and educate people on how they can take better care of themselves in a more holistic fashion,” he says.

Such a wellness series would certainly be holistic given the diversity of expertise represented at Rejuvenation Health. From naturopaths to medical doctors to nutritionists, patients have a multi-disciplinary support team at their disposal. “It’s such a wonderful, collaborative environment where the patient partners with all of us,” describes Dr. Curatola. “And I say ‘partners’ with us because it takes a village; it takes people partnering together in a collaborative ways to really restore them.” The wellness doctor hopes visitors leave the center with an enlightened understanding of the mouth-body connection; of “how it all works together in mind, body and spirit,” he says, before pausing to laugh, “or I should say ‘mouth, body and spirit’.”