Hello, and welcome to this mind, body, teeth podcast, which is all about holistic health. My name is Bita Fox, and I’d like to introduce you to my world, how I see holistic health through the lens of a biological dentist’s eyes. How it’s all connected; mind, body, and the mouth. How could they possibly be connected? I’m going to tell you a little bit about my background. How I arrived at where I am today, and why do I think my message through this podcast, or my messages I should say, are so important. How we can prevent poor health through keeping a healthy mouth and vice versa. What is the interlink? What is the relationship between the body, the mind and our mouth, our teeth?
To give you a little bit of background, I qualified as a dentist as an ordinary dentist in 1999 from Sweden. Stockholm, Sweden, capital of Sweden, which is where I lived and studied at Karolinska Institute. And when I qualified, frankly, I wasn’t all that sure whether I was going to work as a dentist. I was a bit confused and I was a bit lost. I was very biologically minded from the very beginning, as far as I can remember, as long as I can remember. And perhaps dentistry proved a bit too mechanical for my nature, how I was as a person by nature. It took me a few years to actually enjoy the mechanical side of dentistry. If I’m absolutely honest.
Very early on, I had a keen interest and curiosity in what we use, how does that affect us? And not much to the mechanical side of how we drill. It was more like, “What does it do? Why do we use this amalgam metal cocktail? If you like. It’s an alloy. Why on earth are we putting metal in our mouth? Surely they belong with robots. I couldn’t get my head around these things. And so for my paper, I think it was the year before the last year of my studies, so, year four, it would have been. I chose to investigate amalgam fillings and how it works. How does it affect the person? I wanted to do a systematic review, just looking into studies. What kind of studies have been done on patients and have these things been evaluated? The impact of amalgam fillings. I had a nasty feeling there were patients who were not doing well and that this was perhaps under-reported.
And of course, I found quite a few studies, systematic reviews that did talk about this subject. And there was an Institute set up, I believe, in one of the towns, one of the cities actually in Sweden for people with ME and CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome. And whereby the role of their amalgam fillings were investigated and assessed. And perhaps the impact of these filling materials on their condition. Many of these studies actually showed that they had been able to measure a level of mercury released into the bloodstream. So that could be measured, but of course, what they couldn’t improve was that there is a cause and effect in this as it were. And so the Institute was actually abandoned eventually. And so, yes, unfortunately, these patients were deemed to be psychologically affected.
So the diagnosis they received was from a psychological origin and not from a dental origin. And that was that. So I then moved on to looking into gum disease because that was sort of the next logical, natural, biological subject I took to and was attracted to. Gum disease within dentistry is a funny one. That has actually received the most holistic approach even within mainstream dentistry. It is well known that it’s closely linked to cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and so on. So good progress there. And wherever you go, mainstream dentists, they will recognize this, hopefully. And so we’re very happy about that.
Within our clinic, we are pushing the envelope within this arena and with things like ozone laser therapies and so on, calcium therapy is another one. We are very excited about how we can treat gum disease. While we’re talking about infections, root canal-treated teeth is another one that’s gained a lot of attention. The number of patients we see with infected root canal-treated teeth is just mind-blowing. But what is more mind-blowing is how it affects the general health. And these dots are never put together in mainstream dentistry, chronic fatigue being a very common one. In other episodes, we will be talking more and more about this and how it affects your general health or can affect your general health. Because I do believe epigenetics, genetics have a huge role in how these things manifest themselves.
So stay tuned and listen to the other episodes for follow-up on this topic, as well. As my career progressed, I wanted to do other things because by nature, I do get a little bit bored and I do like new challenges. So the next thing in my career was cosmetic dentistry. And I actually ended up with a Master’s Degree in Restorative and Aesthetic Dentistry in 2015. And I found that to be stimulating for a little while. But soon enough, I got bored of that as well. I knew there must be more. I hadn’t reached my passion yet, but at this point, I knew I really, really enjoyed dentistry, actually. I liked the difference I could make and the relationships I built with my patients were fantastic. So rewarding to see them out of pain, achieving what they wanted, and doing so satisfactorily.
Now, in 2016, I hit a real stop in my career, insomuch that unfortunately I became quite unwell myself. Headaches, nausea, extreme fatigue, and short-term memory loss. At the time I didn’t know what the problem was. I put it down to stress and I had to stop working. Quite a bit afterwards, I’d say fast forward, maybe 12 months or so, I ended up testing eventually for mercury levels. And up until then, I didn’t know much about holistic dentistry. It was a new world opening before my eyes. Around the time I purchased my practice Munro Hall Clinic. And so the test showed that I was exposed to quite high levels of mercury. But luckily my body was amazing and excreting this mercury quite efficiently, which was probably why I was still functional. But going back to 2016, I had to stop working.
And this is when I started really, really reading up on things and going back to my passion, my curiosity combined with an urgent need to find out answers for myself as well, this time around. And so the journey started in 2017, properly. In the sense that I was seeing patients who had a diagnosis of ME, CFS, the same kind of patients I had studied all those years ago in my university years. I now was looking after those patients, patients with cancer, patients with adrenal fatigue, CFS, ME as I mentioned, among other things, they all seeked my help or our help I should say. We have a wonderful team working together really, really well, all caring characters. And yes, so now I felt so much more fulfilled.
2021 after the world has been hit by Coronavirus and people are so much more conscious and aware of how our health is so important, we are busier than ever. And so I had people approaching me, mostly patients actually, saying that I should share this given how passionate I am about it. And with today’s media outlets, what better way of using a podcast to get the messages out? And so in this podcast, I will be sharing with you all of my knowledge, all of my experience, case reports. I think they are very interesting. People can relate to different case scenarios and how we solve them. How we help people and how you can be helped too if you are in that sort of scenario or situation. Or perhaps you just want to prevent all of these things. Prevention is the best cure ever. And I would say that any time of the day; prevention, prevention, prevention. But for now, we’ll also cure. Thank you and speak to you soon.
An important announcement about all these episodes in this podcast. Please accept that everything that is being said is just sharing of information based on previous cases that I have treated. They are not to be taken as diagnostics or advice. Each person, each patient must be examined by their dentist and receive a diagnosis and treatment plan based on the findings in their particular case. Thank you.
Last Updated: July 19, 2021
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