Finally finishing the seemingly marathon cleaning, my dentist brought me up to sitting position and clucking disapprovingly like a mother hen said, “Well, that’s a little better, but I want to see you next week again and we’ll do the other side. Understand? All that accumulated stuff can affect your immune system.”

Self-consciously wiping the beginnings of drool I imagined was starting to escape from the frozen side of my face, I nodded mutely, not trusting myself to get my mouth around real words just yet.

I swayed a bit to keep my balance while slipping on my coat after laying almost flat for an hour, but was suddenly brought up short when she added, “… and that’ll affect whether you can dive or not …”

“Huh? My wiving?” I gurgled, in the language only dentists understand.

“Yes. Your diving. You can’t dive with a bad heart, can you?

“Nut I non’t nav a bad neart,” I protested, spraying out my words.

“But you can get one from poorly maintained oral health,” she said. “All you tough guys forget that and you only come see me when something hurts. Bad gums, bad heart. Get me?”

Wondering what in the world she was talking about, I mumbled something sufficiently intelligent like “oh” and stumbled my way to the receptionist who made the next appointment and handed me the bill, which made me dizzy all over again.

YOUR TEETH AFFECT YOUR HEART?

     Who knew?

     Charles C. Bass, M.D., Dean and Professor of Experimental Medicine, Emeritus, of the Tulane University School of Medicine (New Orleans), reported; “...the health welfare, and even life itself, of persons who (may) have heart conditions ... may depend upon prevention of dental disease."

     Bacteria enters the body through a failure of natural defensive barriers, like the tooth structure where almost everything first enters your body, and your skin.

     While the skin and teeth are not, themselves, vulnerable to germs, they prevent germs from access to inner tissues, which have no natural immunity or defense, like your gums when not treated properly.

GUM GERMS

     In order to survive once they invade, germs must have, or adopt, certain characteristics:

• They must be able to survive and multiply at temperatures near 98.6 degrees, normal body temperature;

• They must be able to extract nourishment from the blood or from internal tissues; and

• They must be anaerobic, meaning able to thrive in the absence of "free" oxygen (atmosphere).

     As the only oxygen in the blood is wrapped up inside red corpuscles, an "aerobic" germ would simply suffocate, just as we would in the absence of oxygen, while an “anaerobic” microbe is at completely at home in an oxygen-free environment.

     And where, you ask, is the one part of the human body which is consistently at or near internal body temperature, is rich in microscopic nourishment and is extremely moist, slightly saline, and anaerobic?

     Why, in the area between the tooth and gum surface, at the base of nearly all human teeth, an area on the outside of a barrier surface.

     In fact, if anaerobic bacteria were to have a meeting and plan a perfect place to lie in ambush, they probably couldn't create a better site. From their anaerobic point of view, the perfect environment in which to hide is in our periodontal pocket.

A PERIODONTAL POCKET?

     What’s that?

     The normal "gap" between the base of a tooth and the adjacent healthy gum tissue is about two millimeters deep; about one-sixteenth of an inch. Bacteria lodge in this tiny "trench" (called the gingival crevice) and begin to multiply and produce toxins. Through a well-understood mechanism, this causes the crevice to deepen, ultimately forming the "pocket."

     It’s normal for us to have pockets without knowing it as they don’t hurt, but these pockets are (in doctor words) festering cesspools of mixed bacteria with one important thing in common - they are anaerobic, and there is no atmospheric oxygen in a periodontal pocket.

     When healthy, the gum is a germ barrier but when its one-cell thickness is pierced by anything (aggressive brushing, food scrapes, a broken mouthpiece rubbing on it, etc.), it can no longer act as a barrier and bacteria can then hitch-hike through the body's freeway system via the bloodstream at will.

     Doctors call this “unauthorized” use of the circulatory system bacteremia (an "emia" is simply an excess of anything in the blood), and Dr. Bass suggests, "Bacteria in the periodontal pocket and in diseased periodontal tissues are the source of almost all bacteremia, from the environment of the teeth”.

     Luckily, I have a fantastic dentist who has her doctoring down to such a fine art that nothing, and I mean nothing, ever hurts when I go to her (well, aside from the bill), but there are things even a world class dental surgeon can’t eliminate, like Pyorrhea, which, for better or worse, lives in our mouths throughout our lives.

PYORRHEA WHAT?

       Also known as Periodontoclasia, pyorrhea is a universal disease of man, originating as gingivitis in childhood and continuously advancing during adulthood, and never ending so long as any teeth remain.

     With the exception of those few persons who live in germ-free medical environments, every dentulous (with teeth) adult has demonstrable, active, advancing periodontoclasia lesions in some stage about most or all of their teeth.

     But why, if we’ve had it, and will have it all of our lives, should divers be any more concerned about the condition of their teeth and gums than the next guy?

     Dr. Bass emphasizes that, "Prevention of these dental diseases should also prevent those diseases of the heart in which the infection comes from such foci (a point of concentration). Under these circumstances, the health welfare, and even life itself, of persons who have heart conditions which predispose to infection may depend upon prevention and control of dental disease."

     Before you say you don’t have a predisposing heart condition, be aware that the prior, perhaps unrecognized, damage can be from rheumatic fever, congenital defects (inherited), and any number of other causes, which frequently, victims are unaware of having.

     In other words, most of us don’t know if we have a pre-existing heart condition until the doctor tells us. But even if we don’t have a condition to worry about, when afflicted with another condition as simple as, say, the flu, when our immune system drops, bacteremia hiding in your gums take the opportunity to exert themselves.

OUR SUPERMAN IMMUNE SYSTEM

A vibrant immune system can literally help us hold off any disease or illness indefinitely. This amazing protection mechanism is designed to defend us against millions of bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins and parasites that would love to invade your body.

To understand the superhuman power of the immune system, all you have to do is look at what happens to anything once it dies and the immune system shuts down.

Within a matter of hours, the body is invaded by all sorts of bacteria, microbes, and parasites that were held at bay. Once we die, for example, the door is wide open and it only takes a few weeks for these organisms to completely dismantle your body and carry it away until all that's left is a skeleton.

Although some bacteria are benign or beneficial (for example, we all have millions of needed bacteria in our intestines that help digest food), many are harmful once they get into the body, either from the gums or through the mouth or the skin via or the bloodstream, and cause things like colds, influenza, measles, mumps, malaria, AIDS and so on, when they reproduce and overwhelm the immune system.

SELF-HELP

Good dental health seems complicated, but it isn’t really. Between professional dental cleanings, we can help ourselves daily.

   Dentists suggest that when the toxic waste products that are trapped below the gum line spaces are flushed daily with warm salt water, the body's normal reparative processes can set in quicker and help heal the diseased gum tissue. 

  In most cases, once the gum disease begins to heal, the bone follows suit, growing back new bone where it's been lost and tightening up loose, wobbly teeth (self-help healing of pyorrhea).

Erling Johansen, D.M.D., Ph.D., a dental researcher at the University of Rochester and an advocate of self-help in dentistry, states that we can watch what we put into our mouths, and warns that sugarless gum, for example, isn’t.

"Sugarless gum,” he says, “isn't sugarless … It's sucroseless. If you look at the label, you will see that it says, on most of them, 60 percent carbohydrates. That can be just as bad as sugar. The bacteria that cause decay can survive and multiply on those carbohydrates."

THE FEAR FACTOR

A lot of us still remember the dreaded trips to the dentist in the 60’s, where dental finesse seemed to be abandoned for the sake of expediency. We all remember the needles going in to freeze us and the subsequent drilling and grinding.

No wonder some of us only went to the dentist when our teeth hurt more than we thought the procedure was going to hurt.

Those techniques though have significantly changed and dentists, for example, make sure the topical freezing takes effect before proceeding, plus they warm the anaesthetic before injection so literally nothing hurts.

However, many people have a near phobia of going to the dentist, but hypnotherapy is remarkably effective and popular in relieving pain and anxiety. As a matter of fact, most times, despite the noise and vibration, I find myself inadvertently napping in my dentist’s chair.

GOLF? OR DIVING?

Most of us don’t intend to wait until our family doctors tells us that due to improper, irregular, or absent dental health practices that we have to give up diving for something stunningly boring on terra firma like, oh, I dunno … golf.

Twice yearly visits to the dentist for repair or deep cleanings plus daily flossing is all it takes to keep our gums healthy and help boost our immune system so we can keep on diving regularly.

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Article Researched/Written by Rev. Timothy Jones, OB,
Published in the “MEDICAL UPDATE” column
of SSI’s (Scuba Schools International)
professional JOURNAL, which he wrote for 15 years.

(Updated 2024)

The Author has earned certifications as a
SCUBA Master Instructor #204,021 (Emeritus)
with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors
(PADI Canada) and as an Instructor-Trainer #5774 (Emeritus)
with Schools International (SSI).

With 5,000+ teaching dives in tepid Canadian waters,
he’s an expert in cold water diving
but now focuses on underwater photography
in the Caribbean.

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