[00:00:00]Dwight Jennings:  To fix the jaw isn't a procedure, it's a process. You have to do successive approximations to precision, and you can't go in, in one fell swoop, and just fill it up, and expect it to work, because when you support that joint, it's going to relax a little bit more and decompress a little bit more over time.

[00:00:21]Luke Storey:  I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you. I want you to use your imagination for a moment, take a second, and just imagine a probiotic that actually works, one that actually does what it's supposed to do, heal your gut. 

[00:01:01] When you find the right probiotic, the one that works, it's like winning the gut lottery. That's where our friends at Just Thrive Probiotic come in. Just Thrive Probiotic is the first and only 100% all natural spore-form, DNA-verified-and-tested probiotic supplement. That means it has 100% survivability. It makes it through your digestive track and does its magic in there because it doesn't get killed on the way down. It's got clinically proven strains for leaky gut.

[00:01:31] They're doing nine other ongoing human clinical trials. This is a really powerful way to support your immune system and your brain. Now, your brain really depends on the health of your gut. So, not only does having a jacked-up gut suck, because you get all bloated, and gassy, and the leaky gut issues, and all that, but your brain really depends on the health of your gut. And our friends over at Just Thrive have nailed it when it comes to a product that really works.

[00:01:55] You take one capsule per day with meal and you're done. You're going to heal that gut. You're going to improve your digestion. And this is how I've recently really helped my digestion and my gut health overall because I've always had problems with that. And it's getting better and better the longer I use the Just Thrive Probiotic. It has completely changed the game for me, and I wanted to change the game for you. So, if you want to make that happen, it's super easy. Just get over to thriveprobiotic.com/luke.

[00:02:25] That's thriveprobiotic.com/Luke. And when you use the code Luke15 over there, you're going to save 15% off your order. That's Luke15 at thriveprobiotic.com/luke. One of the coolest things about my job as the host of The Life Stylist podcast is always being on the cutting edge, and not only finding out the best products when it comes to health, but the best companies that are making those products. Now, I'm someone that's been into bee products for a really long time.

[00:02:57] And if you heard Episode 175 with Carly Stein, you got to hear me totally geek out on my obsession with bees and bee products. If you haven't heard that one, by the way, go back and check it out. That's 175. But what I didn't know about bee products is, A, how many different products bees actually make in a hive, what their different uses are in terms of health support, and also, that there are just a lot of companies that are making products that are very inferior, either they're weak or they're not tested for pesticides, and things like that.

[00:03:29] So, the whole like bee product game, I thought I was pretty on top of, and I got schooled in that episode, and now, I'm going back, and kind of educating myself, and I'm using all of the products from Beekeeper's Naturals. So, they've got a few that I'm really into. There's the propolis, which is kind of like the medicine of the hive, then you've got, of course, the bee pollen, which is the food. That's the protein. It's actually the highest-protein food on the planet.

[00:03:55] And it's also got free form in amino acids, so it's great for pre-workout, for muscle recovery. And then, of course, the raw honey, which is amazing. And I thought I knew something about honey, it's got live enzymes. If you take a little bit before you go to bed, it helps you sleep. There's some things like that. But it turns out, honey is a legit superfood if you get it from the right company. It's full of antioxidants and it's just insanely powerful.

[00:04:19] Then, you've got royal jelly. Now, royal jelly is the chronic stuff. That's the food that's exclusively made for the queen bee. So the queen bee lives about 40 times longer than the average worker bee. So, put the math together there and you'll know that royal jelly is some badass stuff. And if you want to try all of these products that the bees make in one, I'm going to recommend B.Powered by Beekeeper's Naturals. That's one of my favorites. Now, honestly, I go through it a little too fast.

[00:04:47] It comes in a jar and I just like I pound that stuff. I probably way OD on it. You don't need to do it like I do it. You can savor it and make it last. That's an amazing product and a really great way for you to get an introduction into all of the bee products in one jar. So, go to beekeepersnaturals.com, use the code lifestylist and save 15%. That's beekeepersnaturals.com and the code is lifestylist. This episode was recorded in a dental office in Oakland, California right after I had a mind-blowing examination that revealed the root cause of some of my longstanding physical difficulties.

[00:05:26] And it seems that I'm not an exception when it comes to getting to the root cause related to jaw health. Now, this dude, Dr. Dwight Jennings, is into some seriously next-level stuff. So, you've likely never heard of a dentist that talks in this way or approaches teeth and the jaw in this manner. And I was actually shocked to find out how jaw misalignment can wreak havoc on your body. So, make sure to tune into episode 321 also released today at the same time as this episode to hear the audio or even watch the video of my entire examination with Dr. Jennings.

[00:06:03] And so, you can find that on YouTube or in the podcast feed here. This is, of course, Episode 320, TMJ, Jaw Pain, and Substance P: The Missing Link in Dentistry with Dr. Dwight Jennings. So, here's a little bit about our guest. Dr. Jennings limited his practice to TMJ and dental medicine over 25 years ago. He has one of the few practices in the Bay Area that is limited exclusively to oral facial pain and TMJ treatment. His extensive experience in this area coupled with his clinical research has created an unusual expertise in TMJ treatment. For over 25 years, he's explored the connection between jaw misalignment and elevated Substance P, the pain neurotransmitter, which becomes elevated with long-term bite disturbances. Here is but a few of the topics we cover in this fascinating conversation.

[00:06:57] What prompted him to pursue this more obscure practice of dentistry in the first place, the definition caused symptoms and solution to TMJ, the Substance P inflammation dilemma and why it's often misdiagnosed, the surprisingly powerful effect the trigeminal nerve has on brain blood flow, the fact that night guards that fit the lower teeth prevent natural skull bone movement, the problem with Invisalign and braces to fix jaw alignment, how jaw alignment affects your spine, and how it relates to back pain, the root cause of many, if not most, headaches, sleep apnea, and how your jaw is related, the other many ways the jaw affects your sleep quality, jaw issues and their relationship with tinnitus, the amazing effects Substance P has on stem cell production, the problem with dentists who use carbon paper to check your bite, erectile dysfunction, you're hearing that right, as it relates to the jaw.

[00:07:49] I know it's crazy, but it does. And finally, the missing link for pregnant women and fertility when it comes to jaw health. So, that's what you can expect to learn in this fascinating conversation with the true pioneer in the field of dentistry. Enjoy the show and please share it with everyone you know who suffers from the symptoms we cover in this episode. You never know how it might change someone's life for the better. Enjoy the show. Dwight Jennings, here we are, man. 

[00:08:25] So, we just took a look in my mouth, which will be the bonus episode to this one, where you kind of describe what we're seeing in there, which I found more interesting than probably some other people will. But while we were doing that, I just realized you are really a wealth of information and there's much more to the story here. So, what makes the type of dentistry you practice different than your average dentist in the mini mall down the street?

[00:08:50]Dwight Jennings:  So, I don't do any general dentistry. I don't do any fill-ins, any crowns, any root canal, any extractions. All I do is jaw orthopedics, orthodontics, and medical management.

[00:09:03]Luke Storey:  And how did you get into that side of dentistry?

[00:09:06]Dwight Jennings:  I started right out of dental school. I started studying European-type orthodontics. And so, the Europeans figured out how to straighten teeth without braces. And you need those skills and those appliances to treat somebody orthopedically. So, there's orthodontics, which get your teeth straight, and then there's orthopedics, which get your jaw aligned. And so, we're doing cranial mandibular orthopedics in a precision level that's not commonly understood or known about by the dental profession. 

[00:09:36]Luke Storey:  Clearly not. I've noticed that, because aside from you, I've never really heard of anyone doing this type of work. One of the things that people typically see someone like you for is TMJ. And it's a word that gets thrown around a lot, but I don't even know what the acronym stands for. So, tell us what TMJ is and if that's kind of one of the main symptoms that people would come find you for.

[00:09:56]Dwight Jennings:  It is one of the symptoms. So, TMJ stands for temporal mandibular joint. So, everybody's got two temporal mandibular joints. But TMJ is an abbreviation for temporal mandibular joint dysfunction. But that's not a good description of what we deal with in most cases. A lot of people can have pretty severe cranial mandibular dysfunction without any TMJ manifestations. So, they can have a very severe jaw dysfunction, but still not have any clicking, popping, joint pain, facial pain, but still have quite a bit of cranium mandibular dysfunction. So, cranium mandibular dysfunction, for probably most people, is covert. It's not overt. It's not causing the obvious symptoms, but it leads to a large number of both dental conditions, and medical conditions, psychiatric conditions.

[00:10:48]Luke Storey:  So, that leads me to this substance, this mysterious substance in the body that seems to be created in a number of ways. One of the main ones being jaw misalignment called Substance P. Let's break down what that is and why it's important.

[00:11:04]Dwight Jennings:  So, I came across a Substance P probably 25 years ago. I was working with physicians on chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, and I had a case that came in for migraines post a whiplash injury. And a year into treatment, her migraines got much better, but she confided in me a year into treatment, she said, I never told you this, she says, but until I started treatment with you, I've had six seizures a year all my life on average. And since you put these mouthpieces on, on me, I haven't had a single seizure.

[00:11:34] And I ran this by Jay Goldstein, one of the MDs I was working with, and he goes, oh, that's Substance P, right? So, this is a really bright, brilliant medical researcher looking at fibromyalgia. And so, at that point, I started looking at Substance P closely with all my other cases, and I've been studying it now for about 25 years. Substance P primarily comes from C fibers, the pain fibers in your body. Pain fibers are everywhere in your body except inside of your brain.

[00:12:06] And there, if you push the skin on somebody, pain pressure, it's transmitted to the brain by way of what they call C fibers, the pain fibers. And C fibers, when they get both locally and in the brain, they secrete Substance P. So, any kind of C fiber stimulation tends to make the Substance P levels go up in your body. The C fibers, if you look at them under Wikipedia, they're multimodal and they measure a lot of different things. They measure ionizing radiation.

[00:12:33] They measure body Ph as well as pain pressure. But C fibers are present within your trigeminal nerve with this sensory zone from here to here, and here to here. The sensory zone has 100 times more dense C fibers than any other nerve in your body. So, the C fibers on your eyeball are 400 times as dense as on your skin. And so, this system, when becoming overworked and overstimulated, will have a significant dramatic impact on Substance P levels throughout your whole body. 

[00:13:09]Luke Storey:  And so, the Substance P is the signaling molecule that's indicating that you're in pain. 

[00:13:15]Dwight Jennings:  It's a neurotransmitter. It's an 11-amino-acid neurotransmitter. And it was discovered in 1930s, and P stands for powder. It was a powder form that they come up with. And it was until 1980 that they started doing significant research on it.

[00:13:33]Luke Storey:  And are all people that suffer with pain-associative issues like fibromyalgia, are they all typically high in Substance P, whether it comes from jaw misalignment or not?

[00:13:45]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:13:45]Luke Storey:  Is that just something you'll find no matter what?

[00:13:47]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:13:48]Luke Storey:  And is it uncommon that people are tracing the root of that to jaw misalignment?

[00:13:54]Dwight Jennings:  Would be very rare that they would know that. And generally, the medical community doesn't have a solution for fibromyalgia or a lot of chronic pain. And Substance P, what Substance P does is that it lowers cell membranes. And so, cells expire too easily, and that would be pain fibers also in your body. And so, you're going to have a lot of sensory information going into the brain from these expiring too easily. So, people with elevated cells, they will typically have a lot of pain patterns like fibromyalgia. They hurt all over or they could have migratory pain problems, as you described on yourself, or you can have localized pain problems. People get knee pain, hip pain, back pain, shoulder pain.

[00:14:37]Luke Storey:  And what do like high levels of Substance P, what is it usually attributed to? I mean, in the medical community, they're obviously aware of it to some degree. What do they think is causing it or an overabundance of it, or do they not even address it?

[00:14:53]Dwight Jennings:  They never address it.

[00:14:54]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting.

[00:14:55]Dwight Jennings:  They never did. It's not on the radar at all. 

[00:14:57]Luke Storey:  Really? 

[00:14:58]Dwight Jennings:  Medical immunity. So, Quest Diagnostics is the only laboratory company that does a Substance P tests and they don't even have the proper norms, and so what's normal on their test results?

[00:15:13]Luke Storey:  Interesting. So, if a guy like me who has this migratory mystery joint pain, which comes and goes, if I were to get that lab test done at Quest and give you the results, you'd be able to tell whether that's an abnormal level or not.

[00:15:27]Dwight Jennings:  Right. 

[00:15:27]Luke Storey:  Your parameters are different.

[00:15:28]Dwight Jennings:  If they go by their norms that they publish on their tests, you would never have an abnormal level.

[00:15:35]Luke Storey:  Right. What about if somebody with something like fiber, like something more acute like that got tested, would that even raise the alarm in the medical system of too high of Substance P?

[00:15:44]Dwight Jennings:  Not if you use quest norms. 

[00:15:47]Luke Storey:  Okay. 

[00:15:48]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. Quest, in conversations I had with them, they took 30 employees and ran them without any medical history on them and to find out what they were. And they had two people that were, two that were over a thousand. And so, they sent the norm 1720, I believe.

[00:16:06]Luke Storey:  So, they can move their baseline? Like what the hell? That's so archaic. 

[00:16:10]Dwight Jennings:  It's like totally wrong.

[00:16:12]Luke Storey:  That's so weird.

[00:16:14]Dwight Jennings:  They sent me 50 results, their last 50 that they had run, and not a single one of them were over a thousand. And these are sick people they're running. And so, it's clear that their norm is abnormal. So, if you look at that SelfHack website, and he's got some norms in there, too, on his, and there's still some controversy as to what is normal.

[00:16:39]Luke Storey:  Wow. Okay. So, we'll put that in the show notes and everything that's discussed in the show notes. And now, by the way, those of you listening, I don't know if you're aware of this, but our show notes are now fully transcribed, including all the links. So, every single thing we talk about, every word is going to be available at lukestorey.com, including that link. So, this is interesting because I find with a lot of lab tests that the standards are so broad, and so general, and based on the average population, at least in this country, of people that aren't very healthy, you know what I mean? Like my doctor who's right across the bay there in San Francisco, Dr. Scott, sure, his methodology works. This guy, Dr. Ted Achacoso had developed this system.

[00:17:27] It's sort of similar to functional medicine, but not even addressing symptoms at all, just optimizing all of your levels of everything ,and then the symptoms go away, that kind of thing. In fact, that's on my symptoms. He doesn't want to hear about it, he's just like, well, just keep testing. But I'm 49 now, and when they do testing, they're looking at levels of hormones and things like that of a 25-year-old, not a 49-year-old. They're like, you don't want to be average, do you want to be average? I say no. And that's really a problem, not only in allopathic, but in functional medicine, I think, is that like we're setting the standard, setting the bar too low, that somebody with Substance P either kind of isn't even a bar.

[00:18:04]Dwight Jennings:  Right. So, my clinical finding is I think that the level should be less than 150 equal liters or whatever the units are that they're using on, and most of my chronic pain patients come in in the neighborhood of about 350 to 700.

[00:18:22]Luke Storey:  And are you able to see that number go down when you're proactively getting their jawline then back in place?

[00:18:31]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:18:31]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting. So, you can see a direct correlation. 

[00:18:33]Dwight Jennings:  Right. Wow. Kind of a random question, which I think we talked about during the exam, but I've talked to different holistic dentists about night guards, and they say that if you have a night guard on your upper teeth, that it prevents your skull from moving, that when you sleep part of your brain's detox mechanism is the plates in your skull having the ability to shift and move around. What do you think about that?

[00:19:03] So, craniosacral is very real, and the craniosacral pump mechanism is very, very real. And I would think, though, that the—let's talk a little about neurology. So, when you're trying to figure out what's most important, if you look at what's most important, probably impacting that craniosacral mechanism wouldn't be as important as having the jaw orthopedically out of position, right? And so, it's hard to get that jaw orthopedically resized within the curved lines.

[00:19:39] Right. The lower jaw is a little more effective. There's sensors in your T skin, lips, everywhere that tell the brain where your jaw is in space. Those are called proprioceptors. All the proprioreceptors from your trigeminal nerve go to a particular nucleus in the brain called the trigeminal mesencephalic nucleus. It is composed of the only sensory cell bodies in the brain. All the sensory cell bodies for your eyes, ears, and skin are out in the ganglion, but your jaw proprioceptors are in the brain.

[00:20:17]Luke Storey:  Damn.

[00:20:18]Dwight Jennings:  Right. And so, for some reason, developmentally, jaw alignment has a really high importance in brain function, and that nucleus is paired side-by-side with your locus coeruleus, which is your sympathetic ganglion, and they share a lot of information. So, any time there's a jaw misalignment, it puts you into sympathetic overdrive.

[00:20:41]Luke Storey:  So, this is people running around with mystery anxiety and nothing's wrong in their life, could be having the root of that being this misalignment.

[00:20:50]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:20:51]Luke Storey:  And we're going to get into more of kind of symptoms of this issue, and, of course, the solution to it, which is the most fun part of every podcast I do. It's kind of like problem, reaction, solution is the model. I get people's attention like, oh, shit, do I have this? But I want to just back up, the creation developed the human body with such perfection, why do so many people now have this jaw misalignment when a natural human body, evolutionarily speaking, is perfect, except for those rare cases of someone born with birth defect? So, is this coming down post-agriculture? Would this not have been an issue prehistorically?

[00:21:34]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. So, they think that in the last 250 years that there have been very dramatic shifts in craniofacial structure that we've been morphing in very dangerous and troubling ways. And they think that's primarily due to what they call industrialized diet. So, the food that we're eating these days is not hard enough, tough enough, and making us work hard enough to develop the structure and it's epigenetically being expressed. And so, every generation is statistically significantly worse than their parents. And so, these days, the vast majority of humans are born with quite substantial compromised head-jaw relationships. 

[00:22:15] Both the upper jaw and the lower jaw are receding back into the skull. And so, that's why there's such a huge amount of snoring and sleep apnea. 60% of the population over 60 now has snoring and sleep apnea. But it's why there's so much crowding in young children. And so, the dental profession, the orthodontic profession has seen this mass pathology, but they're not aware of the medical ramifications of this, the shifts into the neurological function, the brain function, the immune function. Nobody's really talking about that neurological model much at this point. 

[00:22:57]Luke Storey:  So, if we wanted to stop that chain reaction generationally, so a guy like me, I don't have kids yet, but say, I fixed my jaw alignment, and I have a kid, and my mate fixes her jaw alignment if it's needed, and then we have a kid, is it likely that that's going to then be reflected positively on the offspring or is it too late because it's already in the gene?

[00:23:21]Dwight Jennings:  It's a little bit too late, it's already in the genes, but what you do is going to affect, it's like the Pottenger cat studies or the Weston Price's research that when they degenerated the cats in the Pottenger cat studies, it took four generations to bring it back when they put them on raw food, right? And Weston Price showed that there was pretty significant shifts as people start the eating food commerce, so white flour and the white rice within one generation, but he did have cases, too, where the parents got back on better foods and the children later that were born later didn't have the birth defects that they found.

[00:23:58]Luke Storey:  Oh, so you can correct it, it just takes a while.

[00:24:03]Dwight Jennings:  Exactly. Yeah.

[00:24:04]Luke Storey:  Okay. That's interesting, yeah, because we're talking about that earlier, to me, that was one of the most, and I don't even know that much about Weston Price, I've never even read the actual book, but I've just seen all the photos that he did when he traveled around the world and he studied all these indigenous people that have been untouched by civilization and the industrialized food chain, the eating off the land as natural hunter-gatherers. And it's just incredible not only how robust their bodies were. I mean, they're just all beasts.

[00:24:32] They just look fit and amazing, but they all have these huge just Hollywood smiles, the kind of smiles people in my town pay 50 grand for. And every person to a man or to a person who have these beautiful wide smiles, there's no crooked teeth, and it's something that I notice, people rag on the British a lot, are kind of known for having pretty jacked up teeth, and you think about, oh, man, it's that, the post-agriculture food model, we're just not eating food that's natural to the human ame. And so, you see they generationally kind of getting worse and worse. And I think there's a reason why. 

[00:25:14]Dwight Jennings:  I think one of the books here that are brought up. 

[00:25:17]Luke Storey:  Oh, what do you got? 

[00:25:18]Dwight Jennings:  This one's how anthropology informs the orthodontic diagnosis, and so this is all about modern studies around the world showing that each generation, the successive generations are now statistically and significantly worse than their parents that sits on all continents. 

[00:25:38]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting. And that's scary. So what we do essentially is we're born with jacked up teeth, and then cosmetically, we want to make those teeth straight, but we're not really looking into, A, the root cause of diet and lifestyle, and then correcting the jaw alignment itself as part of that solution. Wow. What's it called, trigeminal? 

[00:26:02]Dwight Jennings:  Trigeminal. 

[00:26:04]Luke Storey:  Trigeminal nerve, how does that affect cognition and blood flow when that's impeded by jaw of someone?

[00:26:12]Dwight Jennings:  So, there's what they call the key search term here is regional cerebral blood flow. So, regional cerebral blood flow, it's a PubMed search term, regional cerebral blood flow is regulated by your trigeminal nerve. That's why when a boxer gets hit in the jaw and you stimulate this nerve too much, it shuts down brain blood flow and they pass out, or if you eat ice cream too fast and stimulate too much cold, you'll get a brain freeze. It also alters brain blood flow. But one of the Japanese studies show that people missing their back molars, when they clench down, on average, it decreases brain blood flow by 40%.

[00:26:50]Luke Storey:  40%.

[00:26:50]Dwight Jennings:  But I see a number of cases-

[00:26:56]Luke Storey:  How do you even talk when you're missing 40% of the blood in your brain?

[00:27:00]Dwight Jennings:  So, they get a lot of brain fog, like I saw a young boy. He had a moderate overbite, but when they did orthodontics on him, they put braces on all of his teeth, but his last molar, and the last molar in the back was off by three millimeters, an eighth of an inch. It didn't line up with the upper one by an eighth of an inch. And even though he was extremely brilliant kid, he couldn't go to college, he couldn't perform, he couldn't react, he had just too much brain fog, brain didn't work on him because the back molar has been a little far off. So, you can get into a lot of brain fog, I saw two cases this past week with pretty severe brain fog. 

[00:27:38]Luke Storey:  And so, that's just the relationship between this nerve, not even counting the Substance P issue and the subsequent inflammation caused by the abundance of that in your body.

[00:27:50]Dwight Jennings:  And so, the problem is, is if you ever end up with a transient ischemic attack, if you ever have a temporary decrease in brain blood flow when you pass out, and you go to the emergency room, I have never, ever seen them consider trigeminal sensory input as a problem. So, when you have a problem, medicine is supposed to come up with a differential diagnostic list of all the things that it could be, but bite is never an option with temporary ischemic attacks.

[00:28:22]Luke Storey:  Wow. And why do you think dentistry and medicine in general are so ignorant of this particular niche issue?

[00:28:33]Dwight Jennings:  Well, a lot, they can't communicate, right? So, the dentist don't have any medical understanding of how sensory input through the trigeminal impact are medical issues. They're missing all that neurology. And medicine, if they knew the neurology, if they sent it to a dentist, the dentist wouldn't know how to fix it. The dentist, by and large, doesn't know how to do precision jaw orthopedics, nothing the dentist would do would likely reverse the problem. 

[00:29:05]Luke Storey:  So, it's two fields, just basically speaking a second language?

[00:29:08]Dwight Jennings:  Right.

[00:29:09]Luke Storey:  And then, when it comes to this issue, and the Substance P, and things like fibromyalgia, and other related disorders that we're going to get into, do you perceive any conflict of interest or rather a lack of interest in the medical community because of pharmaceutical sales motivations that, in some cases, perhaps certain entities don't want a solution to ongoing and unsolvable issues like that?

[00:29:40]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. So, there's no Substance P antagonist. There is a single Substance P antagonist approved, but it's only approved for severe nausea after chemotherapy, right? And there's lots of papers where they've used it experimentally to treat other medical conditions, but it's FDA-approved only for use for severe nausea. But since there's a lack of pharmaceutical remedies for Substance P, physicians never think about Substance P and just don't go there either. It's not with proven, and they don't think of a dental solution because they don't know about that either. And so, most physicians, if you mention Substance P, it's a very vague term to them, that they have very little understanding of. 

[00:30:23]Luke Storey:  Until now, goddammit. All you doctors listening, listen up. So, when it comes to going to see, it's an orthodontist that would do braces instead, right? 

[00:30:35]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:30:35]Luke Storey:  Okay. So, say, just I have cosmetic issues with my bite or my teeth. They're wearing down because my bite's off. Why doesn't the application of Invisalign or braces that are straight in the teeth, why doesn't that fix the alignment of the jaw? How are they not related?

[00:30:54]Dwight Jennings:  So, the primary defect in most cranium mandibular disorders is a lack of height in the back teeth. So, if you go in and put braces on all the teeth, it limits those teeth from ever growing taller, or if you use Invisaligns, they temporarily build those back teeth up taller because there's plastic on top of both the upper and lower teeth. And my daughter's currently going through Invisalign, right? 

[00:31:15] And she tells me this weekend that when she takes her Invisalign off, she can only touch on her front teeth, right? And so, she's compressed, and you put those Invisaligns in for 16 hours a day, when you take them off, that joint doesn't readily compress again. And so, I see about a case a month that comes in that gets into severe problems from Invisaligns. They get done with Invisaligns and only hitting on their front teeth and the back teeth don't touch.

[00:31:44]Luke Storey:  But has anyone cover the way to do the Invisalign, but also raise those back to you?

[00:31:50]Dwight Jennings:  It would be very easy. You just got to cut the Invisaligns off so it doesn't cover the last two during the treatment.

[00:31:55]Luke Storey:  I see.

[00:31:56]Dwight Jennings:  Right. And you could grow the back teeth taller.

[00:31:59]Luke Storey:  Aside from growing the back teeth taller, can you put crowns or something on it?

[00:32:02]Dwight Jennings:  You can do that too as well in the cases that's prosthetic, but then you have to find out where it is at that jaw wants to be before you do the grounds and have to go through that. And so, dentistry, for the most part, doesn't understand that protocol. That is, wherever you put the jaw, in time, it wants to be a little bit different. To fix the jaws isn't a procedure, it's a process. You have to do successive approximations to precision, and you can't go in, in one fell swoop, and just build it up, and expect it to, because when you support that joint, it's going to relax a little bit more, decompress a little bit more over time.

[00:32:45]Luke Storey:  We'll be right back at you after this brief but important announcement. A lot of people like myself and listeners of this show like to experiment with supplements and all of the biohacking technologies. And it's easy to get sidetracked with all this stuff. We all want health, vitality, longevity, and many of us think we can buy our way into it. However, I'm going to tell you from my own subjective experience that nothing, and I mean, nothing beats deep, restful restorative sleep when it comes to your health and vitality.

[00:33:18] So, for the past five years or so, since I started this podcast and really committed to this path, I've been looking for anything and everything that improves my sleep reliably. And that brings us to today's sponsor, sovereignty.co who make an incredible sleep formula called Dream. It's got therapeutic doses of clinically studied traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs, broad-spectrum hemp extract grown in California. It's fortified with CBN and a custom sleep terpene formula.

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[00:34:15] So, I really like this product, Dream, not only for the ingredient deck and its effectiveness, but also, the way it's packaged. And I pay attention to stuff like this when it comes to my lifestyle because I want things to work and I want to be able to travel with them. So, if you want to check out this Dream product, I highly recommend that you do so. In fact, I'm about to have my nightly dose of Dream right now in this Airbnb from which I record this plug. Here's what you do if you want to join the Dream team, go to sovereignty.co. That's spelled S-O-V-E-R-E-I-G-N-T-Y, sovereignty.co. And during this 2020 holiday season, you can save yourself a 20% off by using the code, luke20.

[00:34:59] So, again, go to sovereignty.co, use the code, luke20, to save 20%. And now, back to the interview. When I'm thinking about the skeleton and the cervical spine, and how that carries down to the other parts of the spine, I'm just kind of picturing in my mind, I'm just picturing that skeleton in the doctor's office, kind of looking at it from behind, and how the jaw connects to the skull, and how all this is going on, it seems like there's got to be a very direct correlation between spinal misalignment. Is there a relationship between scoliosis, back pain? Does this eventually kind of bend and radiate its way down to the lower back issues and things like that?

[00:35:44]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. So, there's a very large number of articles showing that as the lower jaw goes back, the people go into a forward-head posture, straightens out the cervical spine. And as you reverse that, as you treat these cases and bring the chin forward, it makes the head, as it stretches out, all of it tries to go back. And so, you end up putting the curvature back into the neck. And so, the cervical vertebrae stay a lot better. All the pain fibers from the trigeminal and upper cervical go to the same nucleus in the brain. They believe that the upper quarter is a functional unit on the body.

[00:36:18] And so, anything going on the body would affect neck and shoulder girdle. If you shorten back teeth on animals, Japanese have done 40 years of research on, any time you shorten the back teeth on animals, it causes the opposite side of the body to become hypertonic, intense, and that all the animals get scoliosis, right? And then, as the spine tightens up and as your Substance P levels go up, Substance P is a primary regulator of calcium metabolism in the body. And so, you may have osteopenia, osteoporosis, that's the vertebral breakdown, a lot more stress on the spine. And so, you see a lot more spinal problems as the bites degenerate.

[00:37:02]Luke Storey:  You're mentioning something earlier about Substance P in its relation to the calcium influx in the cells. Can you explain that? Because I found it was really interesting because it's essentially the same thing that EMF does. So, break that down for us.

[00:37:18]Dwight Jennings:  So, what Substance P does to the body is it attaches to the receptor, what they call NKI receptor on cell membranes. And when it attaches to that, it opens up a channel that allows calcium influx in the cells, right? So, cell membrane becomes porous. That's also the same problem on blood brain barrier too, right? And when that cell membrane is no longer integral, then the body can't detoxify either. It loses its pump mechanism. It can't pump the guts, because the cell membranes, the pump mechanism is in attack. When the calcium gets into the cell, it gets into the mitochondria and messes with mitochondrial energy production, cells go from aerobic to anaerobic, you get a lot more fatigue.

[00:38:06]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting.

[00:38:08]Dwight Jennings:  Right. And it's that calcium in the mitochondria that's suspected as being the primary driver on genetic alterations leading to cancer.

[00:38:20]Luke Storey:  Wow. And so, if we have high levels of Substance P, whether it be from other issues or jaw misalignment, as we're describing, and you're in a high-EMF environment a lot of the time, your cells are getting constantly flooded with calcium, as are your mitochondria. It seems like a double jeopardy in that case.

[00:38:39]Dwight Jennings:  So, again, it's going to be, that mechanism from EMF to calcium influx is going to be through C fibers, right? So, C fibers are multi-modal, like when the Fukushima meltdown happened in Japan, they asked one of the researchers there and he knows somebody got too much radiation, he says, you measure the Substance P levels.

[00:39:00]Luke Storey:  Oh, no kidding.

[00:39:01]Dwight Jennings:  Right. And so, the electromagnetic fields are going to, I suspect, go through C fibers, and through the sensory system, and it will be through Substance P that you get that calcium influx from the EMF. 

[00:39:14]Luke Storey:  Oh, really? So, that's why the EMF does that.

[00:39:16]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. That's why the EMF does that.

[00:39:17]Luke Storey:  Oh, trippy. I've never heard that, and I've geeked out on EMF a lot, so I got supersensitive to it.

[00:39:24]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah.

[00:39:25]Luke Storey:  Wow. That's trippy. So, that's how it does that.

[00:39:28]Dwight Jennings:  So, when Substance P goes up in the body, it hypersensitizes all sensory neurons in your body, whether that's the C fibers or your barometric pressure brain fibers or anything. And so, people that have bite dysfunction have a generalized hypersensitivity syndrome and more sensitive to noise than to light, and to hot, and to cold, and to food, and to drugs, and to stress just from that Substance P hypersensitized. And when the body becomes hypersensitive and it loses homeostasis, it can no longer appropriately react to its sensor, to its environment, to its sensory input. And so, it gets sick all the time.

[00:40:06]Luke Storey:  And this would explain things like, well, EMF sensitivity, being more sensitive because I know that some people are like me, we're canary in the coal mine, there's a life I rather in the room like I know it's on or off, and hypersensitive in chemical sensitivities, I'm assuming, would be affected in the same way.

[00:40:23]Dwight Jennings:  So, chemical sensitivities is that way, but it's also a little bit different. So, we have two noses in our body. Most people don't know that. There's the olfactory, which everybody knows about, but the chemoreceptors in your body are part of your trigeminal nerve, right? And so, multiple chemical sensitivity is usually going to be a bite problem because that trigeminal is overexcited.

[00:40:47]Luke Storey:  What isn't a bite problem, Dwight? And listeners, it's going to sound like he's saying everything's a bite problem, so everyone comes to see him, but I'm sure you're plenty busy already. But I mean, I'm just like, God, this is so annoying and that no one knows about this. Well, I guess that's why we're here. And then, I mean, it's obvious, this has got to have a lot to do with migraines and headaches. How does this jaw and Substance P thing plan to people with chronic headaches?

[00:41:17]Dwight Jennings:  So, there are only two things that cause headaches, right? Substance P and another co-secreted neurotransmitter called calcitonin gene-related peptide, right? And they just, in the like last six months, came out with an injection to block calcitonin gene-related peptide, and it's a once-a-month injection. But the research shows that bite therapy is 95% effective, 87% effective at eliminating headaches regardless of the type of headache. So, researchers don't think headaches are different types. They think they're on a continuum, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but they're all from the trigeminal nerve, being overexcited and overstimulated that brings on the headache.

[00:41:59] And in most cases, it's temporalis hyperactivity pulling the job back. The tests that should be done for migraines is they should be doing surface electromyography, looking at your temporalis and masseters bilateral. And then, a good bite, these four muscles fire equally and simultaneously, but in a bad bite, there's a twerk. And so, one's going to be firing quicker, or blocked, or weak and not responding appropriately. And so, that's the test that should be done for migraines. But the vast majority of headaches are going to be through jaw dysfunction.

[00:42:33]Luke Storey:  Wow. Damn. I wish I would have known this. I think three weeks ago, I did a solo episode where I talked about different treatments for headaches, and I guess some pretty good ones, but this wasn't one of them, which sounds like probably the most prevalent. And then, what about allergies? If we have this excited state in our body, you mentioned kind of in relation to food, what about environmental allergies?

[00:42:58]Dwight Jennings:  So, that too. So, again, it's that Substance P being elevated that makes us overreactive to whether it's pollen, or dust, or mites, or whatever. And as you get the Substance P levels lowered, I just had a patient come in to finish treatment a couple of years ago, and he was telling me this year, his spring allergies were nonexistent. And again, the literature is very clear that the Substance P drives a generalized hypersensitivity syndrome. 

[00:43:29]Luke Storey:  And is there any other way like, say, you've got a perfect jaw alignment, but you're running really high on Substance P? Are there any other known causes of that or solutions to it? I mean, are there potent antioxidants, or anti-inflammatories, or anything that can help bring those levels down if it's not a jaw issue?

[00:43:49]Dwight Jennings:  So, the primary thing we want to look at is magnesium levels. Magnesium deficiency will drive up your Substance P levels. Magnesium calms things down, right? All the spices mitigate the effects of Substance P, whether that's turmeric, cinnamon, vanilla, right? Resveratrol has been shown to lower Substance P levels. Acupuncture, massage lower Substance P levels. With some mild exercise will lower your Substance P levels. 

[00:44:18]Luke Storey:  I wonder if float tank is good, your floating sensory deprivation chambers, you're floating in all that magnesium chloride. 

[00:44:25]Dwight Jennings:  Probably would. 

[00:44:26]Luke Storey:  And your nervous system will just calm down, unless you're claustrophobic, then your nervous system is excited because you're paranoid of being trapped in a box. Okay. So, there are a few things that we could do other than that.

[00:44:38]Dwight Jennings:  Cayenne pepper is the primary herbal remedy for eliminating Substance P of the body, but just be careful, because it temporarily elevates your Substance P, it triggers Substance P release, and eventually deplete your body of Substance P, that is people that eat a lot of chili peppers are tough hombres. They don't feel pain as easily, right? They primarily use cayenne pepper in hot climates to lower the Substance P levels so they can tolerate the heat better.

[00:45:06]Luke Storey:  That's good to know. And for those listening and for the show notes, there's the best cayenne supplement I've ever found is formulated by a doctor named Dr. Richard Schulze, the famous American herbalist. He's got a company called American Botanical Pharmacy, and he's the guy I first started following like 23 years ago. And they make a cayenne extract, a liquid extract. I mean, it's so potent. And they check for mold, it's really legit. But one drop of that in like a small glass of water and you're on fire.

[00:45:39] I mean, it's so concentrated, and the little bottle is, I don't know, it's probably 30 bucks. You could take it every day, it would last you six months or something. That's good. I'm going to get back on that because that wasn't one of the things that was indicated for, but I think if you're going to take cayenne, that's probably the best and cleanest way to take it. So, duly noted on that. I hear the term sleep apnea thrown around a lot. I don't really know what that is. There's all these machines for it. And it's a bit mysterious to me. So, break down what sleep apnea is and how it differs from someone who snore.

[00:46:11]Dwight Jennings:  So, snoring is you have a narrow airway and the air going through there makes noise, right? And it's typically worse on your back, because on your back, gravity pulls your jaw back, pulls the tongue back, and narrows that airway in the back. So, people who typically are sleeping on the side will have less snoring. Apnea is where people stop breathing. That is that airway is so close that it becomes too much work for the body to hold it open and it collapses enough that they just stop breathing.

[00:46:41]Luke Storey:  Oh. So, apnea is pretty serious. 

[00:46:43]Dwight Jennings:  Pretty serious. And so, when you stop breathing and you hold that for very long, then the body goes into fight or flight, and you wake back up, you get your muscle down, and you gasp, and you take a breath. And that can happen 23 times a minute. And some people, their oxygen levels in their body will drop really, really low, going from 95, 98, they'll drop the oxygen saturation in the 60s, 70s, or 80s.

[00:47:07]Luke Storey:  Really?

[00:47:07]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. 

[00:47:08]Luke Storey:  That's low. That's lower than it gets on an airplane.

[00:47:11]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. Oh, yeah. They can get really low. And so, that becomes severely stressful to the body and can induce a lot of immune function, heart disease, and other problems.

[00:47:24]Luke Storey:  And how do people typically deal with apnea in the conventional medical model?

[00:47:29]Dwight Jennings:  They get CPAP, they get the air machine that pumps air into them. And so, that CPAP is forcing air through that small opening so you don't develop an apnea, so you don't stop breathing.

[00:47:43]Luke Storey:  And what percentage of the time would you say jaw alignment has causal effect on apnea?

[00:47:50]Dwight Jennings:  So, the research is that for mild and moderate cases, it's highly effective. And one of the sleep study organizations recommends that the first line of treatment is dental anterior repositioning therapy. But for severe cases, oftentimes, you may need surgery in addition to CPAP.

[00:48:12]Luke Storey:  Oh, wow. I'm glad I don't have that. I've attempted at different times, because of back pain, to sleep on my back, when I sleep on my back, I'll start snoring, but it only happens if I sleep on my back. It's not even that I snore, I just kind of wake up, like [making sounds] . It's not like I stay asleep snoring. I just go, oh, shit, I can't breathe, I have move over. And when you did my examination, you said on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the worst jawline that you've ever seen, that I'm around a 3, which is relatively mild. Do you anticipate that if I were to go through the process of however long that takes in incrementally fixing that, that that could be a solution to that can't sleep on your back pain?

[00:48:57]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:48:57]Luke Storey:  Yeah? 

[00:48:58]Dwight Jennings:  Yes. 

[00:48:58]Luke Storey:  Wow. Cool. That's exciting, because my body feels a lot better when I sleep on my back, and I can, it's important to breathe, and when that stop, it's-

[00:49:06]Dwight Jennings:  So, sleeping on your back from a chiropractic standpoint is the best position, but from a TMJ position, jaw position, it's probably the worst position. You are much better on the side or stomach.

[00:49:16]Luke Storey:  Do you recommend people side sleep? 

[00:49:18]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:49:18]Luke Storey:  Even once you've sorted them out? 

[00:49:21]Dwight Jennings:  Yes.

[00:49:21]Luke Storey:  Oh, okay. Well, then maybe that dream is just not one that I'm going to realize in this lifetime. Okay. That's good. How does this relate to tinnitus? So many of my questions when I do these interviews, and I'm sorry to the audience, but they're selfish, and this one definitely would be in that category. Some years ago, I suspect I had a bit of an ear infection going in a funky hot spring, like I've done a lot of, and I lost maybe 30%, 40% of hearing in the left ear.

[00:49:52] And so, now, I'm that guy at 49 like, what, what did you say? I have to turn my head a certain way to hear people, but the ringing is quite consistent. And if I don't ignore it, it's terribly annoying. Now, I've learned to just phase it out and I kind of have a sort of living meditative practice I do to not energize the thoughts about it. But if I think about it, I'm like, oh, it's going out all the time. Is this a common effect? I'm imagining that your ears are so interconnected to your jaw. There must be something there.

[00:50:23]Dwight Jennings:  So, there's some great literature on that. There's a literature on what they call somatic tinnitus. So, they know that sensory input from all parts of the body affects hearing. We're all integrated. So, there's research where they play with the arm and alter hearing. But under somatic tinnitus, they understand that due to the massive size of this nerve, and its proximity, and the way that this nerve fades into the brain, that sensory input from your trigeminal is going to be the primary cause of most tinnitus.

[00:50:53] And so, the research on not so good a jaw orthopedic therapy shows that the jaw orthopedic therapy is about 50% effective at eliminating tinnitus. But if they were to do it more precise, they suspected it would be even higher. Also, with jaw dysfunction, there's a book called The Dental Position, and he has a complete chapter on hearing loss, and he's shown that he can reverse hearing loss, also, with jaw therapy.

[00:51:24]Luke Storey:  Really?

[00:51:25]Dwight Jennings:  Uh-huh.

[00:51:25]Luke Storey:  Oh, that's exciting.

[00:51:26]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah. So, he had before and after tympanogram studies showing that as he pressured those jaws more forward, that he could dramatically alter hearing loss in a number of cases.

[00:51:40]Luke Storey:  Damn. Wow, that's so cool. I'm sure I'm not the only one. And who knows how directly mine's related since my bite is not that crazy off. But still, I always approach thing as, even if it's not a one-shot solution, that you just do everything you can that could possibly be causing that thing, and eventually, you're going to improve it to some degree.

[00:52:02]Dwight Jennings:  The fact that it correlated with the ear infection also makes you think that it's more bite-related. There's a couple of studies that I've seen on young children with constant ear infections. And when they went in, and glued plastic onto the baby molars of these children, and built their back molars up taller, it was 95% effective at stopping all future ear infections.

[00:52:26] So, the station tube, which drains your ear, which has to function or you're going to get an ear infection, is the little muscle at the bottom of it is controlled by your trigeminal nerve. And so, if there's too much muscle tension, too much trigeminal hyperactivity, it won't let that ear tube drain properly, and then you get backed up, and you get your infections frequently.

[00:52:44]Luke Storey:  Oh, interesting. Wow, what a trip. What don't you know about this particular niche of just like it's so crazy, it is related to everything. I'm curious about the Substance P and its relationship to the differentiation of stem cells, how that would then lead into leukemia and different other issues that have to do with your immune function, et cetera?

[00:53:11]Dwight Jennings:  So, Substance P controls stem cell differentiation in the bone marrow and in all tissues. So, that means, if your bite is off and you have too much elevated Substance P, the stem cell transplants are downward, right? But where it controls stem cell differentiation, the bone marrow, it determines whether you have enough red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, mast cells, whatever, right? And so, there are researchers that think that Substance P is the sole cause of leukemia.

[00:53:41]Luke Storey:  Really? Wow.

[00:53:42]Dwight Jennings:  So, all the blood cancers, I suspect, will respond fairly readily to bite therapy by impacting because it's a quick response thing. It's unlike other tissues. It responds very quickly. And some of the cases that I've treated has had a dramatic impact on a dental lymphoma, a couple of leukemias, and multiple myeloma cases that have responded favorably with bite therapy.

[00:54:08]Luke Storey:  Really? 

[00:54:09]Dwight Jennings:  Uh-huh. 

[00:54:10]Luke Storey:  So, would you say that this would be something in addition to whatever traditional or non-traditional treatments people are doing that have cancer of any type or just blood cancer would benefit from it?

[00:54:22]Dwight Jennings:  The research would suggest that it's across the board. I have an article that's being published in the May issue of Cranio coming out in a couple of months with regard to that.

[00:54:33]Luke Storey:  Wow. Cool. That's exciting. And then, what about the relationship with autism?

[00:54:40]Dwight Jennings:  So, I have a theory on autism. And my theory is, is that the mother has a bad bite, and gestates this baby for nine months in an altered neurochemical environment, too much Substance P. The research shows that autistic babies pop out of the womb with too much Substance P. And I think when their teeth come in and they inherit that bad bite, maybe even possibly worse than their parents.

[00:55:04] That's what really trips them up, and what you see, and often, a delayed onset in autism. The primary pathology in autism is the inflammation of the brain, which is primarily controlled by Substance P. All the sensory problems they have in the autistic children, all the gut issues, those would also suggest an elevated Substance P. The effect of trigeminal input into the brain stem and how that affects Polyvagal theory would also account for the asocial behavior of a lot about the sick children.

[00:55:38]Luke Storey:  Man, that's huge.

[00:55:39]Dwight Jennings:  And so, like I have one autistic boy that I treated, he came in at age seventh or eighth grade, severely violent child. He was in Special Ed. As we started treating him, his school teachers realized that if his bite got off at all, he becomes very violent, they would send him back to me. 

[00:56:04]Luke Storey:  Are you serious?

[00:56:05]Dwight Jennings:  And they say that you go have your bite checked, right? And so, he ended up being the only child in Special Ed that graduated with a high school diploma.

[00:56:12]Luke Storey:  Really?

[00:56:13]Dwight Jennings:  Uh-huh.

[00:56:14]Luke Storey:  That's huge, man.

[00:56:15]Dwight Jennings:  And so, his mother thinks he was adopted. His mother thinks that I saved his life, that he would have ended up very violent. Substance P in the last five or six years has been shown to be the primary driver of most negative brain behavioral problems, both depression, anxiety, bipolar, anger, violent, and addictive behavior, are heavily driven by Substance P in the brain.

[00:56:41]Luke Storey:  No kidding. So, it's relevant in the world of addiction too, huh? 

[00:56:46]Dwight Jennings:  World of addiction, yeah. So, the opioid crisis, they're not going to get anywhere if they don't look at bites, right? These people are all self-medicating. The body's too agitated, and they're trying to bring that down, and that's what the opiates give them, a temporary momentary relief. But they're going to have to get those Substance P levels down to stop these addictions. Nobody's there yet.

[00:57:13]Luke Storey:  That sounds like it. Well, they're going to be. Man, whoever is listening to this episode, share it with anyone you know in the medical or dental profession, please. That's all I ask. In addition to the issue with the gestation of a woman with a bad bite, how else does this issue relate to fertility in general? And is it something that all women that are getting ready to have kids should look into in your opinion?

[00:57:40]Dwight Jennings:  In my opinion, I believe it would. Yeah. Would be just like the Weston Price recommendation, where they look at the foods that they eat before conception. I think, also, the bite would be a major factor. But as Substance P levels go up, it puts you into estrogen dominance. And so, you end up with a much higher fibroid problem, but also, miscarriages and infertility issues. Well, the case I've treated once was this 40-year-old lady. She had a 19-year-old daughter, and she had had 17 years of unprotected sex. And we put her in a mouthpiece and she came up pregnant three months later.

[00:58:16]Luke Storey:  Wow. Because of the hormonal balance that was created as a result of lowering Substance P.

[00:58:22]Dwight Jennings:  Right. 

[00:58:23]Luke Storey:  Wow. That's crazy. 

[00:58:25]Dwight Jennings:  Right. And I've had numerous other cases that were infertile or had multiple miscarriages that were able to carry to term.

[00:58:32]Luke Storey:  Wow. I wonder, do you think this has—I mean, other than the obvious reasons of a woman who's sort of past the baby-making prime window, do you think that, over time, if your jaw is misaligned, that the jaw is getting worse, and as a woman lives into their mid-40s and their 50s, do you think that's part of the infertility equation, or is once your jaw is misaligned and you're full of Substance P, it's just kind of that way and it just keeps going, or does it get worse as you get older?

[00:59:05]Dwight Jennings:  So, bite dysfunction causes a continuum of disorders throughout your lifetime. So, in infancy, you see a lot more colicky ear infections, colds, loose allergies, asthma. And as you get older, as you get in the 20s and 30s, you'll see more TMJ problems, more headaches or musculoskeletal problems. As you get into your 40s, you can see more autoimmune disorders. It's more deeper into the body. And in your 60s, 70s, you're going to see more neurodegenerative disorders. So, it keeps morphing. So, bite dysfunction causes chaotic behavior.

[00:59:47] So, it's under chaos theory. And what chaos theory tells us is that when you throw a monkey wrench into a complex system, the outcome is not predictable. And this is part of why it's not well-understood by the medical profession because it creates a very shotgun scattering effect of disease, 3% are going to get this, 5% are going to get, but it's not a very strong linear correlation with any one particular disease. There's a Kaiser study showing that people with TMJ problems have very high medical utilization rates, but nobody's ever gone the other way. They've never screened people for high medical utilization and gone back to see if there's a jaw problem.

[01:00:24]Luke Storey:  And perhaps that answers the question, which is going to be everyone's big question, why don't more people know about this? Because there is not a direct causal relationship between so many of these symptoms, right?

[01:00:36]Dwight Jennings:  Right.

[01:00:37]Luke Storey:  And if everyone knew that, it's not the chaos theory, it's like jaw alignment's off, this is exactly what happens every time, then it's predictable and repeatable. But there's this randomness to it that makes it hard to trace. And I've noticed that a lot with Lyme too. In Lyme, the symptoms are so random, and it's hard to diagnose, and everyone has kind of different symptoms at different times. And so, it gets sort of, I think, less serious attention.

[01:01:03]Dwight Jennings:  Yes. I think a lot of the Lyme is going to be TMJ. There's multiple studies showing that 95% of Lyme patients have TMJ problems. And in most of those, they're theorizing that the Lyme is causing the TMJ. But I think the evidence is that it's the other way around, that it's the TMJ causing alignment, the Substance P opens up the cell membranes and makes you vulnerable, not only viral, the [indiscernible] invasion. And the bull's eye that you get from a tick bite tells you that that person already has elevated Substance P. 

[01:01:34] ut for elevated Substance P, they wouldn't have that dramatic overreaction to a tick bite, that if some people get a tick by, they just pick it up, and there's never any reaction, hardly at all. But some people get the big bull's eye. And the big bull's eye tells you that this person is hyperresponsive and reacting in an unusual manner to a tick bite. It's not the infection that's causing that bull's eye, as it's the inflammatory response in the body from elevated Substance P.

[01:02:01]Luke Storey:  Damn. That's crazy. That would also explain why one person can get bit by a bee and have relatively no reaction or little reaction, another person, her arm swells up, would that be Substance P as well?

[01:02:14]Dwight Jennings:  Same thing, yes. It's the same thing, yeah.

[01:02:16]Luke Storey:  Wow. You struck gold here with this stuff. This is so interesting. I'm like, oh, goddamn, it's so good to know. Wow. Okay.

[01:02:25]Dwight Jennings:  Any time you look at the inflammatory response, you always got to think about Substance P. And the Substance P stimulates the production of the cytokines that seem that modulate the inflammatory response to the Interleukin-1, they had in Interleukin-6 and 8, other stuff produced by Substance P.

[01:02:48]Luke Storey:  Okay. Now that we know that the jawline and its tendency to produce too much of the Substance P is the issue, what does treatment look like of someone who is moderately too severely affected. Like how long does the process take? What do you do in someone's mouth? What kind of appliances do you use? How much does it end up costing? Like what does someone do if they're like, whoa, I have all these symptoms and I've always known my jaw is off?

[01:03:16]Dwight Jennings:  Right. So, we examine them. We integrate their medical history. We don't have the equipment here. We refer them out for a CBCT, a three dimensional X-ray that shows you the jaw joint. So, we kind of want to know how degenerated that joint might be on them. Like I just saw a 17-year-old boy, and they pulled a six-year molar on him when he was younger, and he's severely retreated to it. And so, he's missing about a third of the bone on his upper jaw, right? 

[01:03:52] And so, that gives you a little more clue, insight on how big of a pathology you're dealing with, but generally, what you find on the X-rays isn't significant as the impact on treatment. They do the same thing even if you knew or didn't know what was going on, on the X-rays. But generally, you've got to bring the jaw forward and get them out tip to tip in most cases. And so, you do that initially with orthopedic appliances, looks like these. 

[01:04:18]Luke Storey:  Oh, cool. Those of you that are watching on video, he's got an example right here.

[01:04:22]Dwight Jennings:  So, here's an upper appliance, and these are what are called twin block crossettes. These little metal frameworks were patented in 1905 called crossettes. And then, the acrylic blocks that go on them were invented by a dentist from Ireland about 30 years ago. And so, there's a little ramp on the front that matches up with the ramp on the bottom. And those little ramps give you a lot of sensory guidance so you can take somebody with an overbite. And with this ramps in there, they instantaneously bite forward. You can make them bite more forward. And then, you're going to end up when you go into the second phase of treatment, you can grind the plastic off in the back, and the bone will push these back teeth forward.

[01:05:03]Luke Storey:  Oh. So, you just incrementally keep grinding back the plastic as the jaw moves back. Wow. That's relatively simple.

[01:05:10]Dwight Jennings:  And this little upper appliance, you can use it, when you get the jaw lined up, know exactly where the jaw is, these back teeth aren't going to line up. And in most cases, you have to push one side out more than the other side. So, a lot of dentists that use appliances that have screws in them, you can't control that asymmetry as well as you can with this one. This one, you just solder a little wire on here that goes to this tooth and that you keep that one tooth out that more than you do the other. 

[01:05:38]Luke Storey:  And if one wears a night guard, would they wear this in place of it or in addition to? 

[01:05:45]Dwight Jennings:  In place of it. 

[01:05:46]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[01:05:46]Dwight Jennings:  It takes it out.

[01:05:47]Luke Storey:  So, this would have the net bonus benefit of stopping you grinding because your teeth aren't touching because the thing is in there.

[01:05:53]Dwight Jennings:  Right. 

[01:05:53]Luke Storey:  And would you eat with this in?

[01:05:55]Dwight Jennings:  You do, do that.

[01:05:56]Luke Storey:  Really? 

[01:05:56]Dwight Jennings:  That's the challenging part of this, and it typically takes someone about four days to figure out how to do that, but people get, the vast majority, less than probably 5% that don't figure out how to eat with them. And then, after you have them in for just a few days and you decompress that jaw joint, when you take them out, you can't get you back together again. So, that phenomenon, dentistry is not aware of, orthodontists aren't aware of, and they don't utilize it in orthodontic treatment. They don't realize that you can decompress that joint, re-inflate the cartilage, and put the jaw on a different position. So, people with severe overbites, you could treat them with this technique. But generally, traditional orthodontics treat them surgically. They break the jaws and slide them forward.

[01:06:38]Luke Storey:  Oh, God. And that's totally unnecessary? 

[01:06:41]Dwight Jennings:  In most cases, uh-huh. And so, that ends up leaving the jaw joint back into the socket too far because you're only sliding just a front-half forward. And so, that's really not the optimum treatment of, you need to bring the whole job forward to decompress the jaw joint.

[01:06:59]Luke Storey:  Wow. I'll be damned. 

[01:07:01]Dwight Jennings:  So, a lot of those surgeries end up causing complications also because of that. 

[01:07:05]Luke Storey:  I can imagine. And so, if I'm at a three on a one to 10, 10 being the worst, you've got someone who's at a five, where it's likely that they want to address it, how much time are you looking for in terms of getting it aligned again? And then, is it just fixed forever? Does someone need to wear an appliance like this for the rest of their life to keep it in place?

[01:07:27]Dwight Jennings:  So, this appliance, you would use for phase one to find out where the jaw needs to be. They use it most of phase two to grow the teeth, and vertically, and to control the width of the jaw, and with the ramps, to control the front-to-back positioning of the door. And then, in phase three, the nighttime retention, they'd have a separate appliance that fits both upper and lower jaw, that won't let the average relapse back this way or the lower down to relapse back that way.

[01:07:53]Luke Storey:  Oh, I see. And they're just wearing that at night. 

[01:07:55]Dwight Jennings:  Just wearing that at nighttime.

[01:07:55]Luke Storey:  Just to keep things in place. 

[01:07:57]Dwight Jennings:  So, your goal is to get those back tall enough so that you can not have to wear a daytime appliance.

[01:08:03]Luke Storey:  Oh, cool.

[01:08:03]Dwight Jennings:  Right. Yeah, because that's got to be a bit of an inconvenience.

[01:08:06]Luke Storey:  Right.

[01:08:06]Dwight Jennings:  So, as you're wearing this, you wear it all the time, take it off, brush your teeth, and put it back on.

[01:08:12]Luke Storey:  Wow. And does that show the little metal bits in your smile and whatnot?

[01:08:16]Dwight Jennings:  So, most people show about this, you don't see the upper appliance at all, but you can usually see the lower pads just a little bit. 

[01:08:23]Luke Storey:  Oh, I see. Interesting. And roughly, I don't know if this is possible to estimate, but what if someone is moderately affected and they want to go through these three phases and get to just having to wear the nightguard? What are they looking at spending throughout that whole process? 

[01:08:34]Dwight Jennings:  Most of the modern cases would be enabled about 7,000 to 9,000.

[01:08:37]Luke Storey:  Oh, really? That's actually not that bad. Last time I got a bunch of fill-ins, it was like 10 grand. So, I was telling you this story earlier, I will tell the listeners, I needed a bunch of fill-ins and I can't getting dental work done. So, they were going to do one or two because they were 700, 1,000 bucks, each of them. And when I was under the nitrous oxide, I was high and shit. 

[01:09:05] And I was fine, and I said, keep going, keep going, just do them all, do them all. And so, they did. And then, I came off the gas, and I went to the front desk, and then they said, oh, that will be $10,000. So, I was like, what did you guys do? They said, you told us, we have it on record. So, be careful what you agree to under dental drugs, folks. I mean, that's quite reasonable.

[01:09:26]Dwight Jennings:  So, some cases, really extreme cases, you could run up 15,000 , 20,000. Some of these cases, if you get a reverse, a lot of bad orthodontics is going to take them maybe five years treatment plan or something.

[01:09:39]Luke Storey:  And on your three phases for someone who kind of is affected, but it's not dramatic, what kind of time frame would you be looking at? 

[01:09:47]Dwight Jennings:  Most cases can be 18, 24 months. 

[01:09:49]Luke Storey:  Okay. A couple of years, you can bang it up. Okay. Cool. Alright. Well, that's hopeful. And then, I have to ask this one, because it was just so random, I've heard you talk about how this can relate to erectile dysfunction as well, and I'm so curious as to how that relates.

[01:10:06]Dwight Jennings:  So, it's going to affect hormone secretion for one, right? Your testosterone is going to be affected by your Substance P levels. It's going to impact peripheral circulation. Your Substance P dilates blood vessels and it contract smooth muscles. And so, it's a major regulator of erectile function too.

[01:10:35]Luke Storey:  Oh. And then, you also mentioned earlier that it has the tendency to make the estrogen dominant. It's going to have this negative cascade effect on all your hormone production. Interesting. Yeah. It's funny, as I do interviews with people, that comes up a lot in ways that I wouldn't think it would be related. Like I was interviewing that same Dr. Sherr on hyperbaric oxygen treatment, and I'm saying, oh, this is great for people with all of these serious diseases, and recovering from surgery, and all kinds of stuff.

[01:11:01] And this is, yeah, one of the main things people use it for, is erectile dysfunction. So, it builds new [indiscernible] , who knew? So, there you go, guys. Get out and crush it. Get your jaw fixed. For people that can't get up here to the Oakland area, because I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, oh, I got to go see this guy now. How would one find a dentist anywhere in the world that does the type of work that you do? 

[01:11:25]Dwight Jennings:  So, probably the closest to what people do that I do that do precision jaw orthopedics, they don't, for the most part, understand a lot of the neurology that we just talked about. But there's a college, it's called the International College of Cranium Mandibular Orthopedics, iccmo.org. And so, that would be your best chance of finding somebody in your locale that understands jaw orthopedics.

[01:11:51]Luke Storey:  Cool. So, is that like an international directory?

[01:11:54]Dwight Jennings:  It is.

[01:11:55]Luke Storey:  Okay.

[01:11:55]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah.

[01:11:56]Luke Storey:  And then, give us your website and contact information, all that, for people that are curious and can make it out to this part of the world.

[01:12:04]Dwight Jennings:  So, I'm at tmjcalifornia.com and we're in Alameda, California, the little island next to Oakland.

[01:12:12]Luke Storey:  Amazing view, by the way.

[01:12:13]Dwight Jennings:  We're at the end of the runway for the Oakland airport. We look out over the water, the bay.

[01:12:17]Luke Storey:  I noticed that when I checked in my hotel last night. I said, I'd like an upper floor, and she said, sure. So, she put me on the side of the airport, like I moved my bags in the room, and I heard [making sounds] . I waited for about 15 minutes, well, let me see how often it is, and it was quite often, so I moved to the east-facing side of it. But yeah, it's actually a really beautiful area. I went for a walking meditation along the bay here. It's really nice little park. So, it's a random area that you're in, but it's actually quite nice and super convenient to the airport too.

[01:12:50]Dwight Jennings:  It is a nice airport. Yeah, we have a pretty large flying clientele.

[01:12:53]Luke Storey:  Yeah, I bet. Cool, man. What else do I want to ask? I think there's one other thing. Out of contact, you have to find someone else that does this, shoot, man, I guess we covered it all. Is there anything else you want to add or do you think we looked in all the nooks and crannies of this particular specialty?

[01:13:09]Dwight Jennings:  I think some of the other aspects of Substance P, one would be brain inflammation. That's neurodegenerative diseases. So, MS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, all those are likely going to have a bite component to them too. The autoimmune disorders, the cancers, I think as bites degenerate worldwide, that would account for a lot of the viral epidemics and the cancer rates going up dramatically.

[01:13:45]Luke Storey:  Wow. And that's the thing, too. I guess every generation, as you were saying, it's going to get worse and worse. If you have both parents that have a bad bite, the offspring is going to have a worse one, and so on, and so on. Next thing you know, people are super jacked up, full of this Substance P and all kinds of problems.

[01:14:04]Dwight Jennings:  So, that pertains for also its effect on anger and violent, all the multiple shootings, and stuff, and everything. It could get a lot worse with the social violence. 

[01:14:22]Luke Storey:  Right. Wow. Damn. Alright. Cool. Well, you know what to do, folks listening, man, you got to get your jaw checked out, and perhaps yours will—I thought might be a lot worse because I just always assume the worst when it comes to my health and some of the symptoms I had with that inflammation, and pain, and stuff, so I was glad to find that mine's not that bad, but I wanted to be perfect, so I'm a zero. So, I'm definitely personally going to follow through with the protocol, as goofy as I'm going to feel wearing that thing in my mouth. I have to take it out for interviews. So, imagine when you first use the appliance, you probably have to get used to speaking. Does it typically give people a little bit of a lisp? 

[01:14:58]Dwight Jennings:  It does for the first week. 

[01:15:01]Luke Storey:  Only about a week?

[01:15:02]Dwight Jennings:  Only about a week. And then, you get used to it, the body adapts, and when you take the appliances out, then it's hard to talk without them. 

[01:15:11]Luke Storey:  Oh, that's funny. So, there's a little adaptation period going in and coming off. Alright. Cool. Man, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. As I said, you've been on my to-do list of interviews for two or three years now, almost since the very beginning. I'm glad we finally got it together. And I motivated myself to fly up here. And I'm here just for this, and I'm really glad I did, so thank you for your dedication and the passion you have for your work. I noticed that walking in, you're, before even recording, you're excited just to tell me all this stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, wait until the lights are out. Wait, this is Bouldin. So, thank you for doing what you do. And I look forward to you training some other people in this, too. 

[01:15:50]Dwight Jennings:  Yeah, we were about to turn that corner, yeah. 

[01:15:52]Luke Storey:  Yeah, that's going to be amazing. I find a lot of times, I need someone who's really honed in on a specialty. There's only one of them and more people need help. So, I think that's really cool. Yeah, man. Alright. Thanks, brother. See you soon.

[01:16:06]Dwight Jennings:  Okay. Bye-bye.

[01:16:07]Luke Storey:  Well, guys, we just made it through Episode 320 of The Life Stylist podcast. I want to thank you, per usual, for joining me on today's show. It's such a treat for me to have the opportunity to seek out experts that have a very nuanced viewpoint on health issues or even spiritual practices. So, when I find someone like Dr. Jennings, it brings me great pleasure to pick their brain for all of their wisdom and share it with you. I feel like the most fortunate guy in the world.

[01:16:37] And on top of that, sometimes, I even get to experience the modalities, or treatments, or expertise that our guests are known for. And this was the case in this particular episode. So, right after this show, if you want to dive in, you could catch the bonus show where we walk you through my exam with Dr. Jennings, and this will, of course, make a lot more sense if you listen to both episodes, right? So, if you just popped on to the bonus show that comes out after this, number 321, you'd be like, what is happening here? 

[01:17:08] But I want to encourage you to check it out. If your curiosity was piqued by this conversation, you'll be able to get to see Dwight in action. And it's really fascinating how he does these exams. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced at any dental office, to say the least. So, that's episode 321. That is already live if you want to keep this party going. I might recommend that you check that on video just because it will be easier to contextualize. 

[01:17:33] Anyway, that's what's up with the world of TMJ, and jaw alignment, and the work of Dr. Jennings. Let's move on to next week's episode, number 322, entitled Good Vibrations, Bioharmonics and Sound Healing with Dr. VIBE, that's my friend Dr. Stephen Schwartz. And he makes this thing called the VIBE bed and he created all these special musical tracks that put you into a trance, and have a really positive effect on your mind, consciousness, body. Very cool stuff.

[01:17:59] Dude is an OG biohacker from back in the day. So, in next week's episode, we not only talk about sound healing, but also, tons of other healing and biohacking devices that have been out for many years. He's been doing this for a long, long time. So, that's next week. Can't wait for you to join me there. And then, last but, of course, not least, let's thank our sponsors. First one up is Sovereignty. You can find them at sovereignty.co/luke. That's S-O-V-E-R-E-I-G-N-T-Y, sovereignty.co/luke. 

[01:18:32] During the holiday season here in 2020, you can save 20% off at sovereignty.co/luke with the code, luke20. These guys make some really powerful, powerful, and actually, surprisingly tasty herbal formula, two of them. One that helps you calm down and/or go to sleep. One of them that gives you focus and energy. They're badass. Sovereignty.co/luke. Next one is beekeepersnaturals.com and the code there is lifestylist for 15% off, what I believe are the best bee products in the world.

[01:19:03] In fact, no shit, right now, I'm staring at an unpacked box of tons of Beekeeper's Naturals products that they just had delivered to me in my temporary home in Sedona, Arizona. So, I am super stoked. In fact, this morning, what did I have this morning? I had some of the bee pollen, took a handful of that, and took the dog for a walk. And on some days, I even sprinkle a little bit of that on the dog food, you know what I'm saying? I mean, it's some expensive dog food, I'm not going to lie.

[01:19:32] She just gets a little bit because she's only 18 pounds, and I know I'm doing her right with some bioavailable copper, and some really unique enzymes, and things that are present in bee pollen, and other bee products. I'm a huge believer in supplements that are derived from nature and beekeepers naturals.com does something really cool, in that they also protect beekeepers and sustainable beekeeping practices around the world. So, they are just extremely well-suited company for this show because they're environmentally, socially sound and they also just make some really high-end products.

[01:20:09] So, that's beekeepersnaturals.com. Huge fan. Happy to support them. Happy to receive their support in the form of dollar, dollar bills. Last but not least, Just Thrive. That's justthrivehealth.com. The audience code there is luke15, and that gets you 15% off, some of those badass probiotics in the world. They are not a waste of money. A lot of people don't realize this, you just go to Whole Foods, and like, oh, my stomach's weird, I'm going to take some probiotics, many people don't realize that those probiotics don't have the ability or opportunity to proliferate.

[01:20:41] And actually, they've become cultured in your gut. Often, they die because of the heat of the digestive tract, and the acids, and all these things, right? So, they might have some enzymes and some other benefits just like fermented foods. But if you really want to lock in the gut health, you want, in my opinion, to get a spore-based probiotics. So, that's what justthrivehealth.com makes in addition to a couple other great products. I have one that's really great for immunity. 

[01:21:10] If you're someone who's worried about the Rona and those type of things, you want to fortify your immune system, I think that's a good idea to do all the time. I'm always working on my immune system. And of course, your immune system is so directly correlated to your gut health. So, those guys are going to help you out with that. And when I do these ad plugs, man, I always try to provide a little value. I don't just want to be like, hey, buy this thing, buy this thing, fork over your cash, but I really do a lot of research into all of the products that I represent.

[01:21:37] And it's fun to actually share some of the information that I learn about them. And it's one of the things about my job that I really enjoy, is being able to really research and vet these brands and these products so that I am only representing the best of the best. And that helps me feel really good to have my integrity and know that if you guys are going to spend some cash, and you don't have to, the show is free, that you're not going to be wasting your money. So, there you go. So, thank you so much for joining me and I'll be back inside your head next Tuesday.

[01:22:22]

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