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  4. What do you recommend for patients who have been told by their dentist they need to see a periodontist for gum issues? Reading on what periodontists might do, cut their gums, clean things up, pull the tissue back down, it seems very intense. Do you have anything I can tell this patient to do to improve gum health without the specialist?
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  4. What do you recommend for patients who have been told by their dentist they need to see a periodontist for gum issues? Reading on what periodontists might do, cut their gums, clean things up, pull the tissue back down, it seems very intense. Do you have anything I can tell this patient to do to improve gum health without the specialist?

What do you recommend for patients who have been told by their dentist they need to see a periodontist for gum issues? Reading on what periodontists might do, cut their gums, clean things up, pull the tissue back down, it seems very intense. Do you have anything I can tell this patient to do to improve gum health without the specialist?

Chris Kresser:  Certainly. A lot of the same things that we would do to improve overall health, improve gum health, and then there are more specific steps that a patient can take. One of them is to improve the oral microbiome. A favorite way to do that or the quickest and most effective way that I’ve seen to do that are dental probiotics. So ProDental is a good brand that you can get on Amazon. There are certain species like BLIS, B-L-I-S K12, they’ve been show to be particularly beneficial for the oral microbiome and ProDental has that along with some other species. I’ve seen people reverse some pretty hairy dental situations and periodontal situations just with dental probiotics.  There’s actually an alumnus from the first ADAPT program, Alvin Danenberg, who is actually a periodontist. He went through ADAPT with the first group, and he writes extensively about a functional approach to periodontal health. I’m sure even if you contacted him, he’d be willing to talk with you as a fellow ADAPT member. His website is Dr Danenberg, and he’s on Facebook —Facebook.com/al.danenberg. So check out his website. He’s got some good resources there, and you can maybe hit him up on Facebook and ask him what he thinks. He’s, as I said, approaching periodontal health from a functional perspective, which is pretty unusual.

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