Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey, Human podcast.
This is episode 453,
and my guest is doctor Blaine Leeds.
Blaine's been practicing general and cosmetic dentistry for
over twenty eight years.
He's on a mission to improve the quality
and quantity of sleep for children, teens, and
adults.
Oral sleep apnea impedes restorative sleep, which experts
are now determining
to be the root cause of so many
mental, emotional, and physical issues.
Teeth are super important, y'all. He's also the
coauthor of What Happens When Your Child Doesn't
Sleep,
exploring the link between children's general health and
sleep obstructed
breathing related to underdeveloped jaws.
I find that really interesting.
I was born with lots of extra teeth.
I had to get teeth pulled as a
kid
and had braces for a couple years.
And then, of course, teeth have memory. So
as an adult, I ended up getting Invisalign
and and taking care of that business. But
my dentist as an adult was really interesting,
doctor Cummings in Nashville, Tennessee, actually.
Shout out, doctor Cummings. And
he said that
in my generation,
that kids oftentimes
had
lots of teeth removed, braces and things. Now
I have a
a genetic disorder
that
is coupled with having extra teeth. So I
may be an anomaly in that. But I
know a lot of people have had wisdom
teeth pulled and various things to prepare for
braces.
And he had said to me that it
actually now they know better because it changes
the shape of the jaw by doing that.
And and that's a no no because it's
very important for your jaw to have a
particular shape. And, anyway, I just thought that
was all interesting. And then, doctor Leeds
echoes that sentiment, obviously,
and that's what we talk about. So, anyway,
long story longer, I had braces. My brother
had braces. I come from a family of
braces people,
and
I really loved Invisalign. But that's a whole
other story, and it's not an ad for
Invisalign. Just wanted to throw it out there.
Anyway, check out Hey Human podcast for links
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And thank you for listening. Be well.
Hang in there. It's a tough time.
Be kind.
Be love. And here we go.
Doctor Blaine Leeds, welcome to Hey Human.
Thank you so much for having me, Susan.
Glad to be here. It's nice to see
you. I love this piece of furniture behind
you. It's beautiful.
I love it too. And, it it, was
one of the pieces that was in an
estate sale in this house that we purchased,
back in Arkansas. Some dear friends had the
house for sale, and,
and they had she had a very eclectic
sort of a Pacific Rim, you know,
old taste. And so, yeah, this piece was
in her foyer, and we moved it into
this nice
nice office here in the in our house.
We we were glad to get to keep
it and kinda keep the heritage there. My
wife's mother was a she was an antique
jewelry person and and taught my wife a
lot about antiques. My mother-in-law passed away in
November of twenty three.
That was something they really bonded
through is I mean, but my wife can
look at a chair and say, that's firewood,
and that chair right beside it has, you
know, those claw feet and, you know, that
that's from this era, and that's worth $950.
You know? I mean, she can, you know,
she's really good at that, but her she
and her mom shared that. And my mother-in-law
was much more into the antique jewelry and
stones and that kind of stuff. Had a
little she sold diamonds out of her kitchen.
Had a little kitchen
wholesale jewelry
group, and she would go to Tulsa, Oklahoma
and buy buy stones from this this jewelry
out there. He's a really, really good guy.
Took care of her and really sold her
some nice nice pieces. So, people did that
kind of thing. She was a homemaker, you
know, and it's her kind of her
side hustle, you know, back in the day
before she I love that. Well, let's get
into you. Let's talk about where you came
up and what
inspired the interests
of young you into becoming
what you do now.
Sure. Happy to. I,
I I thought, in ninth grade, I wanted
to be a pediatrician, take care of kids,
be a medical doctor. And,
my path kinda shifted a little bit in
in college and and encountered,
an admissions director from the University of Tennessee
Health Science Center in Memphis who he was
like, yeah, you should think about dental school.
And, never really had crossed my mind at
that point. And,
one thing led to another, and and that
class had one spot remaining in it. And
I thought, you know what? I'll go ahead
and apply.
And, you know, I was able to get
in that that that class and,
you know, change change my career trajectory forever.
And,
you know, I tell people all the time
as much as
as much difficulty as as dental school presented
for everybody as we were going through it
back then, you know, I would go back
again if somebody somebody made me. You know?
I mean, I I just left the office
today. I had two
lovely kiddo patients that I saw toward the
end of the day today at the office.
And, but yeah. So so I've been doing
dentistry now for twenty eight years. Went to
a little small
land grant college in Arkansas and then, on
to University of Tennessee. Arkansas is about to
open a dental school. They're gonna take their
first class in 2025.
And, you know, insert your toothbrush joke here.
You know, Arkansas didn't, didn't have, I mean,
not enough teeth to have a dental school,
you know, some people would say back in
the day. But we we love to let
people think that we're, you know, barefoot and
toothless here in Arkansas, but it's a a
pretty progressive little Southern Southern state with a
couple of you know, a president and another
presidential candidate. So it's a it's a great
place to be. Great great, business center in
Northwest Arkansas.
The best art museum between LA and New
York, you know, in my opinion.
Alice Walton's creation, Crystal Bridges, you know, which
is here in Northwest Arkansas.
Worth the trip. Alice Walton of Walmart?
That's right. Yeah. Oh, okay. So
Helen and Sam's daughter and, one of their
kids. And, she's in her seventies now, but
she took four years and traveled the world
and spent $400,000,000
of her own money putting pieces of art
in a beautiful, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Faye Jones inspired architectural,
building in, in Bentonville, about two miles from
the Walmart headquarters. It's a lovely campus that
just continues to
promote art. I mean, they had Annie Leibovitz
there earlier this year. She did an exhibit.
She stayed for three weeks. She had elementary
school kids come and talk to her, college
kids.
So they're just promoting the arts and doing
a a lovely job of it. And they
created a wonderful outdoor venue called the Momentary
where artists like Wilco and Jason Esbel and
the four hundred unit are gonna play there
this year. And it's just a really good,
good place, place to be. And and, but
yeah, so I practiced in Arkansas for
the first twenty two years of my career.
And then a little bit before that timeframe
in 2014,
we started to have FaceTime on a phone.
And so I knew that healthcare and dentistry
was going to change forever
because Susan and Blaine, if we're down in
Battery Park in New York City, we don't
want to go to the Upper East Side
as an endodontist
and spend half a day going up there
to find out, Oh gosh, we just need
some antibiotic and we're going to come back
six weeks later and have a root canal
done. And so I knew that we were
gonna be communicating like we're talking now. And
I kind of saw the writing on the
wall there, and I just didn't know how
to really ask for funding and didn't know
anything about venture capital or angel investors or
anything like that. If I'd asked for $30,000,000,
I'd probably wouldn't be talking to you right
now. I'd be I'd have my own empire
out there, but I didn't know what I
was doing. So I I asked for about
half a million to set up a pilot
program in Nashville and Phoenix
as the first two cities to do a
a directory basically that the centerpiece was gonna
be like yellow pages for doctors, but eventually
you could have telehealth exams like we're talking
now and do as much as we could
do from a telehealth standpoint. So, you you
know, companies like Invisalign and SmileDirectClub
were looking into that in 2014, '20 '15,
and they were trying to figure out a
way to start treating patients,
for orthodontics, you know, short term orthodontic cases.
And I was one of the doctors that
they contacted after they got up enrolling, and
I was kind of there for the whole,
you know, ride with Smile Direct Club, you
know, from February of twenty seventeen, you know,
to fall of twenty nineteen. They're ringing the
bell to NASDAQ. You know, the company's worth
8,610,000,000.00.
They're growing into Ireland, Australia, Canada. Anyway, didn't
work out. Ended up closing their doors in
December.
But through, you know, the telehealth world with
SmileDirect, I learned a lot about how to
treat patients with telehealth,
how to develop software that can help do
that. And I've kinda lended my expertise to
some other companies that are doing some cool
stuff with with sleep and airway treatment and
helping,
kids grow their underdeveloped jaws a lot better.
And so, that's how you and I ended
up talking today.
Yeah. I wanna get into all of that.
I am,
I think it's so interesting, the idea of
receiving medical care over
video.
Yeah. I can imagine a lot of pros
and cons just in general because,
a, for people that
are nervous, especially about dentists,
there are a lot of there's a lot
of fear around dentists,
and I would imagine that would help
calm people down.
Sure. Well, you know, if we know
as recently as five years ago, there was
a survey done that showed that more than
one in five, it was like twenty one
percent of Americans don't go to the dentist
at all because of fear.
And how about a horrible indictment on our
profession? Here we are in twenty twenty
twenty twenty and beyond,
and people are still afraid to go to
the dentist. And so, you know, that's one
of the takeaways from the from our visit
today is if if somebody's afraid to go
to the dentist in 2024,
you're going to the wrong spot. I mean
and now can you get in at the
other spot? I don't know. It could be
challenging. Right? But, I mean, it
ask around. Talk to your friends. Do some
research on the Internet.
You know, read the Google reviews. I've got
some bad ones. There's people who've had some
bad experiences with some of the stuff we
were doing. So, I mean, it's it's out
there, but you shouldn't have if you're having
pain when you go to the dentist or
or there's a procedure that's scary,
you know, there's a better way to do
it. I can assure you. And,
I mean, we, you know, we were talking
to patients this week about, I mean, we
have IV nurse anesthetists that can come into
our office now. Patient can just have a
little IV drip and go to sleep and
and have a lot of dentistry done and
and wake up with a new smile, you
know, completely comfortable and never,
have to think about any of the anxiety
affiliated with it that we used to have
in the past. And so,
but it is a deterrent, you know? And
so if somebody knows that they're just gonna
talk to Susan like this, you can't be
poked, prodded, you know, fileted, whatever, you know,
through through the Internet. You know? So,
and and we did see a lot of
that, like, with
analyzing these telehealth patients and dentistry for,
you know, Invisalign, SmileDirectClub,
Candid, had some direct to consumer stuff going
for a while. They're now back in in
offices only.
But many of these patients, you can't believe
the dental challenges that they had,
but they and they knew they needed care,
but they felt safe.
It was a safe environment for them to
come and and share photographs with somebody and
so we could look at their, you know,
their situation. And many of them, you know,
we tried to help
direct them to,
you know, an office that was nearby to
them, you know, because they had many, many
more concerns than just, you know, doing some
cosmetic stuff and moving some teeth around. There
is a lot of shame around teeth.
It's really interesting. I mean, there are cultures
that outright hide their teeth when they laugh
or talk, you know, for sure. But in
America
and probably The UK, the the Western
communities,
there seems to be a lot of
pressure
put on having a perfect
smile. Actors, you know, once they get a
little bit more successful, they go and veneer
their face so that they look like they've
got neon lights coming out of their mouth.
I personally like a little character and teeth.
Sure. I know my mom, for example, she's
really has issues. She's ashamed of her teeth
because coffee stains and, you know, over time
her teeth started to get crowded and all
of this.
And she's talking at her age, she's up
there, she's talking about getting Invisalign.
Yeah. And I said, hey, whatever makes you
feel better about yourself, go for it. I
did Invisalign after doing braces,
you know, because your teeth remember where they
were.
And
my dentist at the time, he said, well,
I hate to tell you this, but when
you grow up,
and they pulled a bunch of teeth and
all that stuff. So when you grew up,
they didn't know as much as they know
now. And they actually the the braces messed
messed up your jaw. I used to grind
and all that stuff.
And he said, let me give you Invisalign,
you know, try it out, see what happens,
and it changed my life. Yeah. I don't
I mean, I'm not sponsored by them or
anything, but I highly recommend
that. Well, just orthodontics in general. I mean,
I'm sorry that your, you know, experience with
bands and brackets and all that wasn't as
good as the Invisalign experience, but, you know,
I've probably sent a thousand adults over age
25 to the orthodontist.
And most people think, okay, well, I'm too
old for that. Right.
And I've had a 63 year old patient,
half full man in bracketed orthodontics,
and she's in her late eighties now, but
but she's whitened her teeth. Her teeth are
easier for her to clean. And as we
get older, our dexterity is not as good.
Right? So we can't floss and brush and
get to those tight crowded areas anymore. So,
yeah, orthodontics is just one of those things.
It's almost like a bigger version of having
a, you know, a manicure or something. It's
when you get yourself taken care of and
you let somebody take care of you and
it goes well, I mean, it just, it
feels really good and it changes people's approach
and they eat better, they function better, they
smile better, they're happier with their appearance. You
know what I think? When people are meeting
other people or they're communicating,
people tend to either notice someone's eyes or
someone's smile, you know, the very first thing.
And, you know, and I have this, to
me, the smile comes from in here, right?
It's down in your heart. It's, I've seen
patients who had missed all four of their
front incisors missing, but they had a great
smile because they were so such a happy
person. And, you know, may and so,
you know, your smile is it doesn't have
to be perfect to be beautiful. You know?
And so, but we can we can certainly,
improve that. And there's a lot of nice
ways to do it that that aren't painful
or scary.
Let's talk about sleep and
teeth,
the connection.
Sure. Happy to. Well, it turns out we're
about four generations into
our jaws are are shrinking. And
our children, you know, are given a pacifier
when they're still in the incubator, and they
start, you sucking on the pacifier and it
starts to move their cheeks together. When
our cheeks are filled with muscles and the
muscles
push the teeth together, when our baby molars
start to go together,
the palate arches. I mean, the palate arches,
the palate is the floor of the airway
space, right? So when the palate is arched
like this,
the palate's narrow and tight. The tongue is
not able to fit up where it belongs
behind the baby teeth.
And we end up with a patient who
can't breathe through their nose.
And this is a real serious issue. Human
beings are obligate nasal breathers. We should be
breathing effortlessly, quietly, and visibly through our nose
all the time.
And it's okay to exhale through your mouth,
but when you breathe through your nose,
why does it matter if I breathe through
my nose? Well, several reasons. Number one, your
nose, you know, sits out off off of
your face.
So the air has time as it passes
through your nose to to warm to temperature
to the rest of your body. So you're
not breathing in stark cold air like you
do right into your mouth, right into the
fissures of your tonsils that maybe that's why
we have inflamed tonsils is because somebody's breathing
through their mouth, not because they're allergic to
a lot of stuff. So that's all tied
in too. But if we're breathing through our
nose,
the hair in our nose filters the crud
out of the air. So we've got air
that's warmed to temperature, it's filtered to where
it's more pure, and now it hits a
little sensor back in our parastinuses
that causes our body to secrete
nitric oxide.
And nitric oxide
is our it's the only time it happens
in our body physiology.
And nitric oxide is the body's own vasodilator,
which means that our vasculature opens up,
oxygenated blood is sped to the muscles and
the heart and the brain. And so when
we get Children breathing through their nose with
big wide smiles where their tongue fits up
in their palate,
these kids thrive, they grow, they grow taller,
they they they breathe better, they sleep better,
they're ready for school every day, they bounce
out of the rack in the morning feeling
good and feeling energized because really what we're
talking about is restorative sleep. And when we
can't breathe through our nose properly, we can't
get restorative sleep. And it's a national epidemic
that nobody really talks about. It's why we're
talking today. I'm trying to get it to
as many ears as we can. I've read
a lot recently about mouth tape
for adults to facilitate that very thing, to
get them to breathe through their nose instead
of because that's the snoring and the apnea
and all that when your head tilts back
and your mouth opens.
Yeah. So what are some simple things that
we can do tonight if you're listening to
the podcast and you're, you know, driving somewhere
and listen to it?
I like side sleeping.
If you're sleeping on your back, you know,
we're just working against gravity, right, because your
mandible's gonna fall open sometimes.
That's where the mouth taping comes in. We
we prescribe mouth tape on a weekly basis.
We'll have somebody we recommend it to. If
you're gonna use mouth tape, there's some some
good there's several different varieties that work well.
I I recommend taping vertically so that you've
got a little bit of, you know, air
passage around the side if you need it.
But, basically, you know, we want the, you
know, lips together, teeth apart, breathing through the
nose is what we're trying to achieve. And
mouth tape actually works. And in fact, I
think there was a one one of the
it was one of the US Open run
up tennis tournaments, I think, earlier in the
summer. There was,
a a ladies player that got a lot
of publicity because she mouth taped during a
match. She Woah. Wanted she was having trouble
breathing through her her mouth, and so she
she covered her mouth so she could breathe
through her nose during the match. And so
people why'd she do it? You know? And
and, and nobody understood it. But, yeah, it
can help you. And it can help you
perform better because you're getting more oxygenated blood
to your muscles, and it can even help
with things like cramps, you know, in the
middle of a match, you know, if you're
breathing better through your nose.
What are your thoughts about pacifiers
then? Are they doing us a disservice?
Well, I mean, I
there are many orthodontic companies now that are
trying to make better,
pacifiers.
But when a child gets to age two,
and they've got all their baby teeth in,
I like to switch the Wibbe for
something called a tooth pillow, which
is broader, flatter.
It keeps the musculature
off of the developing
dental alveolus, the bone around the teeth, and
it helps
widen,
a patient's jaw so that their tongue, which
is the body's own natural expander, can fit
up in the palate like it's supposed to.
There's four or five companies out there that
make these kinds of appliances.
Healthy Start is one of the companies in
Chicago.
Myobrace, which is an Australian company, and they
make one of the finest devices for young
children who have an underbite.
If we start kiddos that have an underbite
with a an I three n like Nancy
appliance from Myobrace,
we can actually keep these kids from having
underbite. It will gradually jump that crossbite
by where if they're compliant to wear the
appliance. And then that can save kids a
40,000 jaw dollar jaw surgery, you know, when
they're in high school or college. So
it's really important. So and then we have
tooth pillow, which is is online right now.
You can go be my patient. You know,
if you're a mom out there, you can
go and and send in some photographs and
answer a little survey question, and you can
have a tooth pillow shipped out to you
this week. Tooth pillow appliances are made by
a company called Vivos,
which has, just got FDA approval on an
adult,
expansion appliance for sleep that's a removable appliance
back in, I think, January.
But they make these wonderful little appliances that
are
to me, they have just the right amount
of flex to them and also,
toughness
so that kids can't they have a hard
time tearing them up.
Really intuitive. You can hand a two year
old this device, and they'll just put it
in their mouth. I don't even have to
insert it for them. They they and sometimes
they'll put it upside down. You know? But
but most of the time, they just look
at it and go, okay. I mean, because
that's what every two or three year old
does anyway. I mean, you hand them something,
they put it in their mouth, typically.
So it's pretty intuitive. About ninety percent of
the kids learn to wear it really well,
but it helps them
sleep properly and breathe through their nose and
keeps the muscles of their cheeks, even if
and it also prevents them really from getting,
you know, their thumb or index finger or
something in their mouth, you know, to to
suck on it and create that palatal arching
that we don't want. I read that teeth
clenching and teeth grinding
is a genetic thing that can be triggered
by an event, but that if if you're
either gonna react that way or not based
on your genetics. Is that is there a
truth to that? There there is some truth
to that, because, you know, we clench when
we're in pain or having anxiety and but
almost always
in children or adults, clenching the teeth together.
In other words,
burying those bumps of enamel into the the,
you know, peaks into the valleys on the
opposing arch. You know, our teeth are only
designed to touch one another about two minutes
total out of a 24 day, and that's
when we swallow. That's the only time that
our teeth should be together.
And so and and that which we know
is just not true. We got all these
stressed out drivers out there. We got people,
you you know, clenching their jaw muscles. We
watch the major league hitters when they're in
the batter's box, and, boy, they're clenching those
teeth together. We wanna have,
yeah, the teeth not ideally not touching because
when we're chewing, you know, there's food between
our teeth and when we're talking, our teeth
are not together.
So,
but, yeah, that's that's a key a key
factor for sure.
I bet you everybody listening to this right
now just went, okay. Where are my teeth?
Yeah. Personal touch. My natural state, my teeth
are apart, and I feel like my tongue
is up into the roof of my mouth.
Well, that that's golden. That's that's how we
want it. That's not how it was before
as an adult. Again, I was I was
clenching like crazy,
and
now I don't do that anymore because I
did I got my every everything is aligned
the way it's supposed to do. I don't
think we really
most of us don't really think about how
important
that alignment is with everything else going on
in our bodies.
Yeah. And And I wasn't taught about it
in dental school. I mean, I was taught,
okay, people
have crooked teeth, refer them to the orthodontist,
and that's what we need to know about
that general dentist out there. But just about,
I mean, I've got two or three colleagues
that, you know, I really trust and and
work with often,
and they they always talk about how
any kind of grinding or clenching of the
teeth
is is a sign of a patient that's
trying to breathe. They're they're trying to breathe
through their nose. And and if a patient
is, you know, if they have what we
call a deep bite where their upper teeth
are are way down over the when they're
closed together covering their incisors,
you know, your overbite should only be about
one one to two millimeters. Okay? And so
if a patient is is deep, then they're
at at some point to open their airway,
their brain is gonna send a signal. Okay.
Let's let's move those lower teeth downward and
forward against the backs of the upper teeth
so that we can get the airway open
and get and we can breathe through the
nose, but we still have the teeth touching.
And so what many patients will do is
they'll do what we call a protrusive clenching,
where they'll
slide their mandible forward until
their lower teeth come apart, you know, on
the backs of their upper, front teeth.
And there's a very common wear pattern that
we see,
especially like if folks have like porcelain crowns
or veneers on their upper teeth. Porcelain's harder
than tooth enamel, so we'll look at their
lower teeth and they'll have one to two
millimeters worn off of their lower incisors because
they're wearing on that porcelain all the time
on the upper arch. So it's it's really
common.
Do you actually have parents coming in and
saying, my kid's not sleeping
and we need you? Or is that an
after effect where you say, hey.
I noticed their teeth are doing this certain
thing. Are your kids sleeping? And then reverse
engineer.
It's definitely the latter. They they don't it
it's
you know, again, that's why we're on this
crusade to try to tell as many people
as we can through whether it's through a
podcast or a radio show or a or
write a book or, you know, get on
a morning, you know, local news somewhere and
get the story out there because people just
don't they don't understand that if their child
is snoring, that that's a bad thing. You
know, somebody one of the friends characters, I
can't remember which one, they had a snoring
there was a snoring episode. You know, we've
got, you know, the seven dwarves snoring, you
know, and and we make fun of it.
And, really, when somebody's snoring and and snoring
loudly, it's it means they're struggling to breathe.
So it's definitely the latter of those two
things that you said. Usually, it's me trying
to point out to the family, or, like,
I'll have parents say, oh, no. My kid
my kid sleeps really well because I I
can't wake him up in the morning. Well,
that's no. That's a problem because that means
they may have been awake all night tossing
and turning. Now they finally got into a
deep sleep right before it's time to get
up and go to school. The other thing
that's very common is moms will say to
me, oh, look. Little Timmy's got perfectly straight
baby teeth.
Well, that means crowding is on the way
because the baby teeth are so tiny that
we need space in between all the baby
teeth. So perfect primary or baby tooth dentition
has,
space about the width of a dime, a
US 10¢ coin in between all the teeth.
So when these parents come in and they
go, oh, look. We're so glad his the,
you know, little Tommy's teeth are straight.
It's like, oh, you know, we need to
he he needs expansion, you know, right now
because we've got these large anatomically large adult
teeth that are gonna be coming in,
and they wanna have plenty of room for
them. We wanna get the foundation
set up, you know, so that that those
teeth can come in.
It was my understanding when I was younger
that your baby teeth fell out and then
your adult teeth grow in. And then
I saw a photograph
of a skull of a child,
and it was they had their baby teeth,
and then up above it were all these
other teeth. And then I thought, am I
being
pranked? Is that a real person? Is that
real? Yeah. It absolutely is real. And and
I could show you thousands of X rays,
you know, that just show
those and it's so strange too because the
baby teeth roots, they're really spread apart like
on the molars because
the bulb of that, what we call the
crown of the tooth, is developing,
you know, inside you know, in the confines
of that baby tooth root, and it's really
fascinating. But when you look at an X-ray,
you know, it's just like, wow. Where are
we gonna put all these teeth? You know,
because there's a full set of baby teeth.
And and then there are patients that even
have
extra adult teeth. My brother, he had they
called him shark teeth. He had two sets
of adult teeth. They'd pull all those adult
teeth out the second set.
Yeah. Yeah. And he had braces almost seven
years. Poor thing. Oh, wow. Supposedly, Freddie Mercury
was similar. He had lots of extra teeth.
His teeth were huge. I have giant teeth
also.
I had a bunch pulled out. Yeah. And
it it happens. I mean, I've seen I
haven't seen anybody with that many extras, but
I've seen many, many patients with one or
two extra teeth that were,
like wisdom teeth. I've seen patients with five
wisdom teeth. And Oh, wow. And I had
a a friend of mine whose whose son
had two perfect lateral incisors on this side.
He had had one on the other side
too, but he had two I mean, I
was like, which one do you want removed?
Because we need we need to get rid
of one of these. You know? So My
friend, Jill, she was born without wisdom teeth.
They never they weren't there. Yeah. I'd say
about twenty percent of the population is born
without them. I guess that's evolution. Right? Because
we don't need them. They keep getting pulled
out maybe.
Yeah. I think it is,
because,
like, if there's a a a popular book
in our circles that's written by an anthropologist
named Robert Korosini,
and he went back and and studied skulls,
like, in in Africa,
going several hundred years back.
And the early skulls had 32 teeth, big,
broad arches.
And part of that is that
turns out that breastfeeding is important
because when a child breastfeeds, it's actually more
of a biting motion or chewing motion than
it is a suckling motion.
So it helps their jaws,
their gum tissue get tougher and their jaws
open up more,
and get wider. And so we don't see
as much sleep apnea or sleep disordered breathing
in Sub Saharan Africa because because of food
insecurity and other things. They breastfeed the children
there almost up until age five. And so,
see a lot better growth and development there
than we do in The US. And you
probably remember too, when we were kids, there
might have been one other kid on our
block that got braces. Well, now it's, you
know, everybody, you know? So it's like there's
so much, so much crowding now compared. Plus
we're seeing, like, jaws so small that
a 14 year old child will have really
well developed wisdom teeth that almost traps their
their 12 year molars from erupting because their
jaws are so small
and the teeth are developing earlier,
and then we end up with, you know,
some pretty severe crowding.
You wrote a book, What Happens When Your
Child Doesn't Sleep. We did. Let's get into
that a little bit. I wish it was
out or out yet. I mean, it was
supposed to be out November 30. This is
publishing for you, right, in 2024. Here we
are way
still still waiting on the final edits to
be done. But, yeah, we did write a
book. Brian Ferry and myself, Brian tragically lost
a loved one to, sleep apnea.
His wife, about nine years ago, passed away
with two sleep apnea
machines in the plastic underneath her bed. Never
could get a tolerator CPAP machine, which is
the story of most US adults. Only four
in ten people can tolerate wearing a CPAP
machine.
And really all it does is treat the
symptom. You know, it helps you get air
through your nose so your mouth can close
and you can breathe and you can rest.
And it does work, but it's treating the
symptom, you know,
and the greater problem or the root cause
of the problem is narrow jaws.
And
so, you know, we're developing new ways to
treat that all the time. But, yeah, we
wanted to write the book
so that, you know, we can address some
of these issues that kids have because they're
and it's not really about lack of oxygen
to the brain. Your brain can survive
a surprisingly long time
with diminished oxygen.
It it's really about the sleep
and
being able to breathe through their nose well
enough to get restorative sleep. So they feel
good.
They're able to concentrate.
And so we see things improving, like bedwetting
goes away when we can breathe through our
nose properly. If I give
10 kids
that are bedwetting, ten seven year olds that
are bedwetting, if I put one of these
appliances in their mouth,
seven of them will stop bedwetting tonight.
I mean, it's really dramatic, the connection
between proper nasal breathing and, you know, systemic,
pathology
pathophysiology.
Talking about that sleep apnea, this tragic way
to pass away, and I know it's
it's not like it's every day, but it's
also not that uncommon. I read about that
as well, that apnea
claims
otherwise seemingly healthy people. And it's I think
people have this connotation, oh, if you're morbidly
over obese,
then you don't have sleep apnea. But you
can be incredibly fit and have sleep apnea.
A %. And it's it's such an interesting
idea to think, okay, maybe that's why I
didn't get a good night's sleep last night
is because my mouth was open during the
night instead of closed.
But you know, on
this might gross out some people, but some
mornings when I wake up and my lips
are actually
shut, sealed, shut from saliva or whatever.
And on those mornings, when I wake up
like that, when my lips won't open
until I physically
do that,
I have the best sleep.
Yeah. Well and we can all tell. You
know, when we get really good restorative sleep,
it feels great. You wake up with a
new lease on life that morning. Now you're
thinking, okay. This is awesome.
And imagine if you were
six years
old and you hadn't had a good night's
sleep in
forever.
I mean and we have little kids every
day that we're waking up
in the morning. We're trying to get them
to wake up and feed them and get
them to school and help them thrive in
an environment where, you know, they're falling asleep
all day or they're unable to focus because
they haven't had adequate rest. Or teenagers who
all they wanna do is sleep.
That. Yeah. Or they're although they wanna sleep
during the daytime because they're almost nocturnal. They're
looking at a screen late at night or
they're, you know, they're playing a video game
or something. So, yeah, it's it's just so
important. And
and so that's, you know, that's why we
wrote the book is to try to help
people be aware of what some of these
signs and symptoms are and what are some
of the things that we can help, you
know, by by getting some expansion in the
jaws and creating
bigger smiles so we get better breathing through
the nose and better sleep. And how does
apnea kill people?
Well,
many times, you know what's the number one
killer in The United States?
Now fentanyl, but then maybe heart attack?
Heart attack is still number one. So heart
and but when do most heart attacks happen?
At night?
At night.
And so what's really happening is is someone's
having respiratory arrest and then their heart fails.
And
so that's what's so significant about my my
buddy Brian's wife is that it's very rare
for a coroner to say that someone died
of complications of sleep apnea
because usually it's it's a heart issue or
it's it's a,
oxygen saturation
problem. You know, it's it's respiratory arrest,
you know, which is you know, that's very
closely tied to to,
sleep apnea. But what happens is,
it's actually how we measure it in a
sleep study. When we see somebody who says,
you know, it's one of the questions that
we ask our patients when they come in
for checkups in the dental office. You know,
do you how how do you sleep? And
they go, well, why do you care? You
know? So it's the first thing they say,
you know?
And it's like, well, because, you know, we
can help sometimes if we know some and
and I'll I'll ask patients, when's the last
time you woke up woke up and felt
really rested? And they'll say, I can't remember.
And so we start to look and I
and when they have all these signs and
symptoms of of apnea.
First of all, you know, many of them
have insurance, so we wanna try the CPAP
pathway first. You know? Many of them want
to do that because they have insurance that'll
pay for it. So we start there, and
hopefully they're able to tolerate it. And if
they're not, then we look into, you know,
their you're you know, and that's another misnomer
that's out
there. You know, medical insurance,
once a patient has tried a CPAP machine,
will pay for a dental appliance. If you
say, I don't like this thing. It makes
me feel claustrophobic.
I can't tolerate it. It doesn't work.
Then your doctor can sign a letter saying
I'd like for them to have an oral
appliance made. And that's part of the reason
that there's so such a lack of knowledge
about this is because we have the doctors
who aren't trained anything about you know, much
at all about the oral complications of it.
And we have dentists who don't know really
much about sleep testing or sleep studies in
a hospital.
And so you got these two you know,
it's like going to the podiatrist and asking
them about a root canal. And they, you
know, they they won't know anything about it.
It's the same principle. You know, that's a
big part of the information exchange that we're
trying to trying to work through and and
get everybody together on the same page.
Are you doing outreach to
communities that do have a lack of insurance
to try and get
them help as well, or is that the
next step?
Well, we're we're trying to get information out
to to anyone that can benefit from it.
You know? And and a lot of times,
it's it's not through the medical community. It's
through chiropractors
and
massage therapists
and
PTA chair people, you know, at the school
who've seen these,
you
know, so many kids getting referred for stimulant
treatment, you know, and medications that
you know? Because in in 2024,
I would want my seven or eight year
old child, I would wanna try everything before,
you know, we put them on some sort
of big pharma stimulant. You know? And not
that there aren't kids who can definitely benefit
from that, because I've seen those kids too
that have they've had a benefit from it,
and they've been able to use it for
a while. And then their doctors were wise
enough to wean them off of it as
they got older, and they're doing fine
now. But,
you know, it's it's pretty rare to see
that those drugs have a long term positive
impact.
I think again, I don't have children, so
I can't speak to this. But I think
that for adults,
if we all there's so many devices out
there now that track your sleep and your
oxygenation
levels and how and your deep sleep and
your REM sleep and all this stuff.
And as somebody that has one of those
devices,
I
am shocked
at what I didn't know about when I
was sleeping, what I assumed
just because I closed my eyes at midnight
and woke up at eight,
that I somehow got a good night's sleep
even though I would be not functioning
great the next day
to see the difference and say,
oh my god. An an actual good night's
sleep where I'm getting deep sleep and REM
sleep and all of that. It's
night and day. No pun intended. It's
wild how different you feel. So I imagine
for a little kid
who's growing and the body's already using up
so much energy to do so many other
things,
how much that would affect them.
Oh, yeah. Well and and, of course, they
even, depending on their age, need more sleep,
you know, than an adult does. So, yeah,
it's a huge factor for sure. Yeah. So
interesting. Tell people how they might find you
or reach out to you and and learn
more about this. Sure. I'm licensed in 12
states. So many of the folks that are
listening can be a patient of mine if
they wanna be. If you're interested in tooth
pillow for a child aged two to 12,
13, 14,
you can go to toothpillow.com.
I'm licensed in
California and
Arkansas and Tennessee and New York and New
Jersey and Michigan and Florida. So, you know,
you can,
connect with me that way through the toothpillow.com
website, or you can come directly to my
website, which is doctorblaineleads.com.
And, you know, and you can find our
phone number there, call my staff. We can,
you know, we can treat you with telehealth
and and start directly from our office.
Or you can go to askdoctorleads.com,
which is where you can find out more
information about the book and preorder the book.
Great. Thank you so much, doctor Leeds. I
really appreciate your time. Well, good to talk
with you, Susan. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Absolutely. Maybe we'll get, some sleep out there
for people and at the very least, help
their jaws align in the right way. I'm
telling you what changed my life. I will
attest to the fact that me thinking I
had straight teeth and realizing that it was
a more of a jaw problem and and
just how the Invisalign
changed
everything.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for listening, everybody.
Thanks. Take care. Bye. Bye bye
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