Chris Kresser: I have generally said the earlier it’s caught, the better the outcome. But several of Dr. Jennings’ patients have had Parkinson’s for longer than that and have still achieved an improvement. And Dr. Jennings is not the only dentist that does this work. There are others that do similar work, there are people who work with a device called an ALF that’s just like a kind of wireframe that widens the upper jaw and allows the lower jaw to move forward. There are different approaches and there are different dentists doing this kind of work. So it’s not like Dr. Jennings is the only choice. He’s just the one I’m most familiar with and probably has the most experience with it.
There’s another doctor in LA, let me look it up right now. I just referred actually my, not close family member, but a family member who was just diagnosed with Parkinson’s and lives in the LA area. And oh, here it is. Dr. Gary Demerjian, D-e-m-e-r-j-i-a-n. I think he has two offices. One is in Glendora and one is in Burbank, and he specifically, he does this kind of work specifically for Parkinson’s. I mean he treats TMJ and other conditions as well, but he has a lot of Parkinson’s patients. And he actually has some videos on YouTube that talk about the results that he’s achieved. So check those out. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone in the Midwest, Laura. But I do know that people fly from all over to see Dr. Jennings and also Dr. Demerjian, and people who are doing this work, it’s something that, the visits, they don’t have to happen weekly. The adjustments can happen every 60 days or something like that. So it’s still not cheap, but Dr. Jennings’s office is actually located about two minutes from the Oakland airport, I think, for that specific region. So people fly in, they see him, and then they leave that same day. Don’t even have to pay for a hotel which makes it a little bit easier.
All right. Let’s see, I’m just getting back to questions here. But while I do that, I’ll mention some of you may have noticed the difference in the way that I speak at some point this year. I actually have a dental appliance from Dr. Jennings. I started with just a soft splint on my lower jaw, lower teeth. And it’s had some pretty significant effects on me. Last year I was getting colds and flus more frequently that I ever have in my life, and initially I just chalked it up to a little too much work, for me, at least. I prefer a really good balance as you know and also having a preschool age daughter exposed to 100 other preschool-age kids at her school. But I intuitively felt like it was more than that. And my jaw is the kind of classic jaw that needs to be adjusted.
I have a narrow dental arch, I have a significant overbite—these are consequences of an industrial diet, by the way. If you look at traditional people, they typically have a wide dental arch and their bite is tip to tip, which means the bottom of their top teeth touch the top of their bottom teeth when they close their mouth. And so I’ve been, I am a good candidate for this work. My wife has done it for years. She had intractable neck and shoulder pain that didn’t respond. She’s a dancer, longtime bodyworker, Feldenkrais practitioner, studied somatic experiencing with Peter Levine. All these modalities that didn’t touch the pain and she had it for 20, 25 years, just was a feature of her life. And it literally went away overnight after getting the appliances from Dr. Jennings.
Having said that, it’s been a long road. She’s been doing it for three years; there’ve been some really rocky patches, particularly lately, actually, and it’s not a picnic. But she wouldn’t trade it in for anything, given that she doesn’t have that pain. She was also having kind of interstitial cystitis symptoms, which has completely disappeared. I think the thyroid stuff that she had going on when we were first trying to conceive was also related to her jaw. And so she’s had a pretty miraculous response. For me, what it did is basically took me from getting sick multiple times throughout the year to not being sick at all really in the past since I’ve had the dental appliance. My immune system is really just functioning at an optimal level.
So I have personal experience, both mine and my wife’s, and I have a lot of patients that I’ve sent to Dr. Jennings that have had good results. Having said that, it’s not a panacea and some people don’t get great results. So it’s like anything else. Some people benefit more than others. But I think it’s another piece of the puzzle here, and particularly for patients that aren’t responding well to the kind of functional medicine interventions that we talk about in ADAPT, it just is something to consider, especially if they fit that profile. If they have an overbite, if they have a narrow face or narrow dental arch, if they have snoring or sleep apnea, these are the kind of things that would push you in that direction.