Dentist Phoenix AZ

Holistic Dentistry

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By Nina Martin

The office is prettier than the usual dentist’s den of horrors, with walls the color of wild salmon and lighting that softens the shock when you see your mouth, agape and drooling, magnified in the overhead mirror. The ceiling is painted like an impressionist sky—a little Monet, a little Cezanne—and right out the window is a beautiful pine tree. Very Zen. Usually at the dentist I keep my eyes squeezed shut to pretend I’m not there there. But so pleasant are these surroundings that Dr. Stanley Dintcho actually has to ask me to close my eyes in case any schmutz flies into them while he cleans my teeth.

You read correctly. A dentist—not a hygienist half my age—is scraping plaque off my incisors and polishing them smooth with a thick, grainy paste. He doesn’t like what he sees. “You’ve got a lot of bleeding here,” he scolds, taking another poke at the pockets between my teeth and gums. “You’re lucky—the gum disease hasn’t progressed so far that it’s irreversible. But you’ve got to do a better job of flossing and brushing.”

Dentists have been nagging me for decades about my aversion to flossing. But not since I was a little girl has one bothered to show me how to improve my technique. And I’m not sure a dentist has ever cleaned my teeth himself. Such good care is positively inspiring: When I mumble I’ll do better, this time I really mean it.

Dintcho, whom I found on the Internet by typing “holistic dentist, San Francisco” into Google, is not at all what I expected. Traditionally, holistic dentists have practiced on the fringes of the profession, with a clear-cut anti-establishment philosophy: Mercury-based fillings are as dangerous as cigarettes, proper nutrition as important as brushing, vitamins as valuable as floss. Getting a dentist to admit to being holistic was like pulling teeth; the American Dental Association considered the term synonymous with “quack.”

Dintcho, a former Air Force dentist from Paterson, New Jersey, with an accent straight out of The Sopranos, represents the mainstreaming—some would say the co-opting— of the holistic label. For him, and for many of the new breed of “alternative” dentists who seem to be popping up everywhere, being holistic mostly amounts to slowing down, taking his time to do things right, and getting back to the basics of oral health. He avoids mercury not because he thinks it’s unsafe, but because it’s unnecessary: “We now have other filling materials that last just as long as mercury amalgam and are nearly as easy to work with,” he says. He checks for oral cancer but rarely bothers with herbs and supplements: “In 90 percent of cases, you can improve the health of gum tissue just by changing how you brush and floss. What could be more holistic than that?”

How did holistic suddenly get so hot? Thank the legions of curious and well-informed patients. “About 65 percent of the adult population has sought alternative treatments of some kind,” says Victor Zeines, author of Healthy Mouth...

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