Using Statin Drug? Look at CoQ10

From time to time, I write about nutrition in this column. Often people think that a vitamin can be used as a drug. Vitamins can be used therapeutically, but you’ll get the most out of nutrition when you eat a variety of fresh, whole foods. If you don’t get all the variety that you can get from eating whole foods, there are whole food supplements available. I recommend one to all my patients as insurance that they are getting what they need. The vitamin bottle definitely plays second fiddle to whole foods.

However, you should know about a single, and very important nutritional component, CoQ10 or Coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 is a naturally occurring compound in the body. It works in each cell to produce energy for that cell to work at an optimum level. We manufacture our own CoQ10, but as we age, we produce less and less of it. CoQ10 provides the source of energy to all of our muscles, including our heart. It, all by itself, has been shown to reduce hypertension. In fact, if you have low blood pressure, CoQ10 may be something that you don’t want to take.

CoQ10 was touted as a periodontal treatment years ago. While I never found it to be particularly effective for most periodontal patients, I did have and continue to have some amazing stories on the use of CoQ10 in my surgical patients. About 20 years ago, I had a patient who wasn’t healing well after a relatively minor periodontal surgical procedure. I told her to take CoQ10. In two days, she was nearly completely healed. Same thing happened with another patient three weeks later. CoQ10 has now become a routine part of my pre-operative instructions. And if there are times when patients might not follow this recommendation and they heal a little more slowly than they should, I reinforce the recommendation and most do better. Now this isn’t science. This isn’t a controlled study. It is an observation.

Many of us have been prescribed statin, or cholesterol-lowering, drugs. One problem with those statin drugs is that they drive our own CoQ10 out of our bodies by as much as 50%. Ever experienced leg cramping while in a statin drug? That may be due to that CoQ10 reduction. Many doctors recommend CoQ10 for their statin patients to help replenish the lost nutrient. In fact, one of the prominent pharmaceutical companies has a patent that combines their statin drug with CoQ10. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been put on the market.

There is lots of information on CoQ10 on the internet. One good source is written by a former physician astronaut, Dr. Duane Graveline. You can see his material by logging on to www.spacedoc.net.

Sinusitis Won't Clear Up? It could be your tooth.

Over 13 % of Americans suffer from some form of chronic sinusitis. It is one of the most common medical complaints costing 6 billion dollars and 13 million doctor visits a year. While many sinus infections are self-limiting (will go away by themselves) or are easily treated with antibiotics, there is a group of patients for which sinus infections are a way of life. And one of the previously hidden causes for such sinus infections is now coming to light offering new hope to those who thought there was no answer.

Studies done by the Ferguson group of otolaryngologists at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center initially looked at 5 patients whose treatment of sinusitis through endoscopic sinus surgery had failed. The elusive cause—a dental infection. What was interesting is that three of the five patients had already been screened for dental infections are were told that they had no dental pathology. The difference was a CT Scan, because the CT scan can see pathology that might otherwise be missed with conventional dental tests and x-rays. These patients were then retreated with extraction of the offending tooth or teeth along with sinus surgery. All five patients’ sinus symptoms resolved.

The group then looked at a sample of 186 patients who had previously had CT scans taken for sinusitis of the upper jaw. The findings were clear that many of the infections were of dental origin. What was even more significant was that the more fluid that was in the sinus and the more serious the sinus disease, the more likely it was due to an infected tooth. How significant? 86% of the acute severe sinus cases showed a dental origin.

The message is a telling one. First, the CT scan is much more diagnostic for a tooth-sinus relationship than was previously thought, and we need to look at that possibility more carefully. Second, we cannot always rely on conventional dental testing to diagnose a possible dental source of a sinus infection.

From a personal perspective, I have seen much more evidence of sinus pathology related to teeth since the advent of the dental cone-beam CT scan (CBCT).

If you have a sinus infection that hasn’t resolved, these findings could be significant for you. The action that I would take would be the following: Talk to your ENT surgeon. If your CT scan was taken recently, ask that a new review of the scan be done, looking for a possible dental source for your infection. If that is still unclear, get a dental CT scan taken and have it reviewed both by the dentist as well as a dental radiologist. If a dental infection is the source of the problem, a cooperative dental/medical approach may help you.

What to Look for in a Dental Examination

There is no shortage of new, innovative, dental techniques to enhance your dental experience, your ability to chew, and your smile. But today, let’s get back to basics and talk about what you should look for in a dental examination.

We grew up understanding that if there is a cavity, it needs to be fixed. This is “single-tooth” dentistry. However as we’ve grown older, we may have lost teeth, crowned teeth, broken teeth, had gum disease, gum recession, etc., etc. Changes in tooth relationships occur as a result. It’s for those reasons that our dental examinations should be more detailed. A full oral care plan should be developed even if it may be months or years before you complete the plan. A good plan can save money and help preserve your dental health.

Here’s a checklist of my recommendations:

□ A full periodontal examination including periodontal probing, gum recession, thickness of the gum tissue, and tooth mobility

□ A full dental examination which looks at tooth decay, worn fillings and crowns that may be leaking, cracks and microfractures, and loss of enamel at the gum line.

□ Full mouth dental x-rays. I want to be a bit careful here. Dental radiation for these x-rays is extremely small. However, it is still radiation. The more your disposition to dental disease, the more important x-rays become.

The three examinations above should give you and your dentist an understanding as to the long-term risk for each tooth. After all, you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a tooth that has a high risk of being lost.

□ Bite relationship. Not only should you know how your teeth line up, you should also know which teeth touch and which teeth don’t. For the most part, all teeth should touch when you close your mouth.

□ Joint and muscle assessment. Does your jaw pop or grind when you open or close your mouth. Why? And what can be done to reduce the chances of more joint damage.

□ Study models. For complex cases, impressions are made of your teeth and models of your mouth made so that your dentist can look at your mouth from every different direction.

The more complex your case, the more these diagnostic elements are important. Specialized diagnostic instruments to test the vitality of the nerve of the tooth, or specialized x-rays such as the Cone Beam CT Scan which provides a three dimensional view of your bone may also be indicated.

The relatively small cost in doing a good, careful, diagnostic evaluation can easily be saved in the treatment planning process that you and your dentist make together. A little bit of planning can go a long way toward decreasing your costs and improving your results in effective, comprehensive dental treatment.

Let's Start Taking Control of our Health!

WE ARE OVERMEDICATED!

Yes, I know that your doctor said that you have osteopenia, high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc., etc. And I don’t doubt the diagnosis. Your doctor examined you and found the problems. That is diagnosis.

It is the treatment that is the problem.

So let’s go back to a time when prescription medications were never advertised. Let’s go back to a time when you saw your doctor for advice, not for a prescription. It wasn’t that long ago, was it? And let’s stop fooling ourselves. Our bodies are not much different from similar people 50 years ago, except for the fact that we eat more, ingest more processed foods, drink more, and take more medications. We eat more junk food, fast food, more snacks, more sugar that makes us eat even more sugar. And that’s not the way our grandparents ate. We sleep less, spend less time with our families, more time on the internet, less time at church, at clubs, etc., etc. Our bodies are the same bodies as those of our grandparents, but our lifestyles are not.

So here’s what we do. We see the doctor and get a prescription. The doctor says to see him/her in three months. We see the numbers on our blood test go down, and we cheer. What’s to cheer about? The medication makes our numbers look okay, but are we really okay?

Even worse, a medication creates side effects requiring another medication. So we get that prescription, and we temporarily feel better. The medication is safe. After all, it was approved by the FDA. Guess what? The FDA never tested those two medications together. They were only tested individually. And the problem moves on where you take a third drug, and a fourth. I’ve seen patients who were taking over 20 different medications.

The answer is simpler than you think. When your doctor makes a diagnosis, listen to the diagnosis. You may need a medication. But then you have a job to do. That job is to find all the ways in which you created the diagnosis to begin with and fix that, so that you can get off of the medication. And when you tell your doctor that’s what you’d like to do, he or she will monitor your progress. Sound impossible? I have been to two wellness clinics, and I have seen some of the sickest people you can imagine, under doctors’ supervision, get off of all, or nearly all, of their medications. Their tests normalize. They feel better than they have in years.

Please take control of your health. Start reading, start planning, look for answers. They are not hard to find. Make the commitment to changing yourself. If you want a list of newsletters that I recommend, please email me at DrSheldon@SolidBite.com or call my office. You can start the process of regaining your health.