Gum Disease / Bad Breath / Bleeding Gums & The Full Body Connection
What is Pregnancy Gingivitis?
Due to hormonal changes during pregnancy, women are more likely to develop red, irritated, or inflamed gums. It is important to maintain good oral health during pregnancy, especially since some studies have linked gum disease to low birth weight.
The mouth and the rest of the body relate anatomically and functionally and that is why the oral-systemic connection is absolutely inherent in the way we are put together. The exact same bacteria we are finding in the oral wounds are the exact same bacteria we are finding in systemic wounds. The wounds are the same…
Inflammation and the inflammatory burden…when you get more inflammation in your system…the accumulation of that will have a tipping point where you tend to have inflammatory disease. Inflammatory diseases are Heart attacks, Strokes, (resistance to Insulin) causing Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis, various Cancers, Kidney disease, Pancreatic cancer…the list goes on and on.
We are in a state of chronic inflammation…and that is the basis for every disease. When dealing with Periodontal disease…there is this entire inflammatory cascade that people may not understand.
When you get a cut for example…your body is set up to heal that cut and goes through a process of inflammatory response to solve the problem and resolve it…If you always have a chronic inflammatory bacterial condition in your mouth then you never turn off the process of inflammation…in other words, it never gets the opportunity to resolve and go away…there is just too much…the body cannot react to all of them and the body gets sick.
Infection in your gums
The total area of your gums is about the size of the palm of your hand, if you looked at the hand and saw an open wound the size of the palm of your hand…would you just decide not to do anything about it? And yet people are choosing every day not to address the infection in their mouths. People may think that is it normal that when they brush their teeth the gums bleed…I am not sure where they came up with that. If there is little blood in the sink or between the teeth, it means there is a problem and those high-risk bacteria can get into their bloodstream and cause any one of the many systemic diseases that can originate from the bacteria in the mouth.
50 percent of Americans or 50 percent of patients going into medical surgery have periodontal disease. The body can only fight infection on so many fronts, it is like a war…the body can only allocate so many resources to that fight… that is why surgical procedures need dental clearance, especially with a new surgical site, wound healing is imperative.
