Shelby Township Dentist Explains Holistic Dentistry
Hi I’m Doctor Heather Pranzarone Stratton, at HPS Advanced Dental Care, located in Shelby Township Michigan, very close to Rochester, Rochester Hills, and Washington Township. Today I want to talk a little about holistic dentistry. We have a lot of patients that have been asking about what is holistic dentistry. What does that mean? Why do you guys do that?
What is it? So I kind of wanted to explain a little bit today, we’ll go into what holistic dentistry is. But I also wanted to describe why I went into more of a well-being and total health and wellness approach to dentistry.
Two and a half years ago, we started doing this holistic approach and biological approach to dentistry.
Probably about 5 years ago now. We started getting into it slowly. And about 2 and a half years ago, I was brushing my son’s teeth, he was 2 and a half at the time. He just turned 5 this weekend. I was brushing his teeth and I noticed his gums looked really pale. And so I thought to myself, well, maybe he’s anemic. You know, he doesn’t eat a lot of meat. You know, as any of you guys have kids, he was a fussy eater. He just liked to eat fruits and vegetables and that was about it.
So I thought well maybe he’s a little bit anemic. So I took him to the pediatrician a couple of days later and had a complete blood count done, a CBC done on my son to find out if he’s anemic. We were admitted into the hospital that night. The next day we found out he had leukemia. I guess it, besides being the worst day of my entire life, it was a real eye-opener to me to find out, okay, you know what, what we do in dentistry, is extremely important. I guess for me because at that point I had been in dentistry, well I’ve been in dentistry now for almost 20 years, in different capacities. Either working as an assistant, or in a lab, or doing billing up at the front desk. And then I went to dental school, and being in dental school for 4 years after college.
And then I’ve been a dentist now for ten. Maybe you get a little bit disenchanted with what you do everyday. You know, a lot of people come in and they say, you know all you do here is drill and drill on teeth.
That was my eye-opener to say, you know what? I can really help people. We can really change people’s lives. Not just through complete smile makeovers, which absolutely improve people’s self-confidence and self-esteem, but their absolute overall health and well-being. That was just one example with my son. I have countless others of people’s lives that we were able to look in their mouths and determine there might be some other underlying situation going here. We work with other doctors, physicians, chiropractors, naturopaths, to help determine what’s wrong with somebody’s overall well-being. I’m happy to say my son is doing fantastic. He’s almost done with his treatments now. They’ll be done in December. So he’s doing great. He has a wonderful, wonderful prognosis. The doctors say he’s basically cured from the leukemia that, the cancer that he has.
They were very surprised, the doctor, all these doctors were very surprised. And I actually had one of the nurses, I remember we were in the hospital for 10 days. One of the nurses came up to me and gave me this big hug. And she said, I’ve never seen somebody, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’ve never seen a child come in and been diagnosed as early as your son was with leukemia.
And she just couldn’t believe, she was, how did you figure this out? And I said, his gums were pale and I thought he was anemic. And I was obviously wrong. Well he was anemic, but obviously there was a condition which was causing the anemia, which was leukemia.
You know we all go into different fields for specific reasons, and I like to believe that hopefully me being a dentist and looking at his gums and brushing his teeth one night, helped his prognosis to be as good as it is.
Shelby Township Dentist Explains Holistic Dentistry
So if you have any interest in holistic dentistry, basically what we do is total health and wellness dentistry, is we look at everybody specifically when they come in. A lot of people say, well, do you prescribe herbal supplements? Do you prescribe vitamins? I don’t do that here. I believe that there are people that have been trained and gone to school for many years that know a lot more about that stuff than I do. I can help diagnose or suspect this might be what’s going on with you. Let’s get you to the appropriate people, whoever that is, whoever those people are to help get you diagnosed with the proper diagnosis. And then we can work together and get you healthy again. So, those are some of the things we do here at the office. If you have any questions, please give us a call at (248) 652-0024.
Shelby Township Dentist Explains Holistic Dentistry
