If you’ve seen a holistic or biological dentist, you already get it: Oral health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your mouth, body, and mind are connected, physically and energetically. Your mouth talks to your gut, your immune system, your heart – every component that makes up you.
You probably also know how much better it feels to work with practitioners who actually see those connections instead of acting like they don’t exist.
But the rest of dentistry seems ready to start catching up. Just last month, the American Dental Association formally called on Congress to make oral health a part of coordinating chronic disease care. As they wrote in their formal statement,
The ADA strongly urges that any discussion of care coordination and chronic disease explicitly include oral health. Oral health is inseparable from overall health, and preventable dental disease continues to drive avoidable pain, complications of chronic illness, cost of care, and emergency department visits, especially among low-income and medically vulnerable populations.
Yet it wasn’t all so long ago that conventional dentists were calling it “premature and misleading” to promote oral health as a component of overall health. So their current statement represents a significant shift in tone.
All this time, though, collaboration has been the norm in biological dentistry, which has led the way in understanding the many ways in which oral and whole body health can affect each other. Respect for the mouth/body relationship is foundational.
Still, when your dentist refers you to a functional medicine doctor, for instance, or suggests you work with a nutritionist, what happens next? In most practices – even really, really, really, really good biological clinics – it usually means a referral. The dentist spots something that needs another set of eyes or another perspective or type of expertise. They write a referral, and off you go, hoping for good and timely communication between the two practitioners.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this. It’s just not the same thing as actual integration.
When different types of practitioners come together under one roof, something shifts. There’s a difference in the way information flows and decisions get made. If a dentist identifies oral conditions that may be driving systemic inflammation and there’s a functional medicine doctor down the hall who can look at the same labs that same week, a treatment plan can be adjusted in real time instead of getting stuck in the referral shuffle. When salivary testing shows patterns tied to gut issues or hormone imbalances, having practitioners who can talk with each other immediately – not eventually – changes what’s possible.
On the other hand, if the “whole body” part of your care happens across town, with a different office, a different schedule, and weeks between touchpoints, you’re still working within a fragmented system. The philosophy may say “collaboration,” but the structure says siloed.
Unsiloing healthcare was one of the driving forces behind biological dentist Dr. Katie Lee’s creation of the Collective Health Society, a space where dental and integrative health professionals can work together with a focus on whole patients’ whole health.
When multiple perspectives are in the same conversation from the start, patterns get caught earlier. Adjustments happen faster.
Ultimately, the plan that emerges isn’t a dental plan plus a nutrition plan plus a functional medicine plan running alongside each other. It’s a comprehensive biological dental plan that addresses multiple systems in harmony to create harmony between mouth and body.
You and your health deserve better than to be treated in fragments. You deserve the kind of care that truly integrative, collaborative care provides.
