Best Way to Heal Sensitive Teeth & Exposed Tooth Root at Gumline

Ouch! You bite down on a piece of fruit. A sharp pain shoots through the top of your tooth. You visit your lovely dentist.

She tells you, there’s no cavity. Your electric toothbrush is so abrasive it’s brushed your gums away. Now your tooth root is exposed.

Worse, that crazy brushing scrubbed away the thin layer of cementum covering your root. Your dentin is exposed to the air, a big no-no!

This is exactly what happened to me! I stopped a lifetime of cavities in their tracks when I switched to OraMD (#ad) in place of toothpaste. And began eating living foods like Energy Soup.

Then decades later out-of-the-blue I feel this tooth sensitivity, from using an electric toothbrush for six years.

Feeling Sharp Pain at Top of Tooth

Let’s take a look at your tooth. Can you see the dentin in the middle (Queen’s English “dentine”) between the pulp and enamel? Your tooth neck is at the gumline, and your root below the gum.

Exposed tubules in the dentin cause you to feel pain when you eat cold foods, or walk outside on a cold winter’s day.

Dentin is made up of fine tubes called dentinal tubules. They’re minute, wavy, branching canals in the dentin.

There’s 5 million dentinal tubules per sq cm, equal to 12 million per sq inch! You have miles of tubules.

Lymph flows through these tubules. When a tubule is open to the air (not bricked up with cementum as it should be) and you eat something cold-ish like salad or fruit, the lymph inside the tubule shifts. You feel that as pressure on your tooth nerve. Oww!

Wikipedia describes it like this:

“Abrasion, erosion, caries, scaling, and the procedures of finishing and polishing may result in denuding the dentin of its cementum covering, which can cause the dentin to be sensitive to several types of stimuli.”

What stimuli are you most sensitive to? Usually, it’s sweet and sour foods, cold air, and touch from dental instruments.

Who wants to visit the dental hygienist after that? First she tells me to use an electric toothbrush. That’s the worst thing I ever did for my tooth enamel and gums. Then she comes in with her instruments to scale and polish, the very procedures that scrape cementum away and expose my dentinal tubules!

There’s got to be a better way…

How to Protect Sensitive Teeth

The first thing you want to do is protect the area from bacteria.

Your exposed tooth root is softer than your hard tooth enamel. So it’s more prone to “cervical caries” — that’s a cavity right there in the neck of your tooth. Ouch.

The best protection I know is to brush only with OraMD. Use a soft toothbrush!

OraMD is the best on the web for healthy teeth and gums. It’s 100% pure, essential oils of peppermint, spearmint and almond with NO chemicals.

OraMD stops plaque from building up on your exposed tooth neck, and on your enamel.

Plaque is a thin biofilm of bacteria that attach themselves to your tooth enamel (or the exposed root in this case). OraMD actually kills the bacteria that make up plaque.

Don’t brush immediately after eating. That’s when your enamel is at its softest. Wait half an hour, then softly brush with OraMD. At this stage, the plaque biofilm is so soft, even your fingernail can scrape it off.

Within two days, plaque starts to harden. In ten days it turns into hard yellow calculus (tartar). Now you need the oral hygienist’s painful instruments to remove it.

Prevention is the cure. OraMD will break down the plaque before it ever gets a chance to harden.

Help From Your Dentist

Soon as I felt that sharp stab of pain, I popped into my dentist, thinking I had a cavity! He told me there’s no cavity. The root is exposed. I brushed the protective gum away with an electric toothbrush!

A month later, it happened to a second tooth. He did a procedure on both. Each time it had no effect. I can still feel the dental floss sliding into the lesion — a little gap at the top of my tooth, at the side between two teeth (not at the front of my tooth).

Wikipedia states that:

“Exposed dentin or cementum may also be covered with a dental bonding agent. This resin is the same material used to make tooth-colored fillings.

Perhaps my dentist had a hard time squeezing the resin in, between the teeth?

I decided my next step is to try repair it myself.

Rebuild Cementum at Tooth Neck

The good news is that cementum can repair itself. Cementoblasts — cells in your tooth root — make cementum continuously throughout your life as the old cementum ages and thins. This way your teeth stay firmly embedded in your jawbone.

Your goal is to support this natural repair process, to neatly close off your exposed dentinal tubules with cementum.

Cementum is about 50% hydroxylapatite. Tooth enamel is 90% hydroxylapatite, and bone is 70%. Hydroxylapatite is a calcium phosphate mineral, also known as the bone mineral.

Acid food and drinks dissolve hydroxylapatite, and hence cementum. Enamel begins to demineralize at a pH of 5.5.

Yet another reason to eat a high-alkaline diet! When raw fooders eat too much acidic citrus, it dissolves their tooth enamel. They get sensitive teeth. Watch those oranges and lemons. Juice them, or rinse your mouth after eating.

The other 50% of cementum (the part that isn’t calcified hydroxylapatite) is mainly collagen and protein polysaccharides (compounds of carbohydrate and protein).

Collagen is a protein that feeds on leafy greens. When you want smooth skin and strong bones, juice your greens!

Sadly with age, collagen production slows. Your skin gets thinner and tears easily, hair gets lifeless, skin sags and wrinkles, joints get stiff, and cementum is tougher to rebuild 🙂

To rebuild my cementum, I decided to help my body both externally and internally.

Every time after I eat, I floss and rinse my mouth with a vegan calcium-phosphorus powder dissolved in water. This gives my saliva the ions it needs to rebuild my tooth enamel.

Sometimes I swallow the powdered water, to give my cementoblasts (cells inside the tooth root) the minerals they need to rebuild the cementum at my tooth neck.

Actually, cementoblasts don’t fix minerals into cementum. They’re not the bricklayers. They give birth to the bricklayer — which is a protein called osteocalcin.

Cementoblasts secrete osteocalcin. Osteocalcin grabs calcium between its claws. Then it squeezes itself into cementum’s collagen matrix, hugging the mineral to itself. This is how you re-mineralize teeth and bones, and cementum.

Now here’s a problem. You know how every protein needs a co-factor — a mineral or vitamin — for it to work? Well, osteocalcin needs vitamin K2. Without K2, it floats around helpless, unable to do its job. And your tooth stays sore.

For a while, I took a daily K2 supplement. It never did anything for me! I have faith in my body’s ability to convert the K1 in greens, into K2. See my 8-page article on K2.

Green juices, green smoothies, and seed milks will give you all the calcium and phosphorus you need to build strong bones and teeth.

I also decided to take homeopathic tissue salts for 3 to 6 months. I bought the four salts that support bone growth — and hence, enamel, dentin, and cementum too — the D6 form of Calc Fluor, Mag Phos, Silicea, and Calc Phos.

To Use Fluoride or Not

If you find a calcium phosphate powder and K2, together with the four bone-building tissue salts, does NOT work over six months to rebuild your cementum, then you must decide whether to use fluoride to block up the tubules.

The upside is that fluoride WILL “occlude” the tubules. The downside is that fluoride pastes a thin veneer of fluorapatite across your entire tooth. To me that’s like wrapping your body in plastic cling wrap.

I’d rather not do that. Why? Because then I can’t eliminate toxins via the pores in my skin. They’d be all covered in cling wrap.

A safer option is to buy a strong fluoride gel, one that has stannous fluoride or amine fluoride (olaflur), not the sodium fluoride in regular fluoride toothpaste. Stannous and amine are longer lasting.

Elmex Gel is a strong combo of olaflur and dectaflur. Dentists often use these two fluorides together on damaged tooth enamel.

I decided not to brush with it once a week, as their website advises. Instead I dabbed it on my sensitive tooth neck with a Q-tip cotton swab once a week. In this way, the fluoride goes mostly to the exposed dentin at the neck, and not over the entire tooth.

Why do I want to help my body build its own cementum, rather than me barge in there and cover the tooth neck with flourapatite?

Because our teeth are self-cleansing. I suspect fluorapatite will interfere with this.

Your Teeth Clean Themselves

Teeth are porous, just like your skin. Do you see the pores in this highly magnified image of enamel? It’s not as hard and solid as it looks to the naked eye!

Same with dentin. I showed you the 12 million tubules in a square inch of dentin. Nutrient-rich lymph flows through these tubules to nourish your teeth.

Doctors Steinman & Leonora showed that this lymph actually washes the bacteria off each tooth when it’s working correctly. If you drink a dye, it takes only six minutes to go from your stomach into the pulp of each tooth (think green juice, not the dye they gave their rats).

Then it takes a full hour to be pumped from the pulp, through the dentin, and out through the pores of the enamel. Talk about a thorough cleansing!

This fluid bathes the surface of your enamel like microscopic sweat. If there’s a crack in the enamel, extra fluid will flow to that area.

It’s just like sap in a tree. When you wound a tree (I hope you never do) you’ve seen how sap pours into that area.

Come to think of it, your teeth are a lot like a tree. If a tree loses its bark, it’s left bare to the mercy of the elements. Same with your teeth when the sensitive tooth necks are exposed, and you’re at risk of cervical caries.

But unlike a tree, the fluid in your teeth will also flow in the opposite direction! From your mouth into the enamel pores, through the dentin and into the pulp.

So bacteria actually get into your pulp and begin eating your tooth away from the inside out.

When does this happen? When you have too many bacteria in your mouth! That’s why you want to use OraMD to kill the bacteria.

And when you eat SFS drug (sugar, fat, salt) — especially white sugar and white bread. The sugar disrupts your hormones that control the lymph flow to your teeth.

At the Longevity Now Conference 2013, Nadine Artemis produced these lovely images showing how the fluid flow works. Of course it’s artistic license, it doesn’t truly look like this. It’s a way for you to picture it.

White sugar and bread, pasta and cookies will reverse the flow. I call them skeleton sugars. Fruit sugar is the opposite, it supports your hormones, so the lymph flows correctly to clean your teeth.

Fruit is a whole food. It comes with thousands of phytochemicals in balance, all designed to feed every cell in your body.

I turned to raw foods to heal my teeth, back in 1992. At that time I could not bite on a single piece of fruit. The fruit sugar seeping into my teeth hurt too much.

Within a year my teeth were healed. Since then I’ve been eating lots of fresh fruit daily (for more than 30 years).

In the summer I often eat fruit only for breakfast and lunch, and then for dinner my greens and seeds.

Of course the big difference is that I use only oraMD, never toothpaste. OraMD stops bacteria from clinging to your enamel and your exposed tooth root.

Discount on OraMD

Step One — Stop the Bacteria from Attacking Your Sensitive Tooth Roots!

Wikipedia writes:

“The incidence of cemental caries increases in older adults as gingival recession occurs. It forms a large, shallow lesion and slowly invades first the root’s cementum and then dentin to cause a chronic infection of the pulp.”

Stop Cavities at Your Sensitive Tooth Neck, with OraMD.

Discover More

• How to Cure Tooth Ache & Bleeding Gums — my sister article to this one, learn how to halt a lifetime of cavities.