Lyle Hurd: It’s really nice to welcome back Dr. Flora Stay –
Flora Stay: Thank you.
Lyle Hurd: Dr. Stay is author of “Secret Gateway to Health”. She is a dentist. She has taught dentistry and one of the things we never asked you before is what caused this epiphany that you must have had to go from being a general dentist to a dentist that is into homeopathic and natural approaches to dentistry.
Flora Stay: Well, what happened was, I graduated from a great school –the University of California San Francisco is actually like the Harvard of Medical school, but for dental school. It’s an excellent, excellent school, very top-notch; they teach you conventional dentistry at its best. However, when I set off to graduating, my daughter, at the time, was about 6 years old and I noticed she had a rash all over her body. It started just a little bit on her arm and then it spread, and the next thing I know, it was on her face and everywhere. I took her to a pediatrician, I took her to an allergist, dermatologist and the only thing I could get from them was a course of steroids and that type of thing – creams – and over and over again. It would go away and it would come back. So I was really at my wits end, and I said, ‘well, you know, let me just start asking people what other options there are.’ I start to do some reading myself and a friend of mine said, ‘what about homeopathy?’ I had never of it before. So I did some research again and found that physicians that practice homeopathy up in the bay area of northern California, and so I took her there. He spent a lot of time just talking to her and he asked her certain questions that at the time didn’t make any sense to me at all. He asked about her feelings, emotions, just a variety of non-related things which none of the other conventional physicians had done. Then he disappeared and came back with a powder and put it on her tongue. He gave me some to take with me to give her. Within two-three days the rash was gone and it never came back.
Lyle Hurd: Isn’t that amazing.
Flora Stay: That just really opened up my eyes as to what was this and… it opened up a whole new world to me as far as oral medicine – what other approaches are there that I just don’t know about that could incorporate in my dental practice. So I joined the American Holistic Dental Association. I started to read everything, take every seminar I could. But I come from a very medical background. My three brothers are physicians, I have uncles, aunts, cousins – they’re all physicians. And my father was a botanist who discovered many medicinal plants. So I very much need to know ‘why’ and I need to know that I can repeat the same thing. If something’s supposed to work, I want to make sure that if I use it on patient after patient, it’s going to work. So I took a lot of this information that the holistic approach was teaching me and I went back and I started to put it to use in my practice. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t; and whatever didn’t, I discarded. Some of it did, I kept. I found that homeopathic remedies did have their place in certain situations and I kept those. I noticed that herbal medicine for certain things was fantastic. For example, lavender oil, I used to use on my patients to relax them. So I had eye pillows that they would come into my practice and this lavender oil was soaked in – it had some lavender oil in it. So the aromatherapy through that would be very relaxing. Of course now we know lavender oil if you’re using it a long term, for example in personal care products, there are two studies that show it, it has estrogen mimicking effect, which is not a good thing…
Lyle Hurd: Absolutely not.
Flora Stay: As with anything else, over the years, as I really tried to study and try these methods. I found that herbal medicine and herbal ingredients again have their place in medicine and dentistry if they’re in the hands of a trained practitioner and they’re recommending them for specific conditions – and they’re very valuable. The same is true with acupuncture and acupressure. I used to have my patients practice the hoku points for relaxation and it would do two things. It would help distract them, take their mind off of what I was doing, and it actually does have some benefits as far as the pain from here up, according to Chinese medicine. I incorporated what works, what didn’t, I discarded. So that again, is something that I teach the consumer, as far as holistic dentistry is to again do your homework. You know, in the old days, we used to have the wagons that used to come around selling us tonics, make sure you do your homework; whether you’re at a health food store, whether you’re at, whether it’s the drugs, the pharmaceutical drugs, whether it’s the herbal or certain protocols that a holistic person tells you, just ask the, the needed questions, which I do outline in my book again. To make sure that you’ve done your part, that you don’t just scantily go for anything and spend thousands of dollars.
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