Raena Morgan: Hi! I'm Raena Morgan with iHealthTube. We're visiting again with Dr. Flora Stay. She's the author of The Secret Gateway to Health among other books one on fibromyalgia, which is entitled.
Dr. Flora Stay: The Fibromyalgia Dental Handbook.
Raena Morgan: Okay. So that sounds like it's pretty inclusive. You say that people with fibromyalgia suffer from dry mouth, lots of conditions that they don't connect necessarily with the fibromyalgia that they're experiencing.
Dr. Flora Stay: Well, let me give you one example. For example, gum disease is a state of chronic inflammation, and of course, we know chronic inflammation is very important if you're suffering from chronic fatigue. But unfortunately, not too many people connect that.
Raena Morgan: Chronic fatigue and gum disease. Wow!
Dr. Flora Stay: Yes, absolutely. Because now we know that C-reactive protein is an indicator that we can test to see if inflammation exists anywhere in the body.
Raena Morgan: Okay.
Dr. Flora Stay: It's a wonderful way to determine, if it does exist in the body. You go to the dentist and the dentist tells you, you have gum disease to be able to connect the two as far as other organs in the body and overall general health. I can't tell you how many patients I've had that come in that tell me they've had fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue for years and I do an examination on them and ensure enough they've got really severe gum disease and they've had no clue. Or even in the initial stage, which is just what we call gingivitis, even the very initial stages of gum disease are, involves inflammation.
Raena Morgan: Okay.
Dr. Flora Stay: So an inflammation again, just generally makes the body not feel well. And with gum disease it's present because people ignore it or they think well, a little bleeding when I floss or brush, so what.
Raena Morgan: Right.
Dr. Flora Stay: So, they leave it alone and this inflammation just continues and the immune system is trying to combat this inflammation that it recognizes.
Raena Morgan: Okay.
Dr. Flora Stay: It's just going to make that person feel more fatigued and it leaves the immune system weakened because it's trying to deal with this inflammation in the mouth when the person really needs their immune support as much as they can to combat these other conditions that are going on. So it's just one more thing that can exacerbate all the other issues that the fibromyalgia it has to deal with.
So I would say this is the entrance to the body and it's an extremely important organ. Start here as a fibromyalgia and make sure that area has been addressed if there's any information, cavities because once you start and the fibromyalgia continues, it's just going to be worse and it's going to exacerbate the symptoms.
Raena Morgan: Okay, well thank you doctor. We will visit with Dr. Flora Stay again.
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