Dental Healings: Two Cases

by Artemis Celt, ND

Healing the Root Cause

In June 2011, I called Connie, a 60-year-old client of mine, to follow up on her progress with a chronic gastrointestinal problem.

“I’m doing so much better with that,” she reported, and gave me the details of the amelioration of this condition. As is my habit, I then asked her if anything else of significance was bothering her. She hesitated, and then replied, “Well, it’s looking like I need a root canal. But that’s a dental issue, and there’s probably nothing else that can be done about it. I’ve got an appointment with a dentist for a second opinion four days from now. I don’t really want a root canal, though.”

Connie’s is a typical assumption when it comes to dental problems. Most of us tend to categorize dental problems separately from other health-related matters. For this reason, I have begun to specifically ask about current dental problems in my intake with patients, because more often than not they will skip over them entirely. And it is assumed that dental issues need purely dental solutions: root canals, tooth extractions, and so forth. However, as many people in the alternative healing professions know, each tooth is related to specific organs, acupuncture meridians, and emotions. So when a certain tooth is acting up, it can be well worth the effort to look into the related systems of the body.

With this in mind, I said to Connie, “You know, that tooth might be reflecting a problem elsewhere in your body. If you’d like, we can take a look and see if the root canal trajectory can be averted.” She made an appointment for the following day.

The history: “About 1½ years, ago one of my lower left teeth began bothering me. It was aching occasionally, and had become a bit sensitive if I chewed on anything hard. I went to my dentist, and he couldn’t find anything wrong. So for the next 1½ years, it just sort of stayed like this, getting no better and no worse. But the past few weeks, it’s gotten somewhat worse, so I saw my dentist again. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and suggested a root canal. Over the past week or so, it’s become quite a bit worse. If I touch that tooth or tap on it, it’s very sensitive. It’s become extremely sensitive to hot and cold temperatures, too. I’ve started to avoid chewing on that side altogether.”

When I muscle-tested about this problem, I got that there was one primary cause for it: surgical trauma. Trauma is one of many things that I have learned to check for when screening for causal levels of conditions. And one subcategory within that is surgical trauma. This is a relatively new window of understanding for me in my practice. It came to my attention a few years ago when I was preparing for a talk on common nonphysical causes of physical conditions. Part of my talk focused on unresolved past-life experiences, and I had decided to look through Roger Woolger’s Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives. I was reading through one of the cases that he presented, of a young woman who had gone through elective surgery for the removal of a ruptured ovary some years before. To my surprise, when Woolger led her back to that experience under hypnosis, it was revealed to have been a deeply traumatic experience – not by the conscious self, but by the so-called unconscious mind. As Woolger comments: “Hypnotherapists have long known that anesthesia does not affect the unconscious mind. Although the conscious mind ‘goes to sleep’ or floats off into some pleasant disembodied fantasy, the unconscious nevertheless records every detail of surgery – including, I regret to say, the asides, bad jokes, and dire predictions of many surgeons. So, I am not altogether surprised to hear Eliza’s unconscious self reliving the trauma of her ovariectomy.” This is a trauma that her conscious self was completely unaware of.

Woolger then makes a generalized statement that struck me as having profound implications in terms of our present-day healing issues: “There is no question that all surgery is traumatic at the unconscious level at which the body records impressions.” I remember rereading this particular sentence at least four times, thinking that surely I must be misunderstanding it. But by the fourth reading, I had assured myself that Woolger did, in fact, mean that all surgery is experienced as traumatic, even if the conscious part of the self is entirely oblivious to it. We live in a time when surgery is quite a common medical procedure and, in fact, many people have had half a dozen or more surgeries by the time they reach middle age. If Woolger is correct, this means that each of these surgeries creates unconscious, unhealed trauma – and these traumas will eventually, and inevitably, lead to illness of one sort or another. In other words, surgical trauma held in the unconscious is a common unrecognized cause (or contributing cause) of illness in our society.

Since reading this chapter in Woolger’s book, in my intake with new clients I routinely make it a point to ask about all medical procedures, including surgeries, and I list these in a separate part of the chart for easy future reference. So when muscle-testing indicated that the primary problem with Connie’s tooth was a surgical trauma, I went to this part of her chart and saw that she had had just one surgery: a cesarean section that had been performed 22 years ago. Muscle-testing confirmed that this was the surgical trauma that was asking for healing at this time. I went to the “Emergency, shock, traumatic” section of my homeopathic repertory, and very quickly pinpointed the remedy Arnica (in a very high, 10M potency) as the needed healing agent for this decades-old, untreated, unconscious trauma. Connie took one dose of this remedy that evening, and two weeks later I remembered to call her to find out how her tooth was doing. She told me that the day after taking the Arnica she had much less tooth pain, and that it gradually kept improving over the ensuing week, and that there had been only a very little discomfort for a few weeks now. She did see the second dentist as scheduled, several days after taking the remedy, and was told by him that a root canal was needed. But since the pain has resolved, she decided to put the root canal off indefinitely. Now, six months later, she remains “75%” improved, and the root canal has been avoided.

Discussion:

This simple case beautifully illustrates the underlying holographic principle involved in our physical makeup. Pain in a particular tooth is directly connected to a uterine trauma that occurred over 20 years ago. In fact, they are one and the same. By healing the root cause (the surgical trauma), the dental issue (the “red flag area” of the body) resolves. Since the problem has not improved 100%, it can be assumed that there is at least one other issue that needs to be addressed that is related to this tooth. The following case below is an example of a dental problem caused by two very different contributing factors.

Clear Warning Signs

Three years ago, a 52-year-old woman named Marie called my office. “One of my left upper molars is really bothering me,” she said. “I’m a big fan of homeopathy, and I really hate having dental work done. Do you think you might be able to help?”

After scheduling her appointment, I suggested that she try doing a dream incubation a night or two before coming in. A dream incubation is a very simple tool for accessing information from what I call “The Divine Universal Intelligence.” The assumption here is that all information in the universe is accessible by everyone. However, the mind can only access a very small fraction of that information, via books, teachers, computers, and so forth. Therefore, tools other than the mind are needed in order to access the vast repository of information stored in our universe. Intentionally directed dreaming is one of these tools, and the beauty of it is this: almost everyone can do it with very little effort at all.

Marie was instructed to write a dream incubation request on a blank sheet of paper, and to put this by her bed along with a pen. As she fell asleep, she focused on the request, repeating it four or five times, with the intention of receiving a clear dream that would provide an answer to the question. I suggested an incubation request for Marie to try: “Please show me the root cause of this tooth pain I’ve been having recently.”

Two days later, Marie arrived for her appointment and told me how miserable she was becoming with the nerve pain associated with her distressed tooth. After taking a history, I asked if she had had any success with the dream incubation. She pulled out a piece of paper with a skeptical look and said that, yes, she had remembered a dream from the night before, but was sure that it could have nothing to do with her tooth. “Well, let’s hear it anyway,” I replied. And here is the dream Marie read aloud to me:

Question

: “What’s the main cause of this painful tooth of mine?”

Dream

: “Somehow I know that an old lady and her little dog have been murdered by a serial killer. Her dog is laying on the front doorstep of her house, and I am watching as a policeman reaches out to pick it up. The dream pans in on the image of the policeman’s hand reaching for the dog several times.”

Marie made a face of mild disgust as she finished the last sentence. “What a morbid dream!” she exclaimed. I nodded my head empathetically, and thought to myself, “Gads, I am not at all sure what the heck this dream means!” However, I knew from experience that Marie’s dream was most certainly an answer to her request for information. Sometimes giving a dream a title can be quite helpful, so I asked Marie to think of one. Immediately she replied, “The Serial Killer.” And in that moment, the dream revealed itself to me. “Oh! It’s a play on words! The Cereal Killer. You must need to stop eating grains.” During the intake I had done earlier, Marie had revealed having quite a weakness for breads and pastries. I therefore suggested that she begin by eliminating all gluten-containing products from her diet, and call me in a week for a progress report.

Five days later Marie called to report in. “My tooth pain has subsided greatly,” she said. “I am so relieved! It now is just a dull pain that bothers me very occasionally if I turn my head a certain way, or if I stoop over. It has gotten progressively better as each day passes. And I’ve followed the diet very carefully.” In another week or so, the discomfort in her tooth had completely resolved. And over the course of the ensuing two years, the tooth would bother her “a little” on the rare occasions when she overindulged in wheat-based foods.

Then, a year ago, I received a call from a nervous-sounding Marie. “Artemis, that tooth of mine has really been acting up again, for about a week now. And I’ve been off of gluten, so I don’t know what else to do!” I was able to see her later that afternoon, and asked about her symptoms. “The area where that tooth is – it’s really bothering me. It’s aching, and sometimes it’s a sharp pain. Hot and cold liquids aggravate it to no end. Actually, the whole jaw area around that tooth is bothering me. And I feel kind of light-headed and dizzy. That’s how this all started, I think. I got up one morning about a week ago and felt kind of woozy. It’s hard to explain. Then the tooth started acting up. And a few days ago I started getting these occasional flashes of pain across the back of my head (she points to the occipital region of her head). They’re very uncomfortable, almost electrical and also like a sudden seizing/grabbing kind of feeling. They’re getting worse as the days go by.”

So I noticed that although the same tooth is bothering Marie, she also has two new symptoms that have appeared along with the pain: the light-headedness and the intermittent occipital pain. I wondered if there might be two layers to this dental issue, the first being the gluten sensitivity. I then did some muscle-testing with Marie, trying to determine the causal level of this current problem. Surgical trauma was indicated as the main cause. I looked over the list of surgeries Marie had given me two years before during her initial intake. There was a childhood tonsillectomy, an emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy at 24 years of age, and extraction of all her wisdom teeth during her teens. Muscle-testing indicated that the extraction of her wisdom teeth was the causative factor, and that the homeopathic remedy Hypericum was needed to heal the trauma. Again, it is important to note here that Marie hadn’t consciously felt that this surgery was traumatic. These types of trauma are apparently often experienced by the unconscious part of the self, not the conscious part of the self.

I gave her one dose of Hypericum in a 10M potency. Marie reported in by phone, as instructed, two days later. “I’m about 25% better, I’d say. Not great, but definitely better. The tooth and jaw pain is less intense and less frequent, and the head pain is somewhat better. I’m still a bit woozy now and then, kind of like I’m going out of my body, you know?” This made perfect sense to me, because a common automatic response to trauma is to “go out of” one’s body – to try to escape the scene of the trauma, so to speak. A 25% improvement in two days is an encouraging response, so I told Marie that we would wait four or five more days and see how things were looking then. It took about two more weeks for all of her symptoms to completely resolve, and to this date they haven’t returned.

Discussion:

It is now well known that gluten can adversely affect many systems of the body, beginning with the small intestines. Therefore, it is no surprise that after decades of daily ingestion of gluten, a gluten-sensitive person will begin to receive clear warning signs of one sort or another. For Marie, the sign was a painful tooth. Perhaps this tooth reflected chronic inflammation of the small intestines. Her dream was showing her in no uncertain terms that cereal grains are very detrimental to her health: they are, indeed, a “killer.” The little dog in the dream probably represents the painful tooth that would have to be removed if appropriate healing measures weren’t taken. The dog was on the front doorstep of the house, just as the teeth and mouth are the gateway to one’s entire digestive tract.

Once the first “layer” of this dental issue has been cleared, then another “layer” makes itself known via specific symptoms. It is a completely different issue –trauma-related rather than dietary – but nonetheless it expresses itself in part as discomfort in the same area of the body.

Artemis Celt (formerly Linda Showler) graduated from Seattle’s Bastyr University in 1985 as a naturopathic doctor. She currently practices in Port Townsend, Washington, with a focus on the treatment of chemical, drug, vaccine and radiation miasms, in addition to other common nonphysical causes of physical illness. She has written many articles on the homeopathic treatment of chemical, drug (both prescription and recreational), vaccine, and radiation miasms. You can visit her website at www.deitycentral.com.