About this show:
We don’t naturally think when we have recurrent sinusitis or cognitive decline: “Well I guess I should book with the dentist!” Right?
Well, today’s guest Dr. Michelle Jorgensen who is a dentist, naturopath, author and speaker,. says, you might want to make that dentist appointment!
As she’s seen as both a dentist and a naturopath, oftentimes what’s happening in the body can originate from dental work that’s been done in the mouth – common procedures millions of us have had.
I was blown away by some of the examples she shared in this show.
Once Michelle’s eyes were opened, she decided to study beyond dentistry and dive deep into the history of health cultivation from around the world to design a blueprint to get her own health back on track and help her patients and now people around the world do the same.
In this show you’ll grow confidence in:
- How our mouth is a dashboard for the body and how to ask for investigations to see if what ails you is connected to past dental procedures you might have had.
- How we now have the technology to find hidden mouth infections that can lead to rapid health improvements – the Chronic fatigue example blew me away!
- How ‘we’re all energy’ isn’t woo woo – energy is just another word for electricity and we are all electrical beings.
- Tuning into what your body needs and when – an individual seasonal approach.
- How a simple assessment can give us a blueprint for how to move forward.
I hope you love this show as much as I did & you can preorder Michelle’s book here
Enjoy the show,
Alexx Stuart
Founder of Low Tox Life and the Low Tox movement
Join me on Insta @lowtoxlife
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Thank you to this month’s show sponsors for helping you make your low tox swaps easier:
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About Dr Michelle Jorgensen
Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, DDS, FAGD, TNC, CNAS, is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and pioneer in holistic dentistry. She founded Total Care Dental and Living Well with Dr. Michelle, offering resources to help people regain their health.
After mercury exposure in her dental practice made her ill, she became a Board-Certified Holistic Health Practitioner and created “Health-Based Dentistry”, linking oral health to overall wellness.
Author of six books including “Living Well with Dr. Michelle”, she is passionate about teaching and mentoring. A mother and grandmother, she enjoys gardening, cooking, and embracing nature’s gifts.
@livingwellwithdrmichelle on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok.
https://livingwellwithdrmichelle.com
Booktopia: https://bit.ly/3WxSnnq
More about this month’s sponsors:
Thank you to this month’s sponsors for partnering with our show and helping you make your swaps with their special offer:
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Alexx x
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Title show track, by LIOR.
Love the podcast music? You will hear excerpts from Lior’s track “Caught Up” – go check it out on iTunes or Spotify if you want to hear the whole song or album, Scattered Reflections. Co-written with Cameron Deyell, it’s a great song and I love the reflective energy of it – perfect for the show, right? Enjoy. Lior is always touring, so do check out his website. It is wonderful to hear him sing live, trust me.
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If you would love reading like me or you just simply want to go through the full transcript, you can check below.
[Alexx Stuart] (0:00 – 11:27)This dentist nearly had to sell her dental practice. She was so sick until she figured out why, joined the dots and carved the holistic path forward. We are talking the mouth connected to the body and all the things that let us know something is wrong either in our mouths because of what’s happening somewhere else in the body or vice versa.
This show will blow your mind. Hello and welcome to the Lotox live podcast. I’m Alexx Stuart, your host, founder of the Lotox movement, and I am so excited to welcome you to show 422.
Now we’ve known for a while that there is more and more research coming out connecting different things happening in the body to what’s going on in our mouths. You might’ve heard recently, of course, that flossing and regular flossing tends to produce less of a risk to Alzheimer’s for example. We know that PFAS from dental floss coated in Teflon can then end up in our bloodstream.
We’ve started to really recognize, thank gosh, that the mouth is connected to the whole rest of the body. Who’d have thunk it, right? But Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, who is my guest today, has a really personal departure point where she nearly needed to sell her dental practice because she got so sick. She then, after a barrage of appointments, tests, and scans, had to figure it out herself and thankfully did not sell her dental practice, ended up pioneering holistic dentistry in her area. She practices out of Utah in America, and I just love this conversation because we go from the mouth to all of the signs. She gives some brilliant examples and uses this metaphor of dashboard, the mouth as a dashboard, and can tell us some of the things that she can see and straightaway knows what is wrong in a different or a more holistic sense across the whole body when she’s looking in a mouth.
We’ve had some fantastic holistic dentists on the show over the years. Dr. Ron Ehrlich, now retired, my dentist, who then my dentist became Dr. Louis Ehrlich, but we’ve also had the wonderful Dr. Stacey Whitman, Stephen Lin, on the show over the past 10 years. I will link all of those shows because what I tend to find is if you are listening now and you are new to low-tox living and you might hear for the first time, what, no fluoride and kind of panic, but what do I do instead?
We have a whole suite of options for you to listen and dive into the bigger picture of dental health and what things are actually playing into our teeth being healthy and how we can actually move forward more holistically. Today’s show really did blow my mind, and I love how we then moved into Michelle’s work bringing naturopathy—she’s a qualified naturopath as well—into her dentistry and how that caused her to start to see through her study of Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, traditional German herbal medicine, a much bigger picture of how actually all of this stuff is intertwined. If we really focus on our symptoms as signs rather than things we need to cover up, then they tell us everything we need about how we can move forward.
We end up in a really beautiful, empowering, individualized approach to health where we’re not panicking and jumping off the back of every protocol on the internet, but we’re really tuning in inside us, and I just love that. I want to encourage that for us more and more because the shame of being that one person who doesn’t lose the weight or doesn’t feel the benefits or we could go on, there’s a lot of shame, and that’s a very lonely feeling. We’re really flipping it more and more on the show where we’re starting to explore things with doctors that have specific tools to help you feel more empowered, not less and not more like you need to go on searches and rabbit holes on the internet and kind of getting lost and overwhelmed and then freaking out, not knowing what to do.
We’ve all been there. I’ve been there, so I don’t want that for us. I’m going to hook into that show in a little minute.
Of course, we have our major sponsor Oz Climate. If you listen to the show live, any day now we’re going to be starting, I think next week, our series helping you with really practical tips on dehumidifying, a couple in there about air purification as well, but I get so many questions. It’s probably because I keep championing dehumidifiers, but I’m starting to put them into really practical guides like me talking through a floor plan and how you would rotate units through your house and a whole bunch of stuff.
It’s all on its way. A reminder, you have 10% off, sometimes already discounted prices at ozclimate.com.au with the code LOTOXLIFE. You also have a special offer from BioFirst, and this is an international offer, 20% off the new Blemish Ban range.
You can get the Blemish Ban kit. You can get a Blemish Ban rescue bundle, which has my favorite, the Manuka Skin Saver in there as well. That’s definitely what I’ll be going for given we’re getting 20% off the bundles as well.
It’s just such a fantastic product. These two new products from the Blemish Ban range, you have a toner and you have a gel. The gel is obviously spot treatment-like where you could go over a certain area if you’re having more of an acne patch presentation.
The rapid cleanse from the toner obviously works first, and then we put the gel on top. Then, of course, we can moisturize and do all the other things we’re doing. If you’re really in the middle of a, I need to calm the farm phase, do get the Adult Breakout Rescue because you’ve got the Manuka Skin Saver that you can use as a moisturizer during this kind of situation.
Who am I talking about? When do we use Blemish Ban? You might think Blemish and go straight to teenagers, and while your teenager is going to want to steal it like mine has, it’s not specifically created for them.
When Dr. Jude put her head down and wanted to formulate four blemishes, it was really thinking about the many hormonal transitions that girls and women go through in our lifetimes. The hormonal acne piece, the post-birth control breakouts when you’ve gotten rid of the pill in your picture, the pregnancy and postpartum blemishes. I remember thinking, hold on, aren’t pimples for teenagers?
What’s happening? Why am I getting them now? Then in my mid-forties, I started to get them again.
Thankfully, I don’t have too much of an issue now other than the odd ovulation pimple that I tend to get. It’s just that big rock star on your chin that makes you think everybody in every meeting and coffee and on every walk and across from you at the park is seeing how horrifically massive that thing is on your chin. I get that one every now and then.
I am excited this is here to help. I have tried it. I’ve definitely noticed how quickly my ovulation, it’s like the pimple decided to have the idea to show up and then it didn’t get to show up at all.
I was like, whoa, Jude, is this one of the best things you’ve ever created? I do love the BioFirst range, but I’m really amazed by what I’ve already started to notice the power of this is. Thinking about perimenopause, menopause, basically anyone who is thinking, why is my skin freaking out?
All of the stress that that then brings us because it’s our face. Then of course, it’s a perpetuating stress cycle. If you go to the blemish products in the mainstream, you have awful ingredients like benzoyl peroxide, salicylic acid, sizzle and burn kind of stuff that can really end up screwing with the natural sebum production and again, cause more problems.
I always think about most mainstream products are like cockroach baits. You put them out, but do you ever get rid of the cockroaches doing it? No, they come back.
A lot of the things that exist in consumer land to kind of quell it enough that you think it’s doing something, but it always comes back. You always need to buy more. I have a feeling I’m only new to using this.
Like I said, I’ve only quashed one pimple so far, but with the way Dr. Jude formulates, it’s always root cause and deep treatment philosophy. It’s about healing, not just about sending it away for a little while and it comes back. I love that about their formulations.
Give it a go. LOTOX Life is your code, 20% off the blemish ban range. That’s the kit, the single products themselves, or the blemish rescue breakout set, which also has the Manuka Skin Saver.
Given we’ve almost run out of that, I will absolutely be making the most of this off myself because even my husband steals that one. It’s such a good product. Okay.
Let’s go into this brilliant show with Michelle. I think you’re going to absolutely love her. I can’t wait to hear what you guys think.
Let’s get started. Hello, Michelle. How are you doing?
So great. Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to have you on.
A holistic dentist is always welcoming our community because it’s just, I feel like it’s finally time, right? For us to realize that we got teeth wrong and the stuff that Weston A. Price was talking about all the way back in the thirties, he was really onto something and it wasn’t about fluoride deficiency.
While that seems to have been out of the best interests originally, sure. We really now know that there are a lot of options when it comes to dental health. So I want to start there, but I know your interest is actually much wider having then gone on to study a lot more.
But let’s start with teeth. You have an interesting personal story as to why you started thinking out of the box as a dentist. Can you share that?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (11:28 – 11:50)Yeah, I, you know, I’m a general dentist and I was practicing thinking I would just continue going on for years like I was doing and I started not feeling well and my symptoms were the kind at first that you just start to write off as, oh, I’m just busy or I’m a busy mom or, you know, this is all what we, this is what we feel like when we’re in a thirties, you know, you think you’re so old at that point. [Alexx Stuart] (11:52 – 11:58)
I went through the same thing and it’s crazy how much you can rationalize, right? [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (11:58 – 12:39)
You do. You just started to think I just, everybody feels like this. So I was having gut issues, you know, so we started changing all about our diet and the things we were eating and it helped some, but it didn’t help a lot.
But my big ones were my memory. I just have always had a good memory and all of a sudden I couldn’t remember anything from literally room to room. I couldn’t remember a patient’s name.
And so it was obvious something was really going on. And then one that was really practice changing is I had such numbness, painful numbness in my hands that I couldn’t hold instruments anymore. I couldn’t brush my teeth or brush my hair.
I couldn’t brush my teeth. I couldn’t do anything. I just felt like neuropathic kind of vibes.
Yeah. It would just absolutely, I just could not hold anything. I had no dexterity.
[Alexx Stuart] (12:39 – 12:47)And so I had to put my practice up for sale because I didn’t realize it was that bad when I was looking into your history. That’s insane. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (12:47 – 14:21)
Yeah, it was really bad. So I was going to every doctor, every test, every everything, and nobody had any answers. And so I was looking outside of dentistry and it was in my early thirties and I had four young kids and my husband worked for the practice.
So literally we were going to lose everything at this point. And finally, another practitioner said, you know, have you ever looked into mercury poisoning as a possibility? And I said, well, I don’t have any fillings.
I know that, you know, silver fillings have mercury in them, but I don’t have any. And he said, it’s not the ones you have. It’s the ones you’ve been drilling out for the last decade with no protection.
And that’s literally the first time I’d ever heard that. I still didn’t believe it could be a thing, but I thought, well, I don’t have anything to lose here. I might as well get tested, got tested.
And that’s what it was. Mercury toxicity off the charts. So now all of a sudden, gut problems, brain problems, nerve problems, it all made sense because mercury is a neurotoxin.
So it was frying all my nerves and nothing was working anymore. So I had to figure out, could I get all the mercury out of me and still be a dentist? You know, the doctor said, well, you can, if you figure out a way to not put it back in.
So you’ve got to change the way you’re doing this. And I didn’t even know if it was possible, but I found that there was an organization that did, they have protocol for this. And so I started doing the things that they recommended to keep myself safe during appointments.
And all of a sudden, patients were very aware I was doing something different. You know, when I walk in with this mercury, huge filtration mask on and I’m covering them and we’re using the big vacuum and we’re doing all these things, you know, they would say, well, what’s going on?
[Alexx Stuart] (14:22 – 14:26)Yeah. It looks like a full hazmat situation now. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (14:26 – 15:24)
Which it should be. And so I would explain and they would, you know, say, oh, I’m so sorry for your health issues. I’m glad you’re feeling, you know, are you feeling better now?
But they would say, but isn’t this good for me too? Yeah, actually, this is very good for you too. So it really started asking, you know, just me questioning, what else in dentistry do I not know about that could be affecting health?
And that has taken me on a journey that I never would have anticipated. So doctors started saying, well, you should look into ozone. What do you really know about fluoride?
Do you hear, have you heard the issues with root canals and other issues, you know, other problems in the body? And I didn’t know any of these things. Like I had never heard of any of this before.
It was all just widely accepted as this was safe and good. And this is what we do as dentists. And I wasn’t aware of any of the issues before.
So it has definitely been an awakening for me to find out how much what we do here in the mouth is affected, you know, affects the rest of us. And it’s much more than we ever thought.
[Alexx Stuart] (15:25 – 16:32)Yeah, it really is. I mean, I remember when I first came across a holistic dentist, when I was still going to a conventional practice, and we had bonded because I’d started my blog at the time. It’s like 2009, 10.
And I was on Twitter. And I put the blog up of like, did you know there’s Teflon in your tooth floss, coating every single meter of the stuff that we’re using. And if we, you know, compound that every human who uses tooth floss, that’s a lot of forever chemicals in an everyday product, not to mention going into our gums, and then our bloodstreams.
And he picked it up, he must have been searching for it. He’s like, Oh, my gosh, I didn’t even know that. And I’m a holistic dentist.
And so we started having a conversation, I’ll never forget Ron saying, the thing with the mouth is, it’s the gateway to the rest of your body. It’s one of our major gateways. And of course, it stands to reason, therefore, that we should pay a lot of attention to what is going into the gateway.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (16:33 – 17:09)Yep, yep, yep. Whether it’s food, or oxygen, or water, or whatever it is, so much, most of what’s entering the body comes in through the mouth. And we can see the mouth.
So much that I can look at in the mouth. And I can say looking at your tongue, at your gums, at your teeth, at where cavities are, I can often tell other issues that are happening in the rest of the body. It’s just like a dashboard.
I like to think of it as a dashboard. It’s a dashboard for what’s going on from an overall health standpoint. And we’ve just forgotten to pay attention to what it tells us.
You know, we say, Hey, you’ve got a cavity, let’s fill it up. But we don’t say, you have a cavity, why?
[Alexx Stuart] (17:10 – 17:26)That’s the key. You have a cavity, why? And so I love that dashboard metaphor.
Can we unpack a couple of examples where you look in someone’s mouth and you go, whoop, okay, what’s going on? Are you feeling any of the rest of this? Because you see a clue.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (17:28 – 19:55)Yep. So real simple visual ones are, let’s say, if you have a cavity right along the gum line. So this is a real common thing at certain times of life, especially, and often when you’re getting older as well.
So if I see cavities along the gum line, I immediately say, you’ve got a nutrition cavity. They’re like, what do you mean a nutrition cavity? Well, if there’s a cavity at the gum line, the way a tooth is structured is there’s enamel over the part that you see.
You know, it’s the part that you see, that’s the enamel surface. Roots actually don’t have enamel on them at all. And when your body is, so enamel is largely mineral.
That’s what it is. It’s mineral complex made of something called hydroxyapatite. When your body is lacking in minerals, because it needs them to run your heart, to run your brain, to run a lot of essential functions.
If it can’t get enough either, because you’re not eating enough, you know, you’re just not taking in enough, or because you aren’t absorbing enough, that’s almost an even bigger one. You might be eating fine, but you’re not actually absorbing those minerals. Your body will go and search for them somewhere.
So two big banks for minerals in the body are teeth and bones. And if it doesn’t have enough, it will literally mine minerals from your teeth and your bones. So it will take them from the whole surface of the tooth, from the enamel, that mineral portion.
But the thinnest enamel is right where the top of the tooth meets the root surface. That’s the thinnest enamel. So it’s going to mine the whole surface, but the enamel is going to go away first there, because there’s less of it.
So that’s where it’s going to be prone to get cavities first, if your body is mineral seeking. It’s pulling minerals from you for some other reason. So if I see cavities at the gum line, I’ll say this is a nutrition issue, most likely, unless you have an incredibly high dry mouth.
Sometimes that’s from high blood pressure medication. Something like that will create an incredibly dry mouth. That’s a different situation.
But if otherwise, if I see a cavity there, I say, okay, you need to up your mineral content, your mineral intake. Number one, we need minerals on the outside, which is going to be tooth powder, mouthwash that we use that have hydroxyapatite or the mineral in them. And you’re going to up minerals on the inside, which means vitamin 3K2, which will help the minerals absorb, and then the minerals.
So you’re going to do those two things. But we also need to test your gut and see what’s actually happening from an absorption standpoint. So one thing that I tell people to do, that’s a really easy thing to do at home is what I call the baking soda test.
[Alexx Stuart] (19:55 – 20:00)I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, if you’ve done it before, but go for it just in case they haven’t. Yeah. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (20:00 – 21:18)
Yeah. So it’s, you take a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and a half a cup of water, just mix it in and drink it. And you want to see how long it takes you to burp because that baking soda should chemically react with your stomach acid.
And within two to three minutes, you should be burping if you have adequate stomach acid. So in two to three minutes, you should burp. It’s the chemical reaction.
It creates kind of this gas and you end up burping. Why do you need stomach acid? Because stomach acid, it does quite a few things.
But one of the things it does is ionizes minerals. So if you have inadequate stomach acid, you can’t ionize the mineral properly and your body can’t absorb it. So it literally just passes throughout the other end and it never stops and does the thing that your body needs.
So, because some people say, I eat so cleanly, so beautifully. All I eat is fruits and vegetables. I eat so many minerals.
I’ll say, well, then you’re obviously not absorbing them. So let’s get your stomach acid up to where it needs to be. Let’s get you absorbing nutrients and minerals properly.
It’s going to help a lot of other things too. It’s going to help protein absorption. Often it’s going to decrease food sensitivities, all kinds of other things, if you have adequate stomach acid, but that’s a quick and easy way to find, is this my problem?
So if you’re burping in two to three minutes, you’re good to go. If it takes you longer than two to three minutes, you do not have enough stomach acid to ionize minerals properly. And you’re probably not getting the nutrients you need.
[Alexx Stuart] (21:19 – 21:38)Great test for everybody to do. I agree. And then, so what would, given you a naturopath as well, we can ask this question, how do we build up that stomach acid?
So there’s a lot of, you can supplement like there’s the easy HCL kind of route, but what’s the long-term fix?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (21:39 – 23:25)And we start with a supplement because this is often a misunderstood or not even just thought about concept that let’s say you just start to take some supplements to help with stomach acid creation. Well, you’re not even absorbing those if you don’t have enough stomach acid. So this is a catch 22 issue.
So I always have people supplement with HCL or hydrochloric acid, literally betaine is a, it’s a beat derived version of it. So we always add that at the beginning, but the goal is to not have to continue that. So then we look and say, what causes low stomach acid?
What are some of those things that can lead to that? And one of the huge ones is if the body is in a fight or flight mode, because in fight or flight mode or sympathetic overdrive, these are all words we use for it, digestion stops. And I always give the example of if you’re being chased by a bear, the last thing, it’s not time to sit down and enjoy a steak and salad.
Yeah. Last thing you need to do is digest your meal. So your stomach literally stops digesting food.
So what could be pushing your body into a fight or flight mode? A lot of things, you know, lifestyle stress, environmental stress, things like EMFs or toxins like you talk about and deal with. These are all things that can physically push your body into that fight or flight mode.
But the things that I deal with on a day to day basis also are infections, hidden infections in the mouth. We can dig into that. What are those and what, what they, what might they be doing to airway issues?
This is a huge one. So many people simply are not sleep, getting enough air at nighttime and sleep apnea is literally like 80% of the population. We just don’t understand and know why and what to do about it.
But that pushes your body into very much of a fight or flight panic mode almost. I’m not getting enough air. Stomach stops.
[Alexx Stuart] (23:25 – 23:29)And you carry that through in your day with the subconsciously almost. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (23:29 – 23:40)
Yeah. Yep. And, and from a physical standpoint too, because you’ve depleted all of your adrenal, all of your adrenaline, your cortisol, all of these things all night long, just staying awake or staying alive. [Alexx Stuart] (23:40 – 23:51)
Staying alive. Exactly. And you don’t know when you wake up in the morning and feel like today.
Yeah. You don’t know. You’ve literally been saving your own life throughout the night.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (23:51 – 24:39)I love that. Saving your own life, life throughout the night. Yep.
So you just, your body is not functioning the way it should. So we, first of all, supplement hydrochloric acid. Then we try to identify what could be leading to this.
Is there an infection somewhere? Is there something going on that we can work on or is there gut function? Do we need probiotics?
Do we need to restore the gut lining? You know, what do we need? So that’s the next step is to figure out what is the underlying cause.
And those are some possible solutions. And then we address that. Fix the infection in the mouth.
Add the probiotic and the, you know, supplement to increase gut and health lining, whatever it might be. And then we retest. We retest again in a month or two months.
So we say, what’s the stomach acid level now? Is it still low? Okay.
We still have to keep supplementing HCL for a test. And you’re burping in two to three minutes.
[Alexx Stuart] (24:39 – 24:50)Nice. And I love this because it’s not privileged medicine. Anyone can grab a quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate, half a glass of water and test this and monitor their health that way. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (24:51 – 24:52)
Yep. Super easy to do. [Alexx Stuart] (24:52 – 25:03)
Yeah. Love that. Now you did mention hidden infections in the mouth.
Can we go there? Because I can always hear like a community’s worth of people going, but what did she mean? What kind of infections?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (25:04 – 25:54)Yep. So this is another one, actually, that’s really good from a dashboard standpoint. So, so often I will see people and they’ll say, I have chronic sinus infection.
I have been to the ENT. I’ve had two sinus surgeries already, but I have chronic post nasal drip. Like it’s just never going away.
Or it seems like I get every cold that comes along. Like if somebody’s sick, I’m going to be sick no matter what, you know, these are the things I hear on a daily basis. And when you tell me that the first thing I’m going to do is say, I bet you there’s infections somewhere in your mouth that we don’t know about.
Let’s go looking to see what could be seeding all of this. And also really tamping down your immune system, you know, wearing it out so that you can’t fight things that come along. So what do we do first?
We do what’s called a cone beam CT scan, and we have to have this scan. Hold on.
[Alexx Stuart] (25:54 – 26:01)Let’s just go back and go a bit slower. Okay. Combi?
Cone beam. Cone beam CT.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (26:02 – 26:32)Yes. Cone beam CT scan. What is that?
So it’s a dental specific CT scan. So people imagine like this massive machine in their hospital. It’s not what I’m talking about.
It’s a machine that goes around your head and it’s going to be found in a dental office. Typically you’re going to always find it in an oral surgeon’s office, often an orthodontist’s office, often the specialist, but now more and more, you’re going to find it in general dental offices as well. It’s used for identifying.
Yeah. So if we look…
[Alexx Stuart] (26:32 – 26:36)That’s how we found my son’s supernumerary tooth. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (26:36 – 28:19)
There you go. There you go. Yep.
So why is this an advantage? It’s a three dimensional image. I literally can see your head upside down, inside out.
I can go through the bones slice by slice by slice. I can see everything that’s going on in the head. And this is looking for a few different things.
So the most common thing I see is a failed root canal. And then the next question is, well, how could a root canal fail? What’s that?
What’s going on there? Well, it turns out that’s pretty common, right? Extremely common, but we haven’t been able to see it because we didn’t have this three dimensional scan.
We were looking at it on old dental x-rays. So let me give you a story actually about this. This is probably one of the biggest turning points in my career.
I was seeing a patient, routine visit, you know, they’re for a cleaning. And she said, I had this root canal right up here. I always remember exactly which tooth it was.
And she said, it’s just never felt right. And this is really common with the root canals. You say, just, I don’t know.
It just doesn’t quite feel right. You know, it doesn’t hurt. There’s not any of that kind of toothache, anything.
It’s just, it’s just, I don’t know, something up there. So we took a regular dental x-ray. Then, you know, the one that goes in your mouth and we, you know, snap, snap.
Took a regular old dental x-ray. And I looked at it and I said, yep, you’re right. You’ve had a root canal and it looks just fine.
And if I had shown it to a hundred dentists, I think a hundred dentists would have said, it looks just fine. But she said, but just, it just doesn’t feel right. You know, and I had just gotten this new machine, you know, that could take this cone beam CT scan.
I just got this new machine. I said, you know what, let’s just go take a scan. I’m just curious.
[Alexx Stuart] (28:19 – 28:40)I just want to see what we’re going to see here. And thank you for listening to the patient who’s like, it just doesn’t feel right. Like how rare is it that someone will say, okay, well let’s explore further.
Like that’s just good basic care. I love this. Exactly.
Exactly. Thankfully I had something that I could do because I probably would have just said, it’s just fine.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (28:40 – 29:07)You know, like I didn’t have any other thing to do. I need the tools to take. So we took the scan and scan came back.
She had a hole about the size of a quarter, um, a large hole that her jawbone had completely been eaten away at the end of the root. Huge hole in her jaw. I had, I could not see it on the regular dental x-ray.
Could not see it. Nobody could have seen it. I mean, now I go back and look at the x-ray because I have the x-ray.
[Alexx Stuart] (29:08 – 29:18)I look back at it and I think, well, yeah, I can kind of see it now, you know, but I just kind of made my eye water to think of this woman like it was flesh eating, whatever is up there. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (29:19 – 31:32)
Exactly. But it’s literally daily because what happens when a tooth’s had a root canal, what they do is they clean out the nerve and the blood vessel on the inside of the tooth and fill it up with, it’s called gutta percha. It’s a plastic like material.
And the idea is awesome, right? You get to keep the tooth. You can keep chewing with it, smiling with it.
I mean, this is a great concept. The problem is, is there isn’t just one canal in the side, inside of the tooth. There’s these little feeder channels.
That’s how the tooth, that’s how nutrients get from you all the way out to the enamel out here. You know, there have to be little tiny tubes that get out there and any dentist knows this. This isn’t just like something I’m making up.
They’re called dentinal tubules and there’s literally a mile of them inside of every single tooth. Well, those little tiny tubes are too small to clean and too small to fill. So you always are going to have little remnants of nerve tissue, blood vessel tissue left inside of these little tubes, no matter how well the root canal was, no matter who did it.
It could be the most amazing dentist on the planet. There’s still going to be dead tissue left in that tooth. And anytime there’s dead something in the body, bugs are going to find it.
Yeah. This is why if you have like a gangrene toe, you know, you’re diabetic and they say, oh no gangrene, get it out. Or why you have a ruptured appendix, why they say get it out now, it’s going to, you know, because you can’t have something dead in the body.
It will get infected that fast. So now bugs find it. It’s low level, you know, it’s little bits.
And so bugs find it, but your immune system now has to deal with this nonstop. And this is what leads to a lot of other immune effects from these hidden infections. We’ll see things like autoimmune disease.
And you think, well, what’s going on? Well, because your immune system is distracted and tired out all the time dealing with this infection around this old root canal. Or we’ll see even things like cancer.
Why? Because the immune system can’t deal with cells dividing wrong over here because it’s dealing with this over here. In fact, we see can’t, I have never seen a patient yet that has had or has cancer that doesn’t have an infection in their mouth somewhere.
[Alexx Stuart] (31:33 – 31:33)I haven’t found one. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (31:34 – 31:36)
It’s so correlative. [Alexx Stuart] (31:36 – 31:40)
Could that be correlative because you’re a dentist and they’re the people you’re seeing? [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (31:41 – 32:10)
I see people from all over the, I mean, they, they’re coming saying, I have cancer. Do I have an infection? They’ll just say in their history, they’ll say, you know, they’re there for something else.
They’ve got a sinus infection. They, you know, want their mercury fillings out, something like that. And they’ll say, oh yeah.
And I had cancer. Okay, great. Where was it?
Not great. I’m glad it’s gone, you know, but where, where was the cancer? Oh, it was, I had, you know, breast cancer, which, which breast, my left breast.
Oh, interesting. Because this tooth right here is on the left breast energy circuit and that’s the tooth you have a root canal in.
[Alexx Stuart] (32:11 – 32:11)Wow. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (32:11 – 32:59)
Interesting. Why don’t you go on beam CT scan and see what the status of that root canal is. Wow.
Look at that huge infection above the end of the root. So you can’t feel these because the nerve’s gone. You have no idea other than sometimes that weird little phantom, it just doesn’t feel right.
So what do I find going back to the sinus infection piece? I’ll find massive infections, massively infected root canals on top teeth that have eaten away the floor of the sinus and are literally like shooting like a volcano into the sinus. So no matter how many times you have surgery, the tooth just continues to drain and fills it right back up again.
And it just, just boggles my mind sometimes why an ENT isn’t saying, maybe we should look below the sinus to see if there’s something down there creating this ongoing sinus infection problem.
[Alexx Stuart] (33:00 – 33:13)Are dentists bad at talking to ENTs? Like this is one of our blind spots in medicine, right? The segmentation of body parts.
Do you guys work together? Is anyone starting to collaborate more?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (33:13 – 34:48)We’re starting for sure, but we don’t talk like we don’t work. It’s not like when you’re in a hospital and you have the other specialists all sitting around, we don’t see each other. We just literally don’t cross paths.
So we share this with the ENTs all the time and we’ll say, gosh, look at what we just found. Thank you for supporting our patient. We’re going to clean this tooth out.
And then if they need help from you, now this will be easier for you to do. The infection is gone. So, I mean, we’re talking, we’re trying to teach and we’re trying to show, but it’s just not something that’s on the radar.
They’re just not looking for it. So that’s one of the dashboard things that I see all the time. If you have an autoimmune disease, if you have a chronic sinus infection, if you are not able to stay well, if you have adrenal issues, like you just can’t get the energy you need to do life automatically, I say, let’s do a CT scan.
Let’s find out where the infection is in your head. Because I can almost guarantee I’m going to find it. So that’s one of the things.
Failed root canal. You can’t feel it. Creates all kinds of havoc.
The other one is where teeth were removed. Sometimes the tooth doesn’t, the bone doesn’t actually heal properly. Creates a dead zone there.
And that just leads to all sorts of inflammation in the body and everywhere. And we’ll see connection with that with people who chronic fatigue syndrome, they can’t get out of bed and they have no idea why. And we go and we find there’s these dead spots in your jawbone here where the wisdom teeth were removed.
Let’s clean those out. Oh, wow. All of a sudden you get your life back again.
So really interesting connections.
[Alexx Stuart] (34:48 – 35:23)It’s so interesting, Michelle. And it’s such a massive jump for like, you’re not going to be sitting there unable to get out of bed and thinking I know who I’ll see a dentist. And then it’s the potluck of whether that dentist is even thinking in that way.
And so it’s so important to raise awareness on this because then we can have patient led discussions and say, well, I was actually listening to a dentist speak about this. It’s why I just love having a podcast because you can help people create the dots, but also give them the vocabulary on how to lead the conversation.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (35:24 – 36:30)Love it. And you know, honestly, my huge mission is to educate all of you that are listening because honestly, inside of the dental community, I’m very much a rebel and I’m very much a little bit of an outcast where they look at me and they think, oh, she’s just that crazy lady. And I say, well, I can show you literally x-ray after x-ray after x-ray, tell you story after story after story.
And it makes me a little sad that dentistry hasn’t owned our responsibility. Enormous responsibility here that we have. Honestly, we see people more than anyone.
You know, people see the dentist every six months. Who else in the healthcare world do you see every six months? Nobody, unless you’re really sick.
You know, we don’t just go to the doctor for the fun of it every six months. You know, we don’t do that. So we have a responsibility, but we also have a responsibility to understand the connection here between our mouths and, you know, the overall body.
But it’s just, it’s years behind. It’s years behind. So thankfully you are all interested now.
You’re listening, you’re learning. Now you can go to your practitioner and say, I’d really like to know more about this. What do you know?
That will spur them to ask some questions on their own.
[Alexx Stuart] (36:32 – 37:33)Yeah, that’s it. I mean, if we look back at the timeline of medicine, there are people that have been called crazy and, you know, ostracized and exiled and stoned to death. I mean, there’s just so many horrific stories about anyone who dared to ask a question.
It’s nothing new. And unfortunately for these polarized times, it shouldn’t be politically capitalized on either. This is very, very, like everybody should have the right to question and go, hey, I don’t feel like we’ve got a good enough read on this.
Or can we see some experts debate more publicly? Like, I think that’s really what’s missing to just see not fricking podcast dudes, like spitting stuff out on the internet as if it was truth, but to actually see people in professions with PhDs, with doctorates debating and saying, but I’m seeing this in my practice. Oh, that’s interesting because I’m seeing that.
And what do you think of this? Like, I think that’s where we need to start going for this, these shenanigans to kind of go away and keep dividing us.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (37:34 – 37:35)Yeah, I believe I agree. [Alexx Stuart] (37:36 – 37:59)
Yeah. Okay. Now, obviously your journey into the holistic spurred the naturopathy, the second turn around the sun from an education perspective.
Did you feel like you then needed to understand the whole body system and health on a deeper level?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (38:00 – 38:22)Very much so, but it honestly was just a continuation of my story. So now here I am sick, realize that there’s enormous lack of information that I have that was the underlying component of this, started to learn, started to change what I was doing from a practice standpoint, but I was still sick. [Alexx Stuart] (38:23 – 38:25)
How did you detox the mercury? [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (38:25 – 40:32)
And that’s the, that’s really what I had to then learn all the rest of this to be able to figure out, you know, is I had learned. So here’s the interesting thing with mercury. People don’t know that silver fillings are 50% mercury, 50% still today.
So that feeling that’s walking around in your head is 50% mercury. If you have a filling, thankfully in Australia where you are, I believe mercury fillings have been banned in the United States. They have not been.
So they’re still being placed every single day in dental offices here. They are still 50% mercury. And so I had to figure out, first of all, what does mercury do?
And then how do you get rid of it? And you don’t get rid of it very easily. And this was a challenge because at the time, all I’d been told about mercury is if I told somebody that it could affect their health, I would lose my license.
So that’s really the education I had. What if the person’s health that’s affected is mine? No, no, no.
What do I do? So I learned the mercury hides in, I like to think of it like neighborhoods and hides in neighborhoods and it doesn’t want, you know, the policemen to find it and then, you know, rat it out. And it takes a lot of work actually to pull it out of the work, out of the kidneys.
Like it takes a lot of work to do that. And then once it’s moving, you have to be able to have all of your elimination pathways moving. You know, so my guts needed to be working correctly and my, you know, all this stuff.
I had to be sweating, you know, correctly. And my lymphatic system had to be moving and all this sort of thing. And I mean, I’d been through dental school.
I’d been through, you know, full body anatomy classes and biochemistry classes. But when it came down to now, this is my body, you know, and my biochemistry that we’re talking about, all of a sudden I became very interested in really learning how does this work and realizing I need to be able to have these conversations with patients in an educated manner. You know, I don’t like it when a patient asks me a question and I can’t answer it.
And honestly, what we often do as practitioners is we kind of skate around the question. We either say, oh, it’s not a big deal. Oh, that doesn’t work.
[Alexx Stuart] (40:33 – 41:17)Or something that you said before, which I think is so telling around, like if you hadn’t have had the special scanner, whose name I forget, the cone, that’s it, the cone beam. If you hadn’t have had that, you might have done what most medical practitioners do, which is, yeah, don’t worry too much about it. Let’s just wait and see, you know, because it’s subclinical.
It hasn’t become so impactful that alarm bells are on and we need to shift to what we do best, which is crisis care, unfortunately still. And so, yeah, it’s no big deal. We rationalize, we move on until it hits us in the face.
And in this case, literally.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (41:18 – 42:09)Literally, yeah. Because that’s practitioner talk for I don’t really know the answer for you. It’s what I say, oh, it’s really not a big deal.
Or, oh, yeah, I’ve heard that before too, but that doesn’t work. That’s all we actually don’t know. And we were trying to save face here and, you know, and be the all knowing person that you expect us to be, but we really actually don’t know.
So I don’t like that. I don’t like not knowing. And I thought, well, I’m going to just have to go back to school and learn the answers to these questions.
And so that’s really where that’s kind of the segue that I took to where I am now. And I started just asking questions because my symptoms were, it was easy to try to cover them up, you know, like I had gut problems. So I go to the gastroenterologist and what do they do?
They give me an acid reducer medication.
[Alexx Stuart] (42:09 – 42:10)Oh, no. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (42:10 – 42:16)
Exactly. And anybody who knows what an acid reducer medication does, it’s exactly the conversation we just had. [Alexx Stuart] (42:16 – 42:19)
About demineralizing and yeah. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (42:19 – 42:53)
Decrease. Yep. Now you’re not going to be absorbing your nutrients properly.
So I had to realize that my symptoms were the signs. They were, again, my dashboard. My symptoms were my signs.
They were the most important thing. And really medicine should not be about turning off the symptom because the symptom is simply our cells way of telling us what is happening and what’s going on. But in modern medicine, as we know it, typically the purpose is to turn off the symptom, right?
You have a headache. What do you do?
[Alexx Stuart] (42:54 – 42:58)You turn off the sign and you should be asking, why have I got a headache? [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (42:59 – 44:56)
Exactly. Exactly. Right.
And so medicine we’ve actually come and I believe that we as consumers have really fed this movement too, because when you go to the doctor and you want, you know, you’re, you’re not feeling well, you got a cold, you do whatever they expect that you expect to walk out with a prescription in your hand because you’ve given them an answer. It’s easy. You go fill this prescription, you get a pill bottle, you take these pills and hopefully it makes it go away.
So really we’ve, just as a consumer, as a patient population, have given our practitioners this expectation that we expect you to do something for us. And we expect you to take our symptom away. We complain about something, make it go away for me.
Instead we should be stopping long enough to say, what does the symptom really mean? But that’s where a lot of confusion comes as well, right? How do you find that out?
Like, what does it mean? What does your headache mean? So that’s where I dove even deeper and I started studying Chinese traditional medicine, Ayurveda, German herbalism, you know, all of these different old traditional medical systems.
So outside of even what I was learning in naturopathy studies. And I realized that they all, all they used to have to help us figure out what was going on was to look at the symptoms, right? They didn’t have blood tests.
They didn’t have cone beam CT scans. They didn’t have any of those things. So the only thing, you know, 200 years ago you were struggling with something.
The only thing they had to use was your symptom. And they got really good at figuring out what they meant. But now in today’s medical society, we have a lot of other things we can use.
We can use blood tests. We can use x-rays. We can use things like this, which are great, but I think we’ve kind of forgotten that there’s information to be gleaned from those symptoms too.
[Alexx Stuart] (44:57 – 45:54)Yes. Oh gosh. I agree.
I mean, I had to unfortunately go down the world of mold because of our own story and came to know so much about it that I ended up focusing my health coaching in that space to just help people have a plan, connect to the right doctors. And I just find it almost crazy now to think, and I did this myself when I was starting to look into it, that I would do a $500 P-test to confirm the mold when I had already tested my home, when I already had all my symptoms. I didn’t need no confirmation for 500 bucks.
Let’s spend that 500 bucks on something more effective, which is actually supporting now what we already know to be the case. So I agree. I think you can get test happy to the point where you forget how powerful a symptom actually is and painting a picture.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (45:55 – 48:27)Yep. And so, but again, we’re still often at this point in confusion. Well, what does this mean?
You know, what is it? I sure I can look at my sentence, but what do they mean? So again, I went back to all those traditional methodologies and said, how did they do it?
You know, how did they use the symptoms and what did it mean when they saw these symptoms? Do we all need to become a medicine man or, you know, the community healer to be able to do this? And the answer is no, because they actually had classification systems.
They had classification systems that they use. And as I looked at all of them, they all used the seasons of the earth or the elements of the earth. So they would talk about fire and water.
They would say, you know, if you have this cold and you are constantly sick, you have a problem with dampness. Okay. So they would use these words.
But as I studied this again, it was still super confusing because I’m like, well, what does dampness mean? I don’t know what I’m going to do about this, you know? So I took all of that and I applied it to what we know today.
So I used all of their classification systems and I came up with basically a combination system that I call the season system. So now I have an assessment that’s based on your symptoms. So you plug your symptoms in and it tells you what season you’re in.
Now, this might not make sense still, but the seasons based on all these old traditional philosophies line up with certain organ systems. So let’s say that you come to me and you say, all right, I just feel like I have no motivation. Like I literally can’t get out of the bed in the morning.
I feel sluggish. I just feel kind of lousy. I feel like, I don’t know, I just achy kind of right here, especially, I don’t know what this is, food, every single food bothers me and I can’t tell if it’s an allergy.
I mean, you tell me these symptoms. You plug those into the assessment. It’s going to spit out.
You are in spring season and spring season is all about the liver and the gallbladder. So it’s all about liver, gallbladder health. So all of a sudden, you know where to start.
Starting point is liver and gallbladder. Thankfully, we live in this huge information saturated world. So we can go to people like you and other people that are sharing, okay, how do we get better from things?
How do we detox from things? We can plug all that in, but you need to know that that’s where you’re supposed to start. If you have another set of symptoms, you’re going to start with the heart and small intestine.
Another set of symptoms, you’re going to start with the urinary tract and the kidneys. So it’s all based on where your symptoms are, tell you where you should start. And this is, so I started doing this with myself, with my patients, and finally I went, this is a book.
[Alexx Stuart] (48:28 – 48:30)Yeah, it definitely is. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (48:30 – 48:31)
I’m so glad you’ve written it. [Alexx Stuart] (48:33 – 48:50)
And can I ask, given the dentistry origin, we know that TCM has like a mouth map and then you can link every tooth to a different, did you start to find like, oh, wow, that is, I’m seeing that in my work now every day now that I know this map. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (48:51 – 49:16)
A hundred percent. So it’s called the tooth criterion chart. And I am, so you’ve brought up this, people always start to get a little cross eyed when I start to talk about energy or, you know, this mapping, but I always like to explain, no, no, no, this is the way the body works.
So if you go to the hospital today and they hook you up to heart monitor, you’re going to hear the beep, beep, beep, beep, you know, on the screen. What are they, what are they measuring?
[Alexx Stuart] (49:18 – 49:19)Electricity. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (49:19 – 50:36)
Electricity, right? So for some reason, we all think when we start talking energy in the body, we’re like, oh, those are just crazy people. I’m like, well, what do you think your fitness measuring?
What do you think the heart monitor is measuring? What do you think a brain scan is measuring? It’s measuring electricity.
And what happens? What does it mean when the monitor goes beep? It means electricity stopped and you’re dead.
So electricity is the thing that keeps us alive, right? If electricity stops, we’re dead. So we have to have this electrical flow in the body.
That’s, that means we’re alive still. And that electrical flow has to go along electrical lines, just like our homes or anything have electrical lines where things are connected to switches and there’s breaker boxes that can flip and trip and, you know, the same happens with the body. So every single, there’s, there’s four places in the body where every single organ is represented.
Hands, feet, ears, and teeth. Isn’t that interesting? It’s interesting that those are our peripherals as well.
And the ones that get the most use, you know, think about hands, how much, so basically we’re recharging all of those electrical circuits every time we use our hands, every time we walk on our feet, every time we chew or put our teeth together to swallow.
[Alexx Stuart] (50:36 – 50:41)And that makes so much sense why grounding is so impactful then. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (50:42 – 51:27)
A hundred percent feet, you know, or lay our whole body on or whatever it might be. We’re literally powering up every single organ system. So yeah, all of these organ systems are connected with teeth.
So one of my craziest stories, um, as a gentleman who came in and as he walked in the room, I thought he is orange, like he’s orange, but you know, I didn’t want to say anything about it. I’m looking at his medical history. He’s not saying anything about it.
And finally I just said, has anyone ever told you you’re orange? And he said, yes, people ask me all the time if I use like self-tanner cream. He said, but I don’t, I don’t know why I’m orange.
Well, we took a scan and what I found is that he’d been hit in the mouth with a ball when he was younger and he had root canals on these four front teeth. Guess which organ is connected with the front teeth? The liver.
[Alexx Stuart] (51:27 – 51:28)Liver. Yeah. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (51:28 – 53:06)
He’d been chronically jaundiced since he had failing root canals on these four front teeth. So you cannot tell me the connection isn’t there. It’s so there every single day.
Somebody will say, Oh, I cannot get over it. Like I’ve got pneumonia nonstop. And I’m like, Oh wow.
That tooth right there is on the lung meridian. And you’ve got a failed infected root canal right there on the lung meridian. We take the tooth out, lung infection goes away.
So, so much connection between these two. So it’s putting all these pieces together and saying, okay, how can I do this from my home? You know, how can I heal my own self?
By learning how to read your symptoms, by understanding what they’re meaning. You don’t need a doctor for this. You can actually understand for yourself what your symptoms are telling you.
So for your instance, you know, when you’re talking about mold toxicity and you have these symptoms going on, most likely they would all be directing back to liver and detoxing. It’s going to be probably spring or harvest. Harvest season also has a lot of detoxing need.
Most likely, if you were to take the symptom assessment, it’s going to lead you back to both of those two things. Harvest is stomach and spleen. Spring is liver and gallbladder.
So now you know where to start. Now, would it tell you it’s mold? No, but it’s going to tell you you’re going to start detoxing your world.
So what does this look like? You know, I’m going to start looking around. What could potentially be creating this issue with me being able to get rid of stuff in my body?
Does that make sense? Like it’s putting the power of keeping yourself well back into everybody’s own hands rather than outsourcing it. Like we’ve been told we need to do for about the last 150 years.
[Alexx Stuart] (53:08 – 54:37)Absolutely. I think, especially with social media, I’ve seen people like, you know, there’s the double-edged sword, right? There’s a great aspect, which is more access to information than ever before.
But I don’t think we have the human capacity to sift and connect on a deep level with what feels truly right. I think it’s kind of like I remember when I had my very first job in retail. We were always told, never make a woman try more than three perfumes at once because she will get confused and she will walk out the door and not buy anything.
And that really stayed with me in people psychology, because, you know, you have this protocol, that protocol, join me for this. Health has come down to who has the best marketing and the biggest budget. And that’s a completely disempowering framework for people to move back to owning their own health.
So I’m not interested in that and putting anyone out into that world anymore. I think beautiful, controlled conversation, controlled, you know what I’m trying to say, like contained conversations where we really focus and bring some truths home that everyone can practice from and feel empowered by and grow a vocab. That’s what’s actually going to make for much healthier people.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (54:37 – 55:56)And really right on the backs of that is there is no program or pill or supplement or practitioner. That’s a one size fits all. They may, like you said, have the best marketing or marketing budget, but there’s no one thing that’s the best for every single person right now at this point in their life.
Like every single body is going to cycle through seasons. So just like the earth cycles, we actually cycle as well. We cycle through seasons.
So what my body needs right now, my body right now is at a harvest season. I’ve tested, I test myself and I’m actually changing. I change the way I eat.
I change the way I move. I change the way I do everything based on the season I’m in, but it’s going to move to a fall season. And then I’m going to be changing everything I do there as well.
So our body cycle, but every single body is in a different place as well based on their needs, their individual needs. But it’s so confusing. Well, how do you not know?
Like, should you just power lift, eat keto, intermittent fast, like get rid of all carbs? You know, like, there’s all these, like what people ask me this all the time. Well, what should I do?
Like, I don’t know the answer, but your cells do. So let’s go ask them. Let’s go ask them what they need right now.
And then I can tell you what to start with, because that’s going to be your starting point. So really that’s where this assessment is just so crucial. It gives you the place to start.
All of those programs may be great, but they’re not great for everybody all the time.
[Alexx Stuart] (55:57 – 56:12)No. And or for every age or for every season, I completely agree. And, and so is the season that you’re in, it’s obviously not lined up to the season that the place you live in is in, right?
It’s literally a body season.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (56:12 – 56:28)It’s a body season based on the organ system that needs the most help right now. So every cell needs four things. It needs, and literally we’re made of like 37 trillion cells.
So that’s all we are is a big bag of cells. And bacteria. Yeah, exactly.
And bacteria, but there’s cells too.
[Alexx Stuart] (56:29 – 56:31)Yeah, yeah, true. God, sorry. Yeah. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (56:31 – 58:06)
Our cells, their cells, they’re all, we’re all just cells, you know, we’re all hanging out together. Exactly. We’re all just going through this life together.
So it’s all about what cells, what do they need? And they need supplies, right? We know that.
That’s why we talk about food so much. That’s why we talk about clean water. You know, they need support.
So that’s getting rid of their garbage. That’s the detoxing you talk about. They need to be able to dump stuff and, you know, be taken care of.
They need security. So they’ve got to be protected from all the big, bad bugs in the world that are out to here, out to kill us. And they need signals.
They need to be able to talk to each other, to be able to actually coordinate function in the body. So we look at that and we say, all right, you currently are in a spring season. Let’s say you’re in a spring season.
Your liver and gallbladder need help. What are liver? What do liver, what does the liver need?
What do liver cells like? They love dandelion roots. Interesting.
And what’s so fascinating about this is what grows in spring? Dandelions. The other things that grow in spring are greens like spinach and kale and arugula.
That’s also fabulous for the liver and the gallbladder. So not only does the season coordinate with an organ, but it also populates what you’re supposed to do because it’s what does the earth give during that season? That’s what that organ needs.
And again, I didn’t invent any of this. This has all been known for centuries. I just translated it.
I took all of these other methodologies and said, they’re all saying the same thing. They’re just saying it in Chinese or Japanese or German or Hindu or whatever. Put it all into one common language that we can all speak.
And now we can take back control of our health. We can figure out what we’re supposed to do first.
[Alexx Stuart] (58:06 – 58:35)Oh my gosh. I love it. Okay.
Last question. How has working with this framework impacted you and your family’s health in the recent years as you’ve demystified it and put it into practice? Because I’d imagine you would now be like your, your family’s like go-to or if there are teenagers in the mix, possibly not might be rebelling against it.
But I’d love to see how it’s kind of playing out and some examples in your own life.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (58:36 – 58:53)Yeah. So for sure in my own life, but also patients’ lives, you know, so myself, like I said, I’m Harvest currently. And so I was running.
I have a great group of ladies that I like to run with. I was running at like, you’re probably Celsius. So I don’t know how to translate this 23 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s very cold.
[Alexx Stuart] (58:53 – 59:00)Oh, that is cold. Yeah. That would be very hard to get me out to run or walk or do anything, frankly.
Yeah.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (59:01 – 59:59)But, but not well done because my body is currently in a harvest season. And so that was actually stressing it more because at the end, you go through spring, summer, summer is the big time we’re producing. We’re using a lot of resources when we get to harvest, we’re kind of running out.
Like we’re harvesting, but we don’t have a lot left in the tank. So I will, I was running so slow. I was so annoyed.
I’m like, why am I like the slowest one in the group? I don’t understand this. I’m running the same as everybody else because my body simply is not made for running in the morning at 23 degrees Fahrenheit right now, that was exhausting more than the resources I currently have.
So I stepped back and said, guess what guys, I’m not going to run right now. What I’m going to be doing is I’m going to be doing wall Pilates at home. And I have a personal trainer that’s working with me to build muscle.
You know what? All of a sudden my body, the energy levels skyrocketed because I was draining them every single morning, thinking I was doing the right thing. Does that make sense?
[Alexx Stuart] (59:59 – 1:00:02)Oh, absolutely. I’ve done that with exercise as well. [Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (1:00:02 – 1:00:31)
It doesn’t mean that I can’t go back to running, but not in the current season that my body’s in. That’s the thing, not right now. And so that’s the key.
I was talking with another patient the other day, and she was really, she was so frustrated because I told her, I don’t want you lifting weights right now. You’re in a spring season. We’re actually just gentle, just growing.
I need you on the treadmill. I need you doing. And she said, but I’m losing muscle mass.
I feel terrible. And I said, do you feel terrible? Really?
And she goes, well, actually no. And I said, was what you were doing working? She said, well, no.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:00:32 – 1:00:44)It’s such a, it’s such a powerful question though. I think we need to check in so much more often. Are you happy with the results you are getting from what you are currently doing?
Yes or no?
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (1:00:44 – 1:01:37)Yeah, exactly. Right. Is it working just because some guru said that this is what you should be doing and this is what everybody should be doing.
And you should feel phenomenal because you’re doing it. You feel crap. You know, you feel like you’re a bad person because you don’t feel phenomenal.
You’re like, what am I doing wrong? You’re not doing it wrong. You’re doing it the wrong time.
It’s not the season for that. It might be that they have a fabulous program, but that may not be what your body needs right now. So check in and be okay with going, you know, I don’t feel right.
And really the whole premise of my book is about energy, that you have the ability to have unlimited energy. It’s inside of you. It’s inside of every single cell.
Your job is to ask, what do your cells need to provide that energy? Because we have the ability to do it. It’s just, we have to give ourselves what they need.
And it’s not about fasting or, you know, sacrifice or it’s about what literally, what cells need help right now. And let’s give it to them specifically.
[Alexx Stuart] (1:01:37 – 1:02:05)And then energy takes off. I love it. Oh, Michelle, you’re a legend.
Thank you so much for joining me. That was such a great hour of power. I really appreciate your work and taking us through the dental health piece and then how it grew in your own life as a doctor, just so incredibly inspiring.
So thank you for writing the book. We’ll definitely put the details in the show notes. I loved reading it and we shall see you soon.
[Dr Michelle Jorgensen] (1:02:06 – 1:02:08)Okay. Thank you so much for all you are doing. You’re amazing. [Alexx Stuart] (1:02:08 – 1:05:05)
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