THROWBACK THURSDAY: Off Grid Dental Care with The Herbal Medic

Transcription by CastingWords a little more fully, and to help you be the best possible person, even in the worst possible circumstances, should those befall us. I am a former Green Beret or Special Forces medic in the U.S. Army. I have over 25 years' experience both living and teaching survival and survival concepts to civilian and military. I also have over 20 years' experience with plant medicine as an herbalist. Today I would like to talk about dental health, and by that I mean health of the teeth. the gums, the mucosa of the mouth especially, and even to some extent the upper respiratory. And I would like to talk about how we can work with the health of that part of our body in a post-disaster or remote situation or any situation where we don't have higher dental care available to us. Now, the good news is that we can absolutely do this. We can work with herbs. We can work with non-conventional and orthodox methods to be able to affect our our tooth health, our mouth and dental health. There's no question of that. I've seen this time and time again clinically as an herbalist. I've seen this over and over again that we can. The good news is really on this also is that you probably will take from this some different techniques, some different herbs and ideas that you can use even at home just to better your general dental health. And by that, I mean just maintenance, I mean preventative dental health in order to keep from getting cavities, in order to even be able to regrow enamel. And I'm here to tell you that, yes, you can regrow enamel. I have seen it time and time again. I've seen it even on my own teeth. It can be done. This used to be something that if you said this 10 or 15 years ago, you'd almost be burned at the stake as a heretic by the, you know, American Dental Association. I mean, time and time again, it's not possible. But you're starting to see even more conventional dentistry is starting to come around and admit the fact that, yes, we can regrow enamel. It's absolutely possible. And so we'll talk about how we can do that through some different herbal supplements and nutrients as well. So there are a lot of things that we can do. There's a lot of options available to us as preppers, as people that are interested in taking charge of our own health, whether we're preppers or not, just taking charge of our own health, and in this case our dental health from everything from gingivitis and gum infection all the way to canker sores, mouth problems with the mucosa of. The mouth, to cavities. And so we're going to talk about all of those. Before we get to there, let's go ahead and take a short break to hear a few messages from our sponsors, and then when we get back, we'll get right into it. All right, I'm back, and let's start right off by talking about what we can do on a preventative level to make sure that our tooth care is better. Now, I'm going to make an assumption here that we're talking about, again, we're talking about dental health in a remote environment or in an environment where we're just not necessarily, you know, in a post-disaster environment where we're not necessarily as comfortable in terms of what. Our resources are as we would be as we are day-to-day. In other words. We can't take three showers a day. I'm not saying that people here do, but the point is you can. Most of us live in a first-world environment where we can take as many showers as we want a day. Unless you're homeless or unless you live in a really poverty-level type living, in a first-world environment, you can keep as clean as you want to, and that includes, of course, dental hygiene. So you can brush your teeth 20 times a day if you wanted to. Let's assume that you can't do that, that that's not available to us, And, you know, let's assume that we do have some water, of course. We have to have water. We can't survive without water, as we all know. And so we have to have some water. And let's assume that we have, you know, some real basic kind of minimal availability of things that we can use to help our dental health. But for the most part, we don't have toothpaste. You know, unlimited amount of toothpaste. And we may not even have, you know, floss, although I highly recommend that's one of the things you should have plenty of. As I said before, any kind of cordage is good on any level, and floss is one of those types of cordages. So it's good for a number of things besides just being floss. And let's assume that we have some herbs because herbs are something, again, that we can always have. They're an unlimited resource if we know how to plan for things correctly and we grow them or we know how to wildcraft them or we plan for things correctly and we have stored them. All of those things are available to us. And then also some of the different natural things that are around us. And one of those would just actually be sticks. And I'll get to exactly what I'm talking about here in a minute. But let's assume that we're kind of limited in our resources in that regard. And let's talk about what we want to do. What are our priorities in terms of dental health? And here we're first talking about from a preventative level. So to start off with, what are some of the different steps that we take to just keep our mouth clean in a post-disaster environment. And again, remember, anything I'm telling you here in terms of post-disaster or remote certainly can translate into daily hygiene and daily tooth cleaning on your own in day-to-day basis. And the reason I say that is, you know, I found even for myself, I used to teach, I still do, teach toothpicks and tooth. Powders, and that's part of our herbal basic. Usually if we have time, we make toothpicks in that herbal basic, you know, the herbal medic level one, the basic course, which is about a 70-hour course. And I found. Years ago, starting to do this, I got to where I was using toothpicks and using tooth powders, and I really don't feel right unless I'm using toothpicks at least once or twice a week myself. So it's one of those things, I've gotten into a habit of using it, and it's. Sort of like flossing. I mean, once you start to floss. If you floss every day or even if you floss every other day or if you floss after every meal, whatever it might be, once you stop doing it as much, your teeth don't feel as clean. So these are habits that you can get into that you'll start to do and you'll start to realize that you really are missing it if you're not doing it. And one of them is just to rinse your mouth out after you eat. By that I just mean regular water is fine. We're just basically doing the same concept that we would do when we use water in any situation. We use water to clean out a wound. We use water to clean off an abrasion. We use water to clean off dirt in general, and we do the same thing with our teeth. So after we eat, what we can do is we can rinse our mouth out, and we can swish water around with some force to try to be able to clean out between the teeth, to clean out between the cheeks and the gums, and get whatever the food is that we've eaten out of our mouth, cleaned out of our mouth. So that's the first thing is just a regular old mouth rinse. It doesn't have to be anything special. It can just be regular water. Now, on that note, when we're talking about rinses, One of the things, and this is really not an herbal thing, this is more of an over-the-counter deal, but one of the things that you might consider, if you. Had to, you know, if I said you. Have 15 or 20 minutes to go into this grocery store and get all the supplies you can, and I gave you $ 50 to do it with, and there was a post-disaster, and people are grabbing stuff off the shelves and stuff is rapidly disappearing, one of the items that I would suggest thinking about would be something like Listerine. And the reason is Listerine is not only good for a mouthwash, it's certainly a very good antimicrobial wash in general. So you need something that is weak and dilute enough that you can use it without affecting the skin too badly. Unlike pouring, say, alcohol or even hydrogen peroxide, if it's a high enough percentage on a wound, you're killing a lot of tissue. You're damaging tissue versus Listerine. You're not necessarily. Granted, it doesn't taste great. I know that. It doesn't taste minty fresh like Scope might. But it's a good antimicrobial if you need to have a mouthwash for something like that as well. Or maybe a cut in the mouth, that type of a thing. So that's, again, not really an herbal deal. But we're going to get into some herbs, of course. But it's just something to note. Not a bad thing to have around. So aside from mouthwashes and just preventative, that way, what else do we do to keep our teeth clean? Well, we floss. We have to get gunk out from between the teeth. What happens if you don't clean your teeth... is we get a plaque that forms, and plaque is basically a biofilm. And the biofilm usually starts off with gram-positive bacteria, and then eventually, after 24 or even 48 hours, it starts to colonize with all kinds of other bacteria, especially some types of gram-negative bacteria that have very, very acidic excretions. And these highly acidic excretions will basically eat through the enamel of the teeth, and that's one of the ways that not cleaning your teeth can form cavities. Once you damage that enamel, that enamel covering over the teeth, it's very difficult to repair that damage. You have to repair, you have to regrow the enamel. But if you don't do that and you don't do it fast enough, then you're going to start losing, you're going to start getting tooth form, you're going to get bacteria eating, you're going to get eating away in those areas, and eventually it will rot away the tooth bit by bit. So what we're trying to do there is. to get rid of that biofilm. Now, in the first 24 and even maybe even up to 48 hours, that biofilm is not a bad thing, actually, because it actually is a physical barrier between whatever, you know, small pieces of particular particles of food you might be eating and your teeth. So it's really not necessarily a bad thing, but we can't have plaque on our teeth long long term we can't go not cleaning our teeth for days or weeks at a time and not expect to have problems because of that plaque and so the flossing And getting food out from under there, getting any kind of particulate out from between the teeth is a really good thing. Plus, the nice thing that flossing does is it massages the gums. One thing that I think, if you don't take anything else from this, that I feel is important in terms of tooth and dental care from a holistic standpoint is Gum health equals tooth health. If you can keep your gums stimulated, and by health I mean good circulation to the area. So healthy tissue in your gums means good circulation to the area. It means that a lot of the microbes, the infections, the minor, very small infections that happen because in our gums we have an entire mucosa there that responds to invaders, that responds to bacteria that are not supposed to be there. And all of that is part of our immune system. All of that is part of the health of our gums. And so if you have good circulation to that area, you have healthy gums, then you're going to also probably have healthy teeth. So one of the things that flossing does for us actually is it gives us sort of that that sort of a small massage as such to that gum tissue between the teeth and doing so will help the circulation to your gums. You'll find that if you haven't flossed in a long time or you don't ever floss when you start, your gums might bleed easily. Your gums might be fairly sensitive to that, to any kind of friction on them because of the fact that they have not been, because they're not healthy. They're not healthy tissue. So one of the things that I like to do is I like to floss my teeth and floss them fairly carefully, not just a piece of floss down and up, but actually massage the gum tissue while flossing between the teeth. And not deeply, but you can actually feel that rubbing back and forth. And then when you're done flossing thoroughly like that, to take your finger and put something like tea tree oil, essential oil on it is a really good thing to do. Or you could use some of the herbs we'll talk about here in a little bit. Or even clove oil once in a while, not every day, but once in a while, clove oil, eugenol. You could take some of that and you can rub that along the gum. Massage the gum at the outside and on the outside of the tooth and even on. The inside of the tooth. Massage those gums. And what you're doing by doing that is you're increasing the circulation to the area, you're helping clean the gums, and you're just increasing the tone. You're strengthening and making more healthy the tone of that gum tissue. And by doing that, you're also helping your tooth health, your dental health. So it's good. So one of the items, another item that you can add to the list of things for dental health should be, in my opinion, tea tree oil. And that's something you can get in a number of different places, of course. You can get that online. You can buy that in stores. It's available in probably almost any grocery store, certainly even in drugstores, and not necessarily the highest quality stuff, but it's still good. Generally speaking, any tea trail you get is going to be okay for this particular usage. Tea tree oil is, of course, a very good antifungal as well, and it's useful. It's not necessarily, depending on the quality of it now, because, again, tea tree oil has a huge spectrum of quality depending on where it comes from, how it was distilled, and how much it's been basically watered down. If you have good quality tea tree oil, very good quality tea tree oil, it's very good as an antifungal for skin fungus infections like ringworms and fungal infections of the foot, tinea, basically. And so there's other uses for it, I guess is what I'm saying here, other than just for the teeth. So it's really a good item as an overall item to have in an herbal cabinet, you know, medicine cabinet at home and even in. A first aid kit. So that's the first thing is our gum health and stimulating that gum health. And flossing is very important to that. The next thing that I want to talk about is the concept of toothpicks. Toothsticks basically are the concept of a toothpick, but taken to a little bit further extreme. And what a toothpick is is something, if you can imagine, about maybe double or even triple the diameter of a toothpick, even though it might have somewhat of a sharp end on it. It's a bigger stick than a toothpick is. And we use the stick to be able to clean out and clean along the top edges of the molars And as we clean, we also can chew on the toothpick somewhat, and we can flatten it out and turn it actually into more of a brush. And so it becomes not just a stick but also a brush. So this is a really good way to substitute for a toothbrush. In fact, my honest opinion is a good toothpick, a good quality wood for a toothpick, will make a better toothbrush than a toothbrush does. And the reason is you can get into areas that you can't really get to with a toothbrush in terms of the hard kind of digging the pick action. And the second reason is once you chew it and you have a brush, it's actually a very firm brush that fits very well usually inside of the, in between the teeth. And it's also very healthy, same thing, to brush along the border, that edge, that border between the gum and the teeth. Cleaning that border is very important. That's something you can do by tracing it with a toothpick. Or with the edge of a toothpick, especially if you've chewed the toothpick a little bit and have softened it down, to brush along that edge and that border between the gum and the teeth is very useful. It helps people also with receding gum lines. It's a way to be able to keep, again, keep that area stimulated in circulation and keep it healthy, that gum tissue healthy, which means we also have healthy teeth. So a toothpick can be any kind of wood that is non-toxic, of course, right? And that means any of your favorite, you know, whatever your favorite flavor might be. Now, what a lot of people use is licorice root, and that's the licorice that could be American licorice, that can be the glycyrrhiza globber, which is the Chinese, originally the Chinese licorice. It doesn't matter, but it's fairly sweet, even though it's not sugar. You don't have to worry about, you know, the sugar effect or anything like that on the tooth. It's, in fact, it's fairly antimicrobial. But it's about the right hardness. So the problem with toothpicks, the main problem, aside from making sure you have a non-toxic type of tree, you wouldn't go out and pick a piece of poison oak vine or oleander or something like that, obviously. So it's got to be a non-toxic tree, of course, or anything that's. Got twigs on it. The biggest problem with it is really the correct hardness. So for instance. Rosemary, wild rosemary is a good one. Rosemary is a great herb for the teeth and for the mouth. It's a circulatory stimulant to a mild degree. It's very good that way. But the stick itself, if you cut off a sprig of rosemary, wild rosemary, it's a bush, basically, and you can get sprigs of it that are maybe all the way up to the diameter of a pencil, from a toothpick up to a pencil diameter, somewhere in there. What you'll find is it's very, very hard. It's a hardwood. And so it's difficult to use it as a toothpick very effectively. It works very well. For the boring action that I talked about for cleaning out teeth. But you chew on it a little bit. You'd have to chew on it for a long, long time to be able to get it to flatten out into a brush. So you want something that's kind of halfway in between that. You don't want it so soft that it starts falling apart when you chew on it. But on the other hand, you don't want it so hard that you have to chew on it for an hour in order to be able to get to soften it at all. So that's kind of what we're going for here. So things like fruit trees, you know, apple, pear, peach, all those kinds of trees generally are fairly good. Some of them are harder than others. Around here we have the juniper. Juniper twigs work great. I don't use fresh. I use dried. I use the dead ones for that. Now, as I mentioned earlier, licorice root. Astragalus root also to some degree is very good and is very healthy for you, but the problem with astragalus root is that it's a little bit on the soft side. You can buy astragalus root also, and you can buy it whole, and it's very easy to cut and everything because it is soft. So whatever that might be, whatever that is, twig. Those those twigs might be this is a good way for you to also to learn the plants around you in your own yard because you can harvest them probably from your own yard and this is how you can you can learn the different tastes goes back to the organoleptic connection to herbs that we talk about at any rate the point is you get it you get sticks and you can and you cut off what we normally do in classes we cut about 20 of them or so and put them into a jar along with our tooth powder and i'm going to talk about the tooth powder in just a second here as well Now, what I've talked about so far has been the use of toothpicks really more just for cleaning your teeth. But if you're going to use toothpicks, you can also use them to actually clean out a cavity. And if you're going to do that, then you're going to have to see what it is you're working on. In other words, just like you would clean out a wound if it had infection, you wouldn't do it in the dark or with your eyes closed or a blindfold on. You need to be able to see what it is you're looking at, see what it is you're working with. So in that case, it helps to be able to have a mirror, It helps to be able to have a dental mirror and be able to look in the mirror with a dental mirror and be able to work on that area of the cavity that needs to be cleaned out. So what you'll generally find with a cavity is that the center of it, as it starts to form especially, the center of it will be darker. And then the outer side of it will be lighter. It could even be black in the center if you're getting rot. It could be that bad. And then browner and lighter and lighter as it goes towards the outer radius of the cavity itself. And so what you need to be able to do is to get the right size stick to work with that and be able to visualize what you're doing and clean that area out, clean that dead matter out of there. And a stick is good for that, especially a hardwood. I mentioned earlier the rosemary. Rosemary actually works really well for this kind of thing because it is harder. But it's not as hard as metal, of course, obviously. There is a statistic that I think is an interesting one that I read not too long ago that stated that over 60% of all cavities are started forming within, or I'm sorry, within, there's an interesting statistic I've read in the past that said that every, that 60% of all cavities form, start to form within six months of a tooth cleaning. And this is older statistics. This is back in the old school dentistry when dentists all used metal tools. And the theory was behind this with that statistic. And I don't know if it's accurate. I don't know if the theory is true or not. I don't know, but you can certainly imagine so, that metal tools chip enamel. And so a lot of your more holistic dentists now don't use metal tools. They use hard plastic tools because of that particular statistic. So what you'll find is with wood, you're in the same boat. You can use wood to work away at that cavity area and clean that area out, that dead area out, and any of the tissue that's in there, it's hard tissue, but you can clean that area out without, of course, worrying about destroying more enamel. So this is one of the things you can do. Now, that is, again, where we get an advantage with a toothpick. It's a lot harder. You couldn't do that with a toothpick. You certainly can't do it with a toothbrush. This is where we get the advantage of something like that. Very good for that kind of deep, hard type of cleaning that you have to do to be able to help yourself get through a cavity. So we'll get around to what we would do after that as well. But first, let's just talk a little bit more. Let's talk a little bit about some of the different herbs that we would use and why we would use them. So herbs in general for the mouth. My favorite herbs are, and I'll just give you a list here, are elecampane and redroot. This is theanathus. Theanathus species is also called New Jersey tea. There are several species of it. Elecampane is Inulohelenium, is the binomial, the Latin binomial for that. Another one that I use a lot is myrrh, Comifera myrrha or Comifera momul, the genus and species of that. Prickly ash I use a lot, that's the xanthoviolum species. And goldenseal, a small amount of goldenseal can be used, although goldenseal is endangered, number one. And number two, it's very expensive, so I really don't even use that anymore at all. But it's good for mucosa in general, if you did have some. So those are some of the top ones that I like to use specifically for the mouth. And I'll talk about why. And then the final one, the last one that I'd like to give you on this, is horsetail. Horsetail is a quesedum species. Let me step through these, and actually let me start with the last one that I just gave you, which is horsetail, because I was kind of going there anyway when I talked about being able to work out the dead matter and the cavity matter in a tooth. What you want to do after you've done that with your toothpick, or as you're doing it, is you want to actually try to grow the enamel back over that area. Can you do that? Yes, you can. And the way that you would do that is actually using the herb horsetail that I just talked about. Horsetail. Equisetum is the genus. There are a few species. One of them is arvense, which is the acceptable species worldwide as an herb. Another one of the horsetails is Equisetum haemale, H-Y-E-M-A-L-E, not haemale as some people pronounce it, just haemale. The rule for Latin pronunciation for botanical names is really, there's really only one rule, and that is that you pronounce every syllable that you can. So there's no silent E's or anything like that. Nobody knows if it's E or I or, you know, when you see a vowel because Latin is a dead language. However, one of the rules is you pronounce every syllable. Now, I'm telling you all of this about the Haimale or Haimale, as you may hear it pronounced, because there is one particular person out there in particular who claims that Arvente is not the species you should use. It's dangerous. And that high molly, now I'm doing it, high molly is the only one that you should use, and that's false. That's patently false. There's nothing wrong with the Arvenze. There are absolutely cautions to use with any of the horsetails. No question about that. And I'll talk about those in a second. But there's no difference between the Arvenze and the high molly for its use, for its particular use in terms of contraindications. So use the Arvenze. That's the one that's cheaper. And interestingly enough, one of the same people that does this also sells the high molly, which you can't really find online very easily except through this particular person, and they sell it for much, much more expensive than they should and much more expensive than it would cost you to buy the arvense. So my point to all of this is, and you may not understand anything I've just talked about, but if you see somebody telling you, oh, you can't use that horse tail, you've got to use this horse tail, tell them they're full of it and you can buy the quesitum arvense. It's absolutely fine. And that's if you go to any herb place online. that's a reputable herb distributor, herb sales, such as Mountain Rose or Star West Botanicals or Pacific Botanicals, any place that sells horsetail, that's what they're going to be selling is the Equiseta marventi. And that's the one you can use that does regrow enamel very well. And the contraindication, the caution that I would give you with this on any species of the horsetail is don't take it more than about three weeks at a time. And that's all you need to do is take it about three weeks and then give your body a rest for about three weeks. It can build up toxicity over time. The second caution I would give you with horsetail is to be aware of where it is that it's being harvested. So make sure that you have reputable people that are selling it to you, or if you grow it yourself, that's great. That's even better. Grow it in a clean environment with clean water. Don't harvest it, in other words, from, say, 500 feet or even a mile downstream from mine tailings, if you're doing that, or from agricultural runoff from the side of it. It grows in very, very wet areas. It can literally grow almost underwater. It likes clean, running water. Or I grow mine in sort of a bog, a pond. I put a pond liner down and then I put peat and clay together. And so that kind of holds the moisture in really well. And then it's in an area where we get a lot of gray water runoff. And by gray water, I mean it's just an area where I'm cleaning out the rabbit bowls and things like that every day. So there's always water there. It's right near the main water tap outside the house that I use a lot. So it's right there. So it makes good use of that water that would otherwise just drip onto the ground. So all of that water, when I'm cleaning out rabble bowls, when I'm rinsing something off, every day goes into that and keeps that nice and very, very wet, boggy wet. And the horsetail just loves that. It grows crazy in there. And that's fine. But what I'm saying is the horsetail has a propensity to pick up all kinds of things from water and runoff. So be careful. You don't want to harvest it again from areas where you might get really toxic runoff of chemicals because those will be present in the horsetail if you do. Normally, when you want to harvest in the wild, the best place to harvest it is up near, say, a mountain spring, where you have 9,000 feet or something like that, and there's definitely no runoff from anything above it. So that's the ideal. Now, horsetail is something that you can certainly buy, and it's something that you take, again, in a three-week protocol, approximately. And you want to take... If you were to dry it and to grind it up into a powder, you'd take approximately a couple tablespoons full of that a day, so two to three tablespoons a day depending on your weight. So if you're up over 200 pounds, I would say it would be three tablespoons of that a day, one tablespoon three times a day. For instance. That would be fine. This is something that you could also do the equivalent in tincture, and it would be fine as a tincture. And to get the tincture equivalent, it would be the number of grams that you had depending on what you're tincture strength was. In other words, 1 to 3, 1 to 4, 1 to 5. Whatever you did that, you measured grams versus milliliters, and that gives you a ratio, and that would tell you how many milliliters of that tincture you would take to equal two or three tablespoons of the horsetail. So I can't tell you what that would be exactly, because it would depend on the tincture that you would make. Now, I don't get into that, I don't think, in any podcast here, but if you're interested in learning that kind of stuff, then by all means, come and take my online course at My online course gets into that and a lot more, and it's pretty darn cheap compared to most everybody else out there. So this is how we can take our horsetail, and what the horsetail, again, does is it stimulates the growth of enamel. It helps stimulate nail growth. It helps stimulate hair growth. It helps stimulate the growth of enamel. It has natural organic silica in it, amongst other things, and it's a very, very useful plant that way. We also use horsetail for urinary tract infections. It's decent for that as a urinary tract toner, as a little bit of an antimicrobial for the urinary tract, and it works well with other herbs and formulas for urinary tract infections. But what we're using it here for specifically is to regrow the enamel of our teeth. So this is how we can work specifically with cavities. Now the next step I'd like to talk about in terms of tooth care is the concept of tooth powder. And we can take this tooth powder concept and actually use it to complement the idea of the tooth stick. So, tooth powder, all we're talking about doing here is just taking some herbs that are dried or drying some herbs and then powdering them up into a powder and then using them. And we put a few things together with that to do that. So, let me give you the formula or the recipe for some different tooth powders. First off, Elecamb. I mentioned that before. That is our enohylenium, which is a great herb for stimulating the circulation of the gums. It's also an antimicrobial, a very strong antimicrobial. It's actually also used a lot as an expectorant and an upper respiratory herb, but we're using it here specifically for the mouth. It has historical usage back quite some time ago also for that same reason. It's also considered an antiparasitic, but really, again, what we're using it here for is it's antimicrobial and stimulating properties to the gum tissue of the mouth. Another one that I like to use that goes well with this is, as I mentioned earlier, horsetail. And horsetail Also, not only are we taking it internally, as I mentioned before, but here in the tooth powder, we're not actually taking the tooth powder internally. We're using it as more of a powder on the outside of the mouth, and we're spitting it out, and I'll explain the whole process here in a second. But horsetail here has very good use as sort of a mild plant-based scouring agent. So, I mean, it's good for scouring using kind of like a scrub brush against the teeth. And it's not strong. It's not like taking some sort of strong mineral or sand or doing something like that that's going to actually damage the enamel. This is plant material, but it is a good scouring agent. In fact, it's been termed one of the common names for horsetail is scouring rush, and people have used it in the past. camping. In fact, when I was a kid and we grew up, we used to do this. We'd grab horsetail and you'd fold it up about four or five times and turn it into a little sort of a scrub brush or like a Brillo pad and use it to clean out pots and pans with if you didn't have anything else to use. It's not great, but it worked pretty well. So we're using that as well. Another one that's. Very good is myrrh. And that is actually the gum from the gum of the myrrh tree. And that's a Middle Eastern tree, a Middle Eastern plant. but very, very good for antimicrobial effect on the mouth as well. And then another one that works really well both on gum tissue and also antimicrobial and is a little bit of a lymph stimulant is red root. So any three of those herbs or all four of them, if you wanted to, would work very well in this kind of a formula. And what we do is we powder them and mix them evenly like a one-to-one ratio of all of them together. and we put them in a jar. And let's say we take a jar, and I usually use plastic for this, but you can use a glass jar. And let's say that you take maybe an 8-ounce mason jar, for instance, or. The little pint, I think those are. 8-ounce, maybe they're 4-ounce, little pint jars that stand up. They're taller than they are wide, so they're more of a vertical type of jar. And this is because you're going to put toothpicks in them. You want them to be long enough or large enough that you can put toothpicks in them. Again, I use plastic generally for this, but you could use anything you wanted to. And you put the tooth powder into this jar, and you fill it up about 25%, about a quarter of the way up the jar, with your dried powder. And this is a mix of all these powders that I just talked about, mixed together, one-to-one, dry-mixed, so they're all mixed up together. And then you add in some essential oil. Essential oil of peppermint or essential oil of spearmint would be my recommendations. You can use other things. You could use tea tree oil. You could use cinnamon, essential oil of cinnamon, which is very, very strong. You wouldn't use very much of it. But there are many things you could use, but essential oil of peppermint, essential oil of cinnamon, or even the two mixed together are very good. You could put a couple drops of clove in there as well if you wanted to. But again, that's very, very strong. So you mix just enough of that essential oil in just to barely moisten the tooth powder. You don't mix enough in to make it goopy or wet or anything like that. You want it just barely moist. And what will happen is, as you moisten it, it will expand, and you'll end up going from about a 25% powder in that jar up to almost a 50% powder, depending on how much you put in there. You moisten it, it expands, it swells, and that's your tooth powder now. And it's a lot of tooth powder. That's enough to last you about a year probably for one person. Now you take your toothpicks that I just talked about that are cut to maybe four inches long, and you stick them into the jar so that the bottom half of them is soaking, so to say, in the tooth powder, even though it's not wet. It's just moist, but that'll basically hold the... They'll start to absorb some of the essential oil as well from the tooth powder. What that does as well is that preserves the tooth powder... I've never had, I've had tooth powder sit around for two or three years and never have had it go bad. I've never had it grow moldy, never had any problems like that. And it also keeps the stick from getting moldy. And because you're not drying, unless you've already dried out the stick, and you may have, you could use fresh, I mentioned fruit trees, you could use fresh fruit tree sticks if you wanted to. But drying them is just as effective, and in fact, in many cases, is more effective. So either way, your tooth stick, your powder, and then your oil preserves, as well as, of course, giving you a very, very refreshing kind of tooth powder. So what you do then is you take, when you're ready to brush your teeth as such, you take some of that powder on the end of the stick, just as much as the stick will hold, which isn't very much, and you just rub that and use that in your mouth like you would use toothpaste. You could do the same thing with your finger if you wanted. You could even use the tooth powder on a toothbrush if you wanted to. But the stick, if you're doing... What I do is I just grab my jar of tooth powder, and I've got sticks already in there. If I run out, I just go and collect some more. Not a big deal. And that's my toothbrush. When I teach out in the field, especially for a week or two weeks. At a time, whatever... That's all I use. And I like to floss, too. I pretty much feel like I'm not getting my teeth cleaned if I can't floss at least once every other day. I prefer to floss at least once a day, depending on what you're eating. If you're eating a lot of meat, then flossing, I think, is very important to do. Between the flossing and the toothpick, that would be fine for me. I would never have to brush my teeth, ever, period. I'm telling you that the toothpick is more effective than the toothbrush in that regard. If you have the right kind of wood and you know how to do it and you've got good tooth powder, the toothpick is more effective. So that is our tooth powder. Now, again, you know, because it's got that essential oil in it and those herbs are pretty strong, you know, you just basically like with toothpaste you spit, you know. So it's sort of like having a real small amount of almost like a chewing tobacco, you know, in a way. I mean, people see you chewing on a stick and then see you spitting, you know, what looks like chewing tobacco. That might be what they think. I don't know. But we have, it's kind of a, once you start using them, they're kind of addictive, honestly, because they make your mouth feel really good, they're very refreshing, and they make your teeth feel clean. And plus they stimulate the circulation of your gums. All of that goes to a very healthy dental environment. There. So what we find usually is that students walk around with toothpicks all the time and it's almost like you can't, you know, every morning you see people walking around with toothpicks around the camp and stuff because people use them so much because once you start using them it's hard not to. So that is the concept of toothpicks, tooth powders, and some of the things that we can use. Now, if we start getting into other things with the mouth, like For instance, if we have problems with pain, then one of the oils that we use for that a lot is, as I mentioned earlier, is clove oil. It's called eugenol, and eugenol is the constituent in there, is the oil in there that gives it this very pain-relieving, antiseptic and pain-relieving type properties. And you can rub that on the gum for the pain itself, and it'll help deaden the nerves a little bit. Another herb that does that very well is prickly ash, which is also called toothache tree. I mentioned that earlier. That's xanthoxylum. We use the berry. We use the bark. We use the root bark of that tree. And it can be very effective at numbing the gums and numbing mucous membrane as well, the nerves of the mucous membrane. Area in the mouth. Plus, xanthovalium or prickly ash is very good. It's an antimicrobial. It is a lymph stimulant. It's very healthy, especially for viral infections. I use it a lot for cold and flu-type stuff. It's a heating herb, so it helps stimulate peripheral circulation. We use it in our sprain and strain-type salves to help as a counter-irritant, to help open up pores, and, you know, help open up, not pores, but open up dilated blood vessels in order to be able to absorb xanthovalium. more of the sprain and strain salve through the skin. So that's the same thing in the gums in terms of increasing the circulation. Again, it goes back to that whole circulation increase and circulation of the solution to pollution to solution, whether from the inside of the body, meaning your blood flow, or the outside of the body, meaning water or some sort of fluid that you're washing across the area. So these are really helpful. It's a helpful herb and a helpful way to get around or to help your body heal from things like gingivitis as well. Because that's basically inflammation an infection of that area, we want to increase the circulation to there. We want to clean the area out as much as we possibly can. Very useful for that. One final thing I wanted to talk about to kind of finish off the podcast, and that's the concept of canker sores. A lot of people that have problems with canker sores, I get asked this all the time, so I figured I should probably talk about it. What do we use for canker sores? Well, canker sores are to be differentiated between a herpes or a fever blister. They're not the same thing at all. And a fever blister, there's certainly a use, there's certainly, we could talk about herbal, working with that herbally, and we can work with that very, very effectively using herbs. But here we're talking about a canker sore, and it's usually on the inside of the mouth, some sort of a sore on the gum, or on the tongue even sometimes, and it's an ulcerated, it's an ulcerated section of the mucosa. What I find works really well for that, actually, is sort of a patch, a process, and a patching process with two particular herbs, or two particular substances works really well. One of those substances is an herb and it's called licorice root that I mentioned earlier. So licorice root works very well for that. The other one, and so first of all, licorice root is a very good mucosal vulnerary. In other words, it heals and helps proliferate mucosal around any kind of a wound or an injury or a sore like that. The other that is really, really good for canker sores in particular is propolis, which is in the nerve. I acknowledge that, of course, but it is very much herb-like. It's a plant material. It's originally a plant material, and propolis is the gummy sort of waxy resin material that is created by bees, and it comes from plant material. And what bees do is they use propolis to seal off parts of their hive when they need to, especially against things like viral attacks, because they get viruses, they get sick too. If they need to seal off the queen, they will do that automatically with propolis. So you'll find propolis if you're a beekeeper. That's how you get propolis. So you can buy it online, and it has to be tinctured in very high percentage alcohol. It's not water soluble at all, so you have to tincture it in like 95% alcohol. So if you are. Using propolis, then be aware of the fact it's probably going to sting a little bit on the canker stir because. Of the alcohol. But what I do is I powder up the licorice root into a nice fine powder, and you can do that with a coffee grinder. It's fine. Licorice is a very soft root. And then you can mix that powder with propolis and make a patch on that. a patch, and put that patch on the canker sore, and it will stick to the gum like you won't believe. The propolis will stick on the gum, stick on the tissue of the gum, the mucosa, for a long time. It's very difficult to get. Once you put it on there, it's going to stay on until it wears off and metabolizes into the mucosa, which is what you want it to do. Now, beware of the fact that the propolis can also stick on your teeth if you're not careful, and it turns into kind of a waxy resin on the teeth that takes a little while to wear off, or you could scrub it off, I guess, with grain alcohol. Just be careful. Don't overdose on alcohol in doing so or get drunk. But you could certainly get rid of it that way. But if you're talking about the gum and putting a patch on the gum, just be aware of the fact that if it rubs on the teeth, you're going to probably get that as well. So this is one way that we find canker sores will heal up very, very quickly. Highly recommend that method. Okay, so that's, I think that's about all I've got time for. Hopefully I've given you some ideas to some of the different herbal ways that we can deal with teeth. I didn't talk about some other stuff like oil pulling. That's starting to become real popular with coconut oil and that kind of thing. You know, baking soda. There's a lot of other things we can use for the teeth. But I just wanted to cover some of the high points that I think in terms of a post-disaster situation to be able to work with teeth. One last thing I will mention that I meant to bring up earlier. This is another herbal thing. for poulticing the gum itself, especially for infections like really bad gingivitis or even periodontitis where we have bad infection around that area, one herb that works really well for that is our prickly pear or cactus. And we can take prickly pear and we can slice it, fillet it down the center, and we end up with that gummy part of the inside. It's what we want to put against whatever it is in the tooth. Now, obviously, we need to peel and get rid of all the thorns on the outside, so we can scrape those off, and we can also peel them just to make absolutely sure. Peel them with a knife, scrape them off, but we want it to have some sort of a, we want it to have a little bit of structure to it, because we don't want it to fall apart. We don't want just the gummy stuff all by itself floating around in our gums. What we want to do is we want to have a want to have sort of a poultice patch all by itself that sticks there, almost like a Band-Aid, that you can put on that part of the gum. And what it'll do is it'll help draw out infection. So I use prickly pear for that. Very, very good for things like that. So that's something else to bear in mind. To do this, it helps to have a prickly pear cactus growing in your garden. And prickly pear grows pretty much everywhere. In the United States. Of course, it loves sunny, hot areas, but it grows other places as well. So that's mainly it. I'm going to wrap that up with now. And if you have any questions, feel free to email me, sam.humanpath.com. And until next time, this has been Sam Kaufman. Thanks for listening. Bye. Today's broadcast has come to you through the courtesy of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. See our hosts, show schedules, archive programs, and more at PrepperBroadcasting.com. Thanks for listening.