Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here. Thanks for listening to another episode of Hey, Human podcast. This is episode 453, and my guest is doctor Blaine Leeds. Blaine's been practicing general and cosmetic dentistry for over twenty eight years. He's on a mission to improve the quality and quantity of sleep for children, teens, and adults. Oral sleep apnea impedes restorative sleep, which experts are now determining to be the root cause of so many mental, emotional, and physical issues.
Teeth are super important, y'all. He's also the coauthor of What Happens When Your Child Doesn't Sleep, exploring the link between children's general health and sleep obstructed breathing related to underdeveloped jaws. I find that really interesting. I was born with lots of extra teeth. I had to get teeth pulled as a kid and had braces for a couple years. And then, of course, teeth have memory. So as an adult, I ended up getting Invisalign
and and taking care of that business. But my dentist as an adult was really interesting, doctor Cummings in Nashville, Tennessee, actually. Shout out, doctor Cummings. And he said that in my generation, that kids oftentimes had lots of teeth removed, braces and things. Now I have a a genetic disorder that is coupled with having extra teeth. So I may be an anomaly in that. But I know a lot of people have had wisdom teeth pulled and various things to prepare for braces.
And he had said to me that it actually now they know better because it changes the shape of the jaw by doing that. And and that's a no no because it's very important for your jaw to have a particular shape. And, anyway, I just thought that was all interesting. And then, doctor Leeds echoes that sentiment, obviously, and that's what we talk about. So, anyway, long story longer, I had braces. My brother had braces. I come from a family of braces people, and
I really loved Invisalign. But that's a whole other story, and it's not an ad for Invisalign. Just wanted to throw it out there. Anyway, check out Hey Human podcast for links and to learn more about my guests in the show. Check out susanruth.com to learn more about me and my other artistic endeavors, including, some upcoming film festivals. I'm very excited. Indie Film Fest is coming up April 24 through the twenty seventh in Indiana,
and you can get tickets for that. And, again, that's Indie Film Fest, and I've got some more coming up that I will announce. Let's see. In May is the Der Fantastique in Kassel, Germany. So if you live in Germany, go see the film there. And I feel like there's a couple others. I know there's a couple I can't announce yet, but it's exciting. Good things are coming. Yeah. So definitely check that out on susanruth.com. And, yeah, social media. Sorry. I lost my train.
I'm just a rambling gal tonight. You can find Susan Ruthism on social media and find my music on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or wherever you do those sorts of things. Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you for listening. Be well. Hang in there. It's a tough time. Be kind. Be love. And here we go. Doctor Blaine Leeds, welcome to Hey Human. Thank you so much for having me, Susan. Glad to be here. It's nice to see
you. I love this piece of furniture behind you. It's beautiful. I love it too. And, it it, was one of the pieces that was in an estate sale in this house that we purchased, back in Arkansas. Some dear friends had the house for sale, and, and they had she had a very eclectic sort of a Pacific Rim, you know, old taste. And so, yeah, this piece was in her foyer, and we moved it into this nice nice office here in the in our house. We we were glad to get to keep
it and kinda keep the heritage there. My wife's mother was a she was an antique jewelry person and and taught my wife a lot about antiques. My mother-in-law passed away in November of twenty three. That was something they really bonded through is I mean, but my wife can look at a chair and say, that's firewood, and that chair right beside it has, you know, those claw feet and, you know, that that's from this era, and that's worth $950.
You know? I mean, she can, you know, she's really good at that, but her she and her mom shared that. And my mother-in-law was much more into the antique jewelry and stones and that kind of stuff. Had a little she sold diamonds out of her kitchen. Had a little kitchen wholesale jewelry group, and she would go to Tulsa, Oklahoma and buy buy stones from this this jewelry out there. He's a really, really good guy. Took care of her and really sold her some nice nice pieces. So, people did that
kind of thing. She was a homemaker, you know, and it's her kind of her side hustle, you know, back in the day before she I love that. Well, let's get into you. Let's talk about where you came up and what inspired the interests of young you into becoming what you do now. Sure. Happy to. I, I I thought, in ninth grade, I wanted to be a pediatrician, take care of kids,
be a medical doctor. And, my path kinda shifted a little bit in in college and and encountered, an admissions director from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis who he was like, yeah, you should think about dental school. And, never really had crossed my mind at that point. And, one thing led to another, and and that class had one spot remaining in it. And I thought, you know what? I'll go ahead and apply.
And, you know, I was able to get in that that that class and, you know, change change my career trajectory forever. And, you know, I tell people all the time as much as as much difficulty as as dental school presented for everybody as we were going through it back then, you know, I would go back again if somebody somebody made me. You know? I mean, I I just left the office today. I had two lovely kiddo patients that I saw toward the end of the day today at the office.
And, but yeah. So so I've been doing dentistry now for twenty eight years. Went to a little small land grant college in Arkansas and then, on to University of Tennessee. Arkansas is about to open a dental school. They're gonna take their first class in 2025. And, you know, insert your toothbrush joke here. You know, Arkansas didn't, didn't have, I mean, not enough teeth to have a dental school, you know, some people would say back in
the day. But we we love to let people think that we're, you know, barefoot and toothless here in Arkansas, but it's a a pretty progressive little Southern Southern state with a couple of you know, a president and another presidential candidate. So it's a it's a great place to be. Great great, business center in Northwest Arkansas. The best art museum between LA and New York, you know, in my opinion. Alice Walton's creation, Crystal Bridges, you know, which is here in Northwest Arkansas.
Worth the trip. Alice Walton of Walmart? That's right. Yeah. Oh, okay. So Helen and Sam's daughter and, one of their kids. And, she's in her seventies now, but she took four years and traveled the world and spent $400,000,000 of her own money putting pieces of art in a beautiful, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright, Faye Jones inspired architectural, building in, in Bentonville, about two miles from the Walmart headquarters. It's a lovely campus that just continues to
promote art. I mean, they had Annie Leibovitz there earlier this year. She did an exhibit. She stayed for three weeks. She had elementary school kids come and talk to her, college kids. So they're just promoting the arts and doing a a lovely job of it. And they created a wonderful outdoor venue called the Momentary where artists like Wilco and Jason Esbel and the four hundred unit are gonna play there this year. And it's just a really good,
good place, place to be. And and, but yeah, so I practiced in Arkansas for the first twenty two years of my career. And then a little bit before that timeframe in 2014, we started to have FaceTime on a phone.
And so I knew that healthcare and dentistry was going to change forever because Susan and Blaine, if we're down in Battery Park in New York City, we don't want to go to the Upper East Side as an endodontist and spend half a day going up there to find out, Oh gosh, we just need some antibiotic and we're going to come back six weeks later and have a root canal done. And so I knew that we were
gonna be communicating like we're talking now. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall there, and I just didn't know how to really ask for funding and didn't know anything about venture capital or angel investors or anything like that. If I'd asked for $30,000,000, I'd probably wouldn't be talking to you right now. I'd be I'd have my own empire out there, but I didn't know what I
was doing. So I I asked for about half a million to set up a pilot program in Nashville and Phoenix as the first two cities to do a a directory basically that the centerpiece was gonna be like yellow pages for doctors, but eventually you could have telehealth exams like we're talking now and do as much as we could
do from a telehealth standpoint. So, you you know, companies like Invisalign and SmileDirectClub were looking into that in 2014, '20 '15, and they were trying to figure out a way to start treating patients, for orthodontics, you know, short term orthodontic cases. And I was one of the doctors that they contacted after they got up enrolling, and I was kind of there for the whole, you know, ride with Smile Direct Club, you know, from February of twenty seventeen, you know,
to fall of twenty nineteen. They're ringing the bell to NASDAQ. You know, the company's worth 8,610,000,000.00. They're growing into Ireland, Australia, Canada. Anyway, didn't work out. Ended up closing their doors in December. But through, you know, the telehealth world with SmileDirect, I learned a lot about how to treat patients with telehealth, how to develop software that can help do
that. And I've kinda lended my expertise to some other companies that are doing some cool stuff with with sleep and airway treatment and helping, kids grow their underdeveloped jaws a lot better. And so, that's how you and I ended up talking today. Yeah. I wanna get into all of that. I am, I think it's so interesting, the idea of receiving medical care over video.
Yeah. I can imagine a lot of pros and cons just in general because, a, for people that are nervous, especially about dentists, there are a lot of there's a lot of fear around dentists, and I would imagine that would help calm people down. Sure. Well, you know, if we know as recently as five years ago, there was a survey done that showed that more than one in five, it was like twenty one percent of Americans don't go to the dentist at all because of fear.
And how about a horrible indictment on our profession? Here we are in twenty twenty twenty twenty and beyond, and people are still afraid to go to the dentist. And so, you know, that's one of the takeaways from the from our visit today is if if somebody's afraid to go to the dentist in 2024, you're going to the wrong spot. I mean and now can you get in at the other spot? I don't know. It could be challenging. Right? But, I mean, it
ask around. Talk to your friends. Do some research on the Internet. You know, read the Google reviews. I've got some bad ones. There's people who've had some bad experiences with some of the stuff we were doing. So, I mean, it's it's out there, but you shouldn't have if you're having pain when you go to the dentist or or there's a procedure that's scary, you know, there's a better way to do
it. I can assure you. And, I mean, we, you know, we were talking to patients this week about, I mean, we have IV nurse anesthetists that can come into our office now. Patient can just have a little IV drip and go to sleep and and have a lot of dentistry done and and wake up with a new smile, you know, completely comfortable and never, have to think about any of the anxiety affiliated with it that we used to have in the past. And so,
but it is a deterrent, you know? And so if somebody knows that they're just gonna talk to Susan like this, you can't be poked, prodded, you know, fileted, whatever, you know, through through the Internet. You know? So, and and we did see a lot of that, like, with analyzing these telehealth patients and dentistry for, you know, Invisalign, SmileDirectClub, Candid, had some direct to consumer stuff going for a while. They're now back in in offices only.
But many of these patients, you can't believe the dental challenges that they had, but they and they knew they needed care, but they felt safe. It was a safe environment for them to come and and share photographs with somebody and so we could look at their, you know, their situation. And many of them, you know, we tried to help direct them to, you know, an office that was nearby to them, you know, because they had many, many more concerns than just, you know, doing some
cosmetic stuff and moving some teeth around. There is a lot of shame around teeth. It's really interesting. I mean, there are cultures that outright hide their teeth when they laugh or talk, you know, for sure. But in America and probably The UK, the the Western communities, there seems to be a lot of pressure put on having a perfect
smile. Actors, you know, once they get a little bit more successful, they go and veneer their face so that they look like they've got neon lights coming out of their mouth. I personally like a little character and teeth. Sure. I know my mom, for example, she's really has issues. She's ashamed of her teeth because coffee stains and, you know, over time her teeth started to get crowded and all of this. And she's talking at her age, she's up there, she's talking about getting Invisalign.
Yeah. And I said, hey, whatever makes you feel better about yourself, go for it. I did Invisalign after doing braces, you know, because your teeth remember where they were. And my dentist at the time, he said, well, I hate to tell you this, but when you grow up, and they pulled a bunch of teeth and all that stuff. So when you grew up, they didn't know as much as they know now. And they actually the the braces messed messed up your jaw. I used to grind and all that stuff.
And he said, let me give you Invisalign, you know, try it out, see what happens, and it changed my life. Yeah. I don't I mean, I'm not sponsored by them or anything, but I highly recommend that. Well, just orthodontics in general. I mean, I'm sorry that your, you know, experience with bands and brackets and all that wasn't as good as the Invisalign experience, but, you know, I've probably sent a thousand adults over age 25 to the orthodontist. And most people think, okay, well, I'm too
old for that. Right. And I've had a 63 year old patient, half full man in bracketed orthodontics, and she's in her late eighties now, but but she's whitened her teeth. Her teeth are easier for her to clean. And as we get older, our dexterity is not as good. Right? So we can't floss and brush and get to those tight crowded areas anymore. So, yeah, orthodontics is just one of those things. It's almost like a bigger version of having
a, you know, a manicure or something. It's when you get yourself taken care of and you let somebody take care of you and it goes well, I mean, it just, it feels really good and it changes people's approach and they eat better, they function better, they smile better, they're happier with their appearance. You know what I think? When people are meeting other people or they're communicating, people tend to either notice someone's eyes or someone's smile, you know, the very first thing.
And, you know, and I have this, to me, the smile comes from in here, right? It's down in your heart. It's, I've seen patients who had missed all four of their front incisors missing, but they had a great smile because they were so such a happy person. And, you know, may and so, you know, your smile is it doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. You know? And so, but we can we can certainly, improve that. And there's a lot of nice ways to do it that that aren't painful or scary.
Let's talk about sleep and teeth, the connection. Sure. Happy to. Well, it turns out we're about four generations into our jaws are are shrinking. And our children, you know, are given a pacifier when they're still in the incubator, and they start, you sucking on the pacifier and it starts to move their cheeks together. When our cheeks are filled with muscles and the muscles push the teeth together, when our baby molars start to go together,
the palate arches. I mean, the palate arches, the palate is the floor of the airway space, right? So when the palate is arched like this, the palate's narrow and tight. The tongue is not able to fit up where it belongs behind the baby teeth. And we end up with a patient who can't breathe through their nose. And this is a real serious issue. Human beings are obligate nasal breathers. We should be breathing effortlessly, quietly, and visibly through our nose all the time.
And it's okay to exhale through your mouth, but when you breathe through your nose, why does it matter if I breathe through my nose? Well, several reasons. Number one, your nose, you know, sits out off off of your face. So the air has time as it passes through your nose to to warm to temperature
to the rest of your body. So you're not breathing in stark cold air like you do right into your mouth, right into the fissures of your tonsils that maybe that's why we have inflamed tonsils is because somebody's breathing through their mouth, not because they're allergic to a lot of stuff. So that's all tied in too. But if we're breathing through our nose, the hair in our nose filters the crud
out of the air. So we've got air that's warmed to temperature, it's filtered to where it's more pure, and now it hits a little sensor back in our parastinuses that causes our body to secrete nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is our it's the only time it happens in our body physiology. And nitric oxide is the body's own vasodilator, which means that our vasculature opens up, oxygenated blood is sped to the muscles and
the heart and the brain. And so when we get Children breathing through their nose with big wide smiles where their tongue fits up in their palate, these kids thrive, they grow, they grow taller, they they they breathe better, they sleep better, they're ready for school every day, they bounce out of the rack in the morning feeling good and feeling energized because really what we're talking about is restorative sleep. And when we can't breathe through our nose properly, we can't
get restorative sleep. And it's a national epidemic that nobody really talks about. It's why we're talking today. I'm trying to get it to as many ears as we can. I've read a lot recently about mouth tape for adults to facilitate that very thing, to get them to breathe through their nose instead of because that's the snoring and the apnea and all that when your head tilts back and your mouth opens.
Yeah. So what are some simple things that we can do tonight if you're listening to the podcast and you're, you know, driving somewhere and listen to it? I like side sleeping. If you're sleeping on your back, you know, we're just working against gravity, right, because your mandible's gonna fall open sometimes. That's where the mouth taping comes in. We we prescribe mouth tape on a weekly basis.
We'll have somebody we recommend it to. If you're gonna use mouth tape, there's some some good there's several different varieties that work well. I I recommend taping vertically so that you've got a little bit of, you know, air passage around the side if you need it. But, basically, you know, we want the, you know, lips together, teeth apart, breathing through the nose is what we're trying to achieve. And
mouth tape actually works. And in fact, I think there was a one one of the it was one of the US Open run up tennis tournaments, I think, earlier in the summer. There was, a a ladies player that got a lot of publicity because she mouth taped during a match. She Woah. Wanted she was having trouble breathing through her her mouth, and so she she covered her mouth so she could breathe through her nose during the match. And so people why'd she do it? You know? And
and, and nobody understood it. But, yeah, it can help you. And it can help you perform better because you're getting more oxygenated blood to your muscles, and it can even help with things like cramps, you know, in the middle of a match, you know, if you're breathing better through your nose. What are your thoughts about pacifiers then? Are they doing us a disservice? Well, I mean, I there are many orthodontic companies now that are trying to make better, pacifiers.
But when a child gets to age two, and they've got all their baby teeth in, I like to switch the Wibbe for something called a tooth pillow, which is broader, flatter. It keeps the musculature off of the developing dental alveolus, the bone around the teeth, and it helps widen, a patient's jaw so that their tongue, which is the body's own natural expander, can fit up in the palate like it's supposed to. There's four or five companies out there that make these kinds of appliances.
Healthy Start is one of the companies in Chicago. Myobrace, which is an Australian company, and they make one of the finest devices for young children who have an underbite. If we start kiddos that have an underbite with a an I three n like Nancy appliance from Myobrace, we can actually keep these kids from having underbite. It will gradually jump that crossbite by where if they're compliant to wear the appliance. And then that can save kids a 40,000 jaw dollar jaw surgery, you know, when
they're in high school or college. So it's really important. So and then we have tooth pillow, which is is online right now. You can go be my patient. You know, if you're a mom out there, you can go and and send in some photographs and answer a little survey question, and you can have a tooth pillow shipped out to you
this week. Tooth pillow appliances are made by a company called Vivos, which has, just got FDA approval on an adult, expansion appliance for sleep that's a removable appliance back in, I think, January. But they make these wonderful little appliances that are to me, they have just the right amount of flex to them and also, toughness so that kids can't they have a hard time tearing them up. Really intuitive. You can hand a two year old this device, and they'll just put it
in their mouth. I don't even have to insert it for them. They they and sometimes they'll put it upside down. You know? But but most of the time, they just look at it and go, okay. I mean, because that's what every two or three year old does anyway. I mean, you hand them something, they put it in their mouth, typically.
So it's pretty intuitive. About ninety percent of the kids learn to wear it really well, but it helps them sleep properly and breathe through their nose and keeps the muscles of their cheeks, even if and it also prevents them really from getting, you know, their thumb or index finger or something in their mouth, you know, to to suck on it and create that palatal arching
that we don't want. I read that teeth clenching and teeth grinding is a genetic thing that can be triggered by an event, but that if if you're either gonna react that way or not based on your genetics. Is that is there a truth to that? There there is some truth to that, because, you know, we clench when we're in pain or having anxiety and but almost always in children or adults, clenching the teeth together.
In other words, burying those bumps of enamel into the the, you know, peaks into the valleys on the opposing arch. You know, our teeth are only designed to touch one another about two minutes total out of a 24 day, and that's when we swallow. That's the only time that our teeth should be together. And so and and that which we know is just not true. We got all these stressed out drivers out there. We got people,
you you know, clenching their jaw muscles. We watch the major league hitters when they're in the batter's box, and, boy, they're clenching those teeth together. We wanna have, yeah, the teeth not ideally not touching because when we're chewing, you know, there's food between our teeth and when we're talking, our teeth are not together. So, but, yeah, that's that's a key a key factor for sure. I bet you everybody listening to this right now just went, okay. Where are my teeth?
Yeah. Personal touch. My natural state, my teeth are apart, and I feel like my tongue is up into the roof of my mouth. Well, that that's golden. That's that's how we want it. That's not how it was before as an adult. Again, I was I was clenching like crazy, and now I don't do that anymore because I did I got my every everything is aligned
the way it's supposed to do. I don't think we really most of us don't really think about how important that alignment is with everything else going on in our bodies. Yeah. And And I wasn't taught about it in dental school. I mean, I was taught, okay, people have crooked teeth, refer them to the orthodontist, and that's what we need to know about
that general dentist out there. But just about, I mean, I've got two or three colleagues that, you know, I really trust and and work with often, and they they always talk about how any kind of grinding or clenching of the teeth is is a sign of a patient that's trying to breathe. They're they're trying to breathe
through their nose. And and if a patient is, you know, if they have what we call a deep bite where their upper teeth are are way down over the when they're closed together covering their incisors, you know, your overbite should only be about one one to two millimeters. Okay? And so if a patient is is deep, then they're at at some point to open their airway, their brain is gonna send a signal. Okay.
Let's let's move those lower teeth downward and forward against the backs of the upper teeth so that we can get the airway open and get and we can breathe through the nose, but we still have the teeth touching. And so what many patients will do is they'll do what we call a protrusive clenching, where they'll slide their mandible forward until their lower teeth come apart, you know, on the backs of their upper, front teeth.
And there's a very common wear pattern that we see, especially like if folks have like porcelain crowns or veneers on their upper teeth. Porcelain's harder than tooth enamel, so we'll look at their lower teeth and they'll have one to two millimeters worn off of their lower incisors because they're wearing on that porcelain all the time on the upper arch. So it's it's really common. Do you actually have parents coming in and saying, my kid's not sleeping
and we need you? Or is that an after effect where you say, hey. I noticed their teeth are doing this certain thing. Are your kids sleeping? And then reverse engineer.
It's definitely the latter. They they don't it it's you know, again, that's why we're on this crusade to try to tell as many people as we can through whether it's through a podcast or a radio show or a or write a book or, you know, get on a morning, you know, local news somewhere and get the story out there because people just don't they don't understand that if their child
is snoring, that that's a bad thing. You know, somebody one of the friends characters, I can't remember which one, they had a snoring there was a snoring episode. You know, we've got, you know, the seven dwarves snoring, you know, and and we make fun of it. And, really, when somebody's snoring and and snoring loudly, it's it means they're struggling to breathe. So it's definitely the latter of those two
things that you said. Usually, it's me trying to point out to the family, or, like, I'll have parents say, oh, no. My kid my kid sleeps really well because I I can't wake him up in the morning. Well, that's no. That's a problem because that means they may have been awake all night tossing and turning. Now they finally got into a deep sleep right before it's time to get up and go to school. The other thing that's very common is moms will say to
me, oh, look. Little Timmy's got perfectly straight baby teeth. Well, that means crowding is on the way because the baby teeth are so tiny that we need space in between all the baby teeth. So perfect primary or baby tooth dentition has, space about the width of a dime, a US 10¢ coin in between all the teeth. So when these parents come in and they go, oh, look. We're so glad his the, you know, little Tommy's teeth are straight.
It's like, oh, you know, we need to he he needs expansion, you know, right now because we've got these large anatomically large adult teeth that are gonna be coming in, and they wanna have plenty of room for them. We wanna get the foundation set up, you know, so that that those teeth can come in. It was my understanding when I was younger that your baby teeth fell out and then
your adult teeth grow in. And then I saw a photograph of a skull of a child, and it was they had their baby teeth, and then up above it were all these other teeth. And then I thought, am I being pranked? Is that a real person? Is that
real? Yeah. It absolutely is real. And and I could show you thousands of X rays, you know, that just show those and it's so strange too because the baby teeth roots, they're really spread apart like on the molars because the bulb of that, what we call the crown of the tooth, is developing, you know, inside you know, in the confines of that baby tooth root, and it's really fascinating. But when you look at an X-ray, you know, it's just like, wow. Where are
we gonna put all these teeth? You know, because there's a full set of baby teeth. And and then there are patients that even have extra adult teeth. My brother, he had they called him shark teeth. He had two sets of adult teeth. They'd pull all those adult teeth out the second set. Yeah. Yeah. And he had braces almost seven years. Poor thing. Oh, wow. Supposedly, Freddie Mercury was similar. He had lots of extra teeth. His teeth were huge. I have giant teeth also.
I had a bunch pulled out. Yeah. And it it happens. I mean, I've seen I haven't seen anybody with that many extras, but I've seen many, many patients with one or two extra teeth that were, like wisdom teeth. I've seen patients with five wisdom teeth. And Oh, wow. And I had a a friend of mine whose whose son had two perfect lateral incisors on this side. He had had one on the other side too, but he had two I mean, I was like, which one do you want removed? Because we need we need to get rid
of one of these. You know? So My friend, Jill, she was born without wisdom teeth. They never they weren't there. Yeah. I'd say about twenty percent of the population is born without them. I guess that's evolution. Right? Because we don't need them. They keep getting pulled out maybe.
Yeah. I think it is, because, like, if there's a a a popular book in our circles that's written by an anthropologist named Robert Korosini, and he went back and and studied skulls, like, in in Africa, going several hundred years back. And the early skulls had 32 teeth, big, broad arches. And part of that is that turns out that breastfeeding is important because when a child breastfeeds, it's actually more of a biting motion or chewing motion than it is a suckling motion.
So it helps their jaws, their gum tissue get tougher and their jaws open up more, and get wider. And so we don't see as much sleep apnea or sleep disordered breathing in Sub Saharan Africa because because of food insecurity and other things. They breastfeed the children there almost up until age five. And so, see a lot better growth and development there than we do in The US. And you probably remember too, when we were kids, there might have been one other kid on our
block that got braces. Well, now it's, you know, everybody, you know? So it's like there's so much, so much crowding now compared. Plus we're seeing, like, jaws so small that a 14 year old child will have really well developed wisdom teeth that almost traps their their 12 year molars from erupting because their jaws are so small and the teeth are developing earlier, and then we end up with, you know, some pretty severe crowding. You wrote a book, What Happens When Your
Child Doesn't Sleep. We did. Let's get into that a little bit. I wish it was out or out yet. I mean, it was supposed to be out November 30. This is publishing for you, right, in 2024. Here we are way still still waiting on the final edits to be done. But, yeah, we did write a book. Brian Ferry and myself, Brian tragically lost a loved one to, sleep apnea. His wife, about nine years ago, passed away with two sleep apnea
machines in the plastic underneath her bed. Never could get a tolerator CPAP machine, which is the story of most US adults. Only four in ten people can tolerate wearing a CPAP machine. And really all it does is treat the symptom. You know, it helps you get air through your nose so your mouth can close and you can breathe and you can rest. And it does work, but it's treating the symptom, you know, and the greater problem or the root cause of the problem is narrow jaws.
And so, you know, we're developing new ways to treat that all the time. But, yeah, we wanted to write the book so that, you know, we can address some of these issues that kids have because they're and it's not really about lack of oxygen to the brain. Your brain can survive a surprisingly long time with diminished oxygen. It it's really about the sleep and being able to breathe through their nose well enough to get restorative sleep. So they feel good. They're able to concentrate.
And so we see things improving, like bedwetting goes away when we can breathe through our nose properly. If I give 10 kids that are bedwetting, ten seven year olds that are bedwetting, if I put one of these appliances in their mouth, seven of them will stop bedwetting tonight. I mean, it's really dramatic, the connection between proper nasal breathing and, you know, systemic, pathology pathophysiology.
Talking about that sleep apnea, this tragic way to pass away, and I know it's it's not like it's every day, but it's also not that uncommon. I read about that as well, that apnea claims otherwise seemingly healthy people. And it's I think people have this connotation, oh, if you're morbidly over obese, then you don't have sleep apnea. But you can be incredibly fit and have sleep apnea.
A %. And it's it's such an interesting idea to think, okay, maybe that's why I didn't get a good night's sleep last night is because my mouth was open during the night instead of closed. But you know, on this might gross out some people, but some mornings when I wake up and my lips are actually shut, sealed, shut from saliva or whatever. And on those mornings, when I wake up like that, when my lips won't open until I physically do that, I have the best sleep.
Yeah. Well and we can all tell. You know, when we get really good restorative sleep, it feels great. You wake up with a new lease on life that morning. Now you're thinking, okay. This is awesome. And imagine if you were six years old and you hadn't had a good night's sleep in forever. I mean and we have little kids every day that we're waking up
in the morning. We're trying to get them to wake up and feed them and get them to school and help them thrive in an environment where, you know, they're falling asleep all day or they're unable to focus because they haven't had adequate rest. Or teenagers who all they wanna do is sleep. That. Yeah. Or they're although they wanna sleep during the daytime because they're almost nocturnal. They're looking at a screen late at night or they're, you know, they're playing a video game
or something. So, yeah, it's it's just so important. And and so that's, you know, that's why we wrote the book is to try to help people be aware of what some of these signs and symptoms are and what are some of the things that we can help, you know, by by getting some expansion in the jaws and creating bigger smiles so we get better breathing through the nose and better sleep. And how does apnea kill people? Well, many times, you know what's the number one killer in The United States?
Now fentanyl, but then maybe heart attack? Heart attack is still number one. So heart and but when do most heart attacks happen? At night? At night. And so what's really happening is is someone's having respiratory arrest and then their heart fails. And so that's what's so significant about my my buddy Brian's wife is that it's very rare for a coroner to say that someone died of complications of sleep apnea because usually it's it's a heart issue or it's it's a, oxygen saturation
problem. You know, it's it's respiratory arrest, you know, which is you know, that's very closely tied to to, sleep apnea. But what happens is, it's actually how we measure it in a sleep study. When we see somebody who says, you know, it's one of the questions that we ask our patients when they come in for checkups in the dental office. You know, do you how how do you sleep? And they go, well, why do you care? You know? So it's the first thing they say, you know?
And it's like, well, because, you know, we can help sometimes if we know some and and I'll I'll ask patients, when's the last time you woke up woke up and felt really rested? And they'll say, I can't remember. And so we start to look and I and when they have all these signs and symptoms of of apnea. First of all, you know, many of them have insurance, so we wanna try the CPAP pathway first. You know? Many of them want to do that because they have insurance that'll
pay for it. So we start there, and hopefully they're able to tolerate it. And if they're not, then we look into, you know, their you're you know, and that's another misnomer that's out there. You know, medical insurance, once a patient has tried a CPAP machine, will pay for a dental appliance. If you say, I don't like this thing. It makes me feel claustrophobic. I can't tolerate it. It doesn't work. Then your doctor can sign a letter saying I'd like for them to have an oral
appliance made. And that's part of the reason that there's so such a lack of knowledge about this is because we have the doctors who aren't trained anything about you know, much at all about the oral complications of it. And we have dentists who don't know really much about sleep testing or sleep studies in a hospital. And so you got these two you know, it's like going to the podiatrist and asking them about a root canal. And they, you know, they they won't know anything about it.
It's the same principle. You know, that's a big part of the information exchange that we're trying to trying to work through and and get everybody together on the same page. Are you doing outreach to communities that do have a lack of insurance to try and get them help as well, or is that the next step? Well, we're we're trying to get information out to to anyone that can benefit from it. You know? And and a lot of times,
it's it's not through the medical community. It's through chiropractors and massage therapists and PTA chair people, you know, at the school who've seen these, you know, so many kids getting referred for stimulant treatment, you know, and medications that you know? Because in in 2024, I would want my seven or eight year old child, I would wanna try everything before, you know, we put them on some sort
of big pharma stimulant. You know? And not that there aren't kids who can definitely benefit from that, because I've seen those kids too that have they've had a benefit from it, and they've been able to use it for a while. And then their doctors were wise enough to wean them off of it as they got older, and they're doing fine now. But, you know, it's it's pretty rare to see that those drugs have a long term positive impact. I think again, I don't have children, so
I can't speak to this. But I think that for adults, if we all there's so many devices out there now that track your sleep and your oxygenation levels and how and your deep sleep and your REM sleep and all this stuff.
And as somebody that has one of those devices, I am shocked at what I didn't know about when I was sleeping, what I assumed just because I closed my eyes at midnight and woke up at eight, that I somehow got a good night's sleep even though I would be not functioning great the next day to see the difference and say, oh my god. An an actual good night's sleep where I'm getting deep sleep and REM sleep and all of that. It's night and day. No pun intended. It's
wild how different you feel. So I imagine for a little kid who's growing and the body's already using up so much energy to do so many other things, how much that would affect them. Oh, yeah. Well and and, of course, they even, depending on their age, need more sleep, you know, than an adult does. So, yeah, it's a huge factor for sure. Yeah. So interesting. Tell people how they might find you or reach out to you and and learn more about this. Sure. I'm licensed in 12
states. So many of the folks that are listening can be a patient of mine if they wanna be. If you're interested in tooth pillow for a child aged two to 12, 13, 14, you can go to toothpillow.com. I'm licensed in California and Arkansas and Tennessee and New York and New Jersey and Michigan and Florida. So, you know, you can, connect with me that way through the toothpillow.com website, or you can come directly to my website, which is doctorblaineleads.com. And, you know, and you can find our
phone number there, call my staff. We can, you know, we can treat you with telehealth and and start directly from our office. Or you can go to askdoctorleads.com, which is where you can find out more information about the book and preorder the book. Great. Thank you so much, doctor Leeds. I really appreciate your time. Well, good to talk with you, Susan. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe we'll get, some sleep out there for people and at the very least, help
their jaws align in the right way. I'm telling you what changed my life. I will attest to the fact that me thinking I had straight teeth and realizing that it was a more of a jaw problem and and just how the Invisalign changed everything. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks. Take care. Bye. Bye bye now. Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks. Bye.