Let’s talk about bacterial endocarditis. So bacterial endocarditis is an infection of endocardium affecting the inner lining of the heart and its valves, mainly the valves. Now is bacterial infective endocarditis that rare? Well, it’s hard to say because it isn’t seen and it is not diagnosed that often. Now here’s a more broader definition of bacterial endocarditis rheumatic fever. Rheumatic fever, nowadays you don’t hear about that much either, right? It’s an acute inflammatory complication of this strap bacteria, and it affects the joints, the brain and the heart, right, because it’s followed — it’s characterized by arthritis, chorea against central nervous system distress and Carditis, heart pain. So with residual heart disease as a possible sequel event.

So this is usually after dental drilling or some kind of trauma or like that the patient comes home and they get severe flu and then they go to the doctor and they are diagnosed with rheumatic fever. So what did Weston Price say that the two worst things were in life in regard to stress to our immune system? What were the two worst challenges in life? Divorce and death. You’re close. So Dr. Price said the two biggest challenges to our immune system in life are pregnancy, it’s a big deal, a woman has to really be taken care of, nourished, and flu for he lived through the 1918 flu. But this is what this rheumatic fever is. It’s characterized by like flulike symptoms which are sometimes diagnosed as rheumatic fever often missed.

Rheumatic disease just to review, this is any disease of streptococcal bacterial origin. Now again this used to be a lot more common and talked about in the 1950s, 1940s but then when antibiotics came in, as soon as you gave an antibiotic, yes that did reduce the symptoms. So it’s not talked about so much. But we know what the antibiotics do, they kill some bugs, other ones cause later problems. So as biological dentists and physicians and practitioners, we know about silent focal infections. That’s why I love this group because we’re very aware of these chronic silent focal infections that conventional dentists and doctors aren’t aware of at all and sadly, holistic practitioners and physicians aren’t very aware of at all.

So what are typical focal infections? The dental tonsils, sinus, genital, other foci, and what do these focal infections do? They are chronically like a machine generating pathogenic bacteria and they are going to migrate and metastasize typically to what’s called rheumatic disturbed fields in the body, rheumatic streptococcal related places that make a happy home for strep bacteria where strep bacteria like to live. And there are five main rheumatic disturbed fields. First of all, the heart, again the endocarditis to the valves, rheumatic fever includes all of these — three of these areas. Joints chronic rheumatoid arthritis, kidney’s acute chronic glomerular nephritis, the gut, appendicitis, stomach duodenal ulcers, and we already talked about the brain. In the old days they called it chorea, nowadays we call it Tourette’s. It’s really the same thing.

It is interesting Tourette’s was diagnosed or identified by a Frenchman Tourette in an 86-year-old woman in the 1880s, unusual? Because nowadays we see it in children and teens and usually after that except for 10% of the time the patient adapts and it’s not so obvious those kind of symptoms or they grow out of it as they say. PANDAS, Grandas and then this whole epidemic of ADD, ADHD, hyperactivity in kids, all manifestations of strep bacteria. So I want to mention Edward Rosenow. Who knows Edward Rosenow? Such an amazing man and if you do get my book, I hope you will read that history as well (inaudible) to my next book the price of root canals, the turn of the 20th century was just amazing. That was just the hallmark, that was the time of focal infection theory that was just exploding, and we had an incredible research that — doing root canals became such a thing, giving antibiotics in the ‘30s and ‘40s, which was huge backlash to that and then it all died. And we are the ones taking up the reins on that and telling people, yes, focal infections are real, we have to address them. You can’t diagnose what you don’t know about and treat.

So Rosenow was considered a research genius. Later Mayo Institute recruited him because he was an amazing biologist, amazing man and he found that streptococcal bacteria loved this partial tension of oxygen, they don’t like anaerobic areas without oxygen, they don’t like aerobic areas, they like this partial tension of oxygen. And also that streptococci along with that had a specific pathogenic affinity for certain tissues. Well, what are those certain tissues? They love the heart valves. Again that’s a partial oxygen environment, mitral valve first, aortic valve, second, very common for patients to come in with some kind of diagnosis of mitral valve disease, minor or moderate or significant, usually minor to moderate, it’s a very common finding in what it is strep bacteria metastasizing to that heart valve. And it can be mitral valve prolapse, stenosis or more serious regurgitation.

The strep bacteria also love the joints, they love the joint capsule, that synovial fluid, very warm, nice, happy little environment for them. That’s why we have so much arthritis, again partial tension of oxygen partly oxygenated, same thing with the kidney glomeruli, same thing with the frontal cortex in the brain, all these tissues are very good areas for the Streptococcus to live and to thrive. So Rosenow did this same research that Dr. Price did too and we all know this research that Dr. Price in Cleveland, Rosenow was at Rush medical College in Chicago. Dr. Price was in Cleveland, there was a lot going on in the Midwest. Midwest was really popping band with all these scientists studying focal infections. So Dr. Price put together a team of 60 leading scientists, what an amazing man and that included Dr. Milton Rosenau, not the same one of Harvard Charles Mayo or Rochester, we know what he ended up doing at Mayo clinic. Dr. Frank Billings of Chicago at Rush medical College who also — that’s where Rosenau worked and what he would find is, if he took an infected tooth and infected root canal tooth from a patient with heart disease and pulled that tooth, extracted it, cavitated it well I hope and then he put it under the skin of a rabbit that would develop the same disease, whether it was ovarian disease, pelvic inflammatory disease, heart disease, skin disease, anything. So it was so well correlated. It was amazing. It is almost like that strep bacteria had grown to that particular affinity and then it would want to go to that same place in that animal, right? I was in a joint before, I’m going to go to a joint again, wanted to find a home again, right?

So I know a lot of you know about Price’s research on this and a lot of other doctors did research and found the same issue. Now later on detractors which we are feeling because this focal infection theory isn’t popular nowadays. Detractors tried to do the same thing other scientists did and they didn’t do it properly. They didn’t put the strep bacteria, they didn’t keep it in a partial oxygen environment. They said [it isn’t true]. So you have to do the research correctly.

So let’s talk about focal infection parlance, I got to see tons of old friends here. Maybe some of you are new and don’t realize that our biological demo group, we’re very into vocal infections, the diagnosis and treatment of those. So the two main ones of course the teeth and the tonsils, that’s the cause, okay, and the disturbed fields is the area, the rheumatic field area like the heart valves or the hip joint or the kidneys or the brain. So if you have an impacted wisdom teeth, often those are silent with intermittent little pain and swelling. You are not even thinking about your heart. Or if you have a root canal infected or if you have an abscessed tooth or if you have incompletely extracted wisdom tooth. In the focal infection site there all of these areas continually generate bacteria and go to susceptible areas in that patient and of course the patient — there’s also the patient’s miasm, right, or condition or heredity, but really those of us that know about epigenetic nowadays that it’s really not the genetics itself, genetics is really only 5 to 10% of the time the problem. Epigenetic says you can completely change your life based on your environment. You don’t have to be prone to heart disease just because your family was or your ancestors were.

So I love this quote from Dr. Price, modern medicine is mistaking effect for cause. Modern medicine is mistaking effect for cause. So as we said this may be a new slide – no, do you have this in your slide? Okay, sorry, I added a few new slides. So I just love this quote, treating a patient’s joint or heart disease without examining the strong possibility of a focal infection in the teeth or tonsils, when doctors are doing that they are treating the effect, the symptom, rather than the true cause of the problem, the focus. Now the problem is patients come to us and talk about their hip joint or their heart pang. They don’t come into you guys that know about dental focal infections. They’re just talking about teeth.

So as biological physicians and practitioners we – the teeth information as biological dentists, you all need to list it as you do the whole systemic history, the whole history on what’s going on in the body. But this is so important, meaning that as biological dentists and physicians we’ve got to treat upstream, not just downstream. We’ve got to treat the cause and dental and tonsil focal infections are epidemic, every single one of you in this room probably has one or the other.

Now [Spransky] was a renowned Russian physiologist and he talked about this trigger factor and he was saying that chronic relatively silent dental focal infections can flare up from the second insult and I just added as dental cleaning, drilling, extractions. So again what we don’t want to do when we have this bacteremia in the bloodstream is that we don’t want to trigger a dormant heart disturbed field and be part of the cause of a heart attack in three weeks or triggers more bacteria to load onto the patient who already has existing dental and tonsil focal infections, already has a lot of bacteria on board. So what can we do? So silent heart disease, little bit more about the mitral valve, the mitral valve is the main valve that gets injured. This is very common mitral valve disease. It’s the most commonly disturbed and infiltrated and infected valve than the heart, the second is the aortic, third tricuspid.

Now again heart disease even though it’s a disturbed field and we’re saying disturbed fields are usually symptomatic. This disturbed field is usually rather asymptomatic patients. Sometimes they have palpitations, shortness of breath, apnea, angina, heart pain and fatigue but often this deposition of strep bacteria causes very little symptoms. Mitral valve disease, rheumatic heart disease without a history of rheumatic fever, well as we said rheumatic fever flu gets missed all the time depending how strong the symptoms, often undiagnosed, or you take antibiotics prophylactically and you just never know you have it, which some people will say, well that’s good but there are better choices.