The Difference IV Nutrition Can Make in Your Dental Care

Centuries before people knew about vitamins, they still understood some of the relationships between diet and disease, such as the scurvy that used to be common among sailors, lacking ready access to fresh fruit and vegetables for long stretches of time. In the mid-1700s, it was found that citrus fruits – high in vitamin C – could prevent the bloody gums and poor wound healing that mark the disease.

Today, we know of dozens of nutrients that are absolutely necessary for human life, including 13 vitamins and 16 essential minerals. We also know that taking more than the minimum requirement of some nutrients can have therapeutic effects – not just preventing diseases of deficiency such as rickets (low vitamin D) and beriberi (low vitamin B1) but supporting the body’s innate healing abilities.

Nutritional therapies are a key part of the kind of dentistry we do here at the Holistic Dental Center in Millburn, including IV drip therapy as a safe and effective support for a range of treatments.

Why IV Therapy? Why Not Just Oral Supplements?

Oral supplements are great, and we often recommend them to our patients as part of their overall mouth/body health journey. When we do, it’s at a maintenance dosage. A therapeutic dosage would mean swallowing far more pills than most would be willing to tolerate.

Delivering nutrients intravenously sidesteps that problem. But there’s a more important reason to favor drip therapies, as well.

Oral supplements have to travel a long path through your digestive system before the nutrients make it into the bloodstream to be delivered to your body’s cells. A fair amount of their power is lost along the way, particularly when a person’s health is already compromised.

IV nutrients bypass the digestive system so they can go straight to your cells, where your metabolism operates. This also means we can deliver nutrients at much higher dosages than you would be able to tolerate when taking them orally. This is especially the case with one of the most important nutrients we deliver through IV: vitamin C.

IV Vitamin C when Removing Old “Silver” Mercury Amalgam Fillings

Vitamin C is a strong antioxidant that boosts immune function and helps protect against toxic metals such as the mercury that makes up about 50% of each and every “silver” amalgam filling.

Because of this, IV vitamin C is a crucial part of any sensible amalgam removal protocol, administered during the procedure. Additional treatments may be recommended following treatment in addition to any other detox therapies that may be advised, whether by us or your integrative physician or other holistic health professionals involved in your care.

Improving Oral Surgery Outcomes with Nutritional Drip Therapy

For nearly 100 years now, doctors have been aware of vitamin C’s potential to support wound healing after injury or surgical procedures. This is because of the crucial role it plays in generating new collagen. Some evidence suggests that it may also help reduce pain.

So our surgical protocols involve IV nutrition, as well – not just vitamin C but other nutrients that support the healing process, such as vitamins B12, D, and E. Typically, an initial infusion is given the day before surgery and a second during the procedure itself, as well as on each of the next two days.

Additionally, we can deliver antibiotics by IV to prevent infection without compromising gut health, as broad spectrum oral antibiotics do. Gut health, after all, is critical to oral health.

Used in conjunction with other biocompatible supports such as platelet rich fibrin (PRF), nutritional drip therapy sets the stage for fast, natural, and uneventful healing for our patients.

They also highlight yet another dimension in which we tap nature’s own power to support each patient on their journey to optimum mouth/body health.