Best herbs for healthy teeth and gums?

What are the best herbs and care practices for healthy teeth and gums?

I have a number of recommendations to promote healthy gums and teeth, and chief among these is to avoid eating sweet foods and drinks, attend to good digestion, and avoid stress, alcohol, smoking and coffee.  The teeth and gums do well when there is a healthy oral ecology and the mouth is slightly alkaline from sufficient saliva production.  So things like stress, which inhibits digestion, or substances like coffee, alcohol and smoking, which dry out the mouth and inhibit saliva production, are a definite no-no.  In Ayurveda we recommend cleaning the tongue with a tongue scraper every morning, followed by a procedure called gandusha, or oil-pulling, which is rinsing out your mouth with sesame oil.  This is followed by using bitter and pungent tasting herbs to clean the mouth, including neem, pippala and karanj.  In my practice I use a mouth rinse with herbs such as bayberry, myrrh, and spilanthes.  Using such techniques, I have been able to help people overcome chronic tooth and gum problems.  Make sure to visit your dentist regularly, just to know what's going on with your teeth - you don't have to go for every procedure, such as fluoride, but it is good to be informed so you know just how vigilant to be.  For problems like cavities, I recommend a relatively new, less invasive technique called Cari-Solv, that preserves more of the tooth mass, and prevents microleakage between the filling and the tooth that can initiate new decay.

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0 #1 jessica 2011-12-16 02:03
Todd, do you have anything to add for cavities in young children? My night-nursing, minimal sugar-consuming 23 month old was just diagnosed with cavities behind all 6 of his front teeth. The holistic dentist told me to quit night-nursing immediately and use "MI paste" and xylitol products to try to encourage remineralizatio n. I'm adding white oak bark tincture for him and have already been taking kidney yin tonics myself and am overall kind of freaking out since it was just yesterday and she really wasn't all that encouraging...anything to add?
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