241-SYNCPodcast_MeghnaDassaniThrowback

[00:00:00] Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. Today we’re doing something different, something we haven’t done before on the show. We’re actually going to be doing a series of throwback episodes. We are well over 200 episodes into this podcast and every day I get a message from someone asking a question about progesterone or asking a question about proper testing or asking a question about what it means to embrace a functional wellness journey and I always find myself referring them back to one of the old but good podcast episodes here on the show.

[00:01:26] Jenny Swisher: So we’re going to take some of our favorite for the next few weeks and we’re going to throw them back. We’re going to do an episode replay so that you can hear these amazing interviews with experts in their field. I’m so excited to introduce you to each one of them here in the next three weeks, but without further ado, let’s dive in.

[00:01:40] Jenny Swisher: I am so excited today to dive into a more specific area on the topic of sleep. We had the great fortune of interviewing, um, Dr. Michelle Jorgensen several weeks ago here on the podcast. I’ll make sure to link that up in the show notes, but you might remember from that episode that we were only able to really scratch the surface of this idea of.

[00:01:57] Jenny Swisher: The airway and sleep and how it really impacts our overall health. You guys know that I’m all about helping you reach your maximum energy. So today I’m excited to have Dr. Dasani with us here on the call. I’m going to let her introduce herself and her expertise, but we’re really going to be able to dive deeper into this idea of how to improve our sleep.

[00:02:14] Jenny Swisher: Perhaps some things that are being barriers for us that are preventing us from really getting full recovery and that full reboot that sleep provides. So I’m excited to be able to dive deeper into this subject material today. So without further ado, Dr. Dasani, welcome to the show. I would love for you to just tell our listeners who you are and what you do.

[00:02:33] Meghna Dassani: Thank you so much, Jenny, for having me on your show. As you said, uh, my name is Dr. Meghna Dasani. I am actually a, we, we’re still trying to come up with how I want to introduce myself. I’m a general dentist that focuses on sleep and functional dentistry, and then it turns into this Super long intro and I was like, I got to find a way to put this easier and in a shorter way for people to understand, but that’s basically what I do.

[00:03:01] Meghna Dassani: A huge, huge focus of my practice is on integrating and implementing sleep apnea, sleep disordered breathing treatments for adults as well as children into my practice. And for the longest time, people thought, Oh, these are two separate entities, right? I mean, wouldn’t it? teeth in the mouth have to do with airway and breathing.

[00:03:24] Meghna Dassani: And it’s all in the same realm. It’s all here. As a dentist, I can impact how you breathe because I’m fond of saying the roof of the mouth is also the floor of the nose. And that is where our airway begins. So with interventions based on the age of the person. You know, there are things that we can do differently for children than we can do for adults, but there’s always a way that we can impact airway and breathing for anybody in the population.

[00:03:58] Meghna Dassani: Basically, how can I help you sleep better and breathe better? So that your brain is getting enough oxygen and that I think is the magic to actually what you just said earlier Living a life that’s full of energy living your best life to the best potential and being able to impact out Yeah, I just read a statistic recently that said 66 percent of Americans are struggling with good nightly sleep I’m sure it could even be greater than that based on I’m not sure where their metrics are based off of but you know I know for me As the leader of a course of women who come in wanting to learn more about hormone imbalance and who want to learn more about cycle syncing, this is the number one complaint that I hear, which is, well, I don’t really sleep the greatest, right?

[00:04:44] Jenny Swisher: And sometimes we laugh it off and we say, you know, women especially can be We can be the ones that to say like, Oh, I survive on caffeine and wine. Right. Like, especially young moms. And, and so, you know, it’s one of those things where I hear it time and time again, and it’s almost made into a joke, like, Oh, well, I’ll just sleep when I’m dead.

[00:05:00] Jenny Swisher: Right. Or, Oh, I don’t sleep the greatest. And it’s just passed off. But then the same individual is often the one that says, I don’t have any energy or I can’t keep up with my kids or I’m feeling off. I feel like my check engine light is flashing what’s going on. And sometimes I like to say. What if it’s really simple?

[00:05:16] Jenny Swisher: What if it comes back to our lifestyle factors? What if it comes back to the food we’re eating and the way we’re moving or not moving and our sleep, right? So when I teach hormone imbalance and the best way to reach maximum energy, I focus on the four fundamentals. One being nutrition, exercise, supplementation.

[00:05:34] Jenny Swisher: We’ve been able to cover so much of that here on the show. I just interviewed someone about EMF and the impact of EMF on sleep, but this is really functional. This is about like your mouth, like how your mouth and your, your airway is constructed. And if it’s allowing you to, you know, to breathe deep enough and to get into a good sleep, I know that the Dr.

[00:05:53] Jenny Swisher: Jorgensen just barely talked about this, but she talked about how, if our tongue is falling back in our mouth, if I, if our, you know, all this structural stuff. In our mouth, if it’s not functioning properly, it’s, it’s kind of waking us throughout the night because as soon as we get into a deep sleep, we could be essentially kind of choking on our tongue.

[00:06:12] Jenny Swisher: Right. So I want you to kind of tell us in very basic elementary terms, like, what do you see most often when it comes to the airway? And what could people be noticing or thinking about with their own sleep? Yeah, yeah, you know, you said it so well, actually, that a lot of times as women, as moms, as busy females, we almost take it as a badge of honor that we aren’t sleeping enough or well, or I survive on caffeine and, you know, whatever that may be.

[00:06:39] Meghna Dassani: Um, One thing to remember is sleep is the foundation for anything and everything we do. You know, this, you know, you talk about this all the time, breaking it down to its very basic form. Let’s look at what happens when we don’t get enough sleep and how we get to that. Forget not getting the enough hours of sleep, which is sad.

[00:06:59] Meghna Dassani: Super important. We underestimate how many hours of sleep we truly need. And it always baffles me when people say I get by on four hours of sleep and I’m my most productive at whatever it is. And I’m going really the basic science. Let’s get down to that. Now, why do we need enough hours of sleep? You and I know when we sleep, our sleep is in cycles, right?

[00:07:22] Meghna Dassani: We go through light, deep, light, uh, light sleep, deep sleep. We get into REM sleep and we cycle through these. Each of these cycles is about 90 minutes long. As we go through the night, the beginning part, the beginning two thirds of the night, we have more of that light and deep sleep, the non REM sleep, which makes, which is what is made up of the light and deep sleep.

[00:07:46] Meghna Dassani: And you have a certain amount of REM sleep. Non REM sleep is when our body is healing, right? I say it’s like when our body is being sent into the body shop. That’s when we heal, we repair, we rejuvenate. You went to CrossFit? Well, good job. That’s when your muscles are going to heal. You went out for a run?

[00:08:03] Meghna Dassani: You worked out in the yard? You ran, played with your kids? Non REM sleep is when all of that healing is going to happen and you still have some REM sleep. REM sleep is when our brain is healing, when our mind is healing. And as you go through the night, as you progress through those sleep cycles, the amount of non REM sleep that you have decreases and the latter cycles, I like to see cycles four and five, we end up with more REM sleep, which is when our brain is healing.

[00:08:31] Meghna Dassani: Guess what happens to us that only sleep the four hours or the five hours. Well you’re missing out on REM sleep. Your brain isn’t getting the rest that it needs. Yes, your body’s healing, but you know, you gotta wake up feeling like a million bucks. Ever have that and wish you could replicate it? Well, you probably got some good REM sleep that night.

[00:08:52] Meghna Dassani: So that’s one reason why we need enough hours of sleep. That’s our quantity of sleep. Now, let’s get into the quality of sleep. So you do stay in bed for the eight hours that you’re supposed to seven, seven and a half, eight hours. But if for whatever reason, a pet that sleeps with your child, that makes you have a partner that snores or something going on with you in the back of your throat, and I’ll touch upon that in just a second.

[00:09:18] Meghna Dassani: is waking you up is what we call arousals or micro arousals. You’re not waking up, sitting up, getting a sip of water, going to the bathroom, which that could be counted as one too, but this is your brain waking you up ever so slightly just to make sure you’re getting the oxygen you need. So for those of us, and I say this because I’m in that same Asian space with the group of women that you work with, as we grow older, we tend to lose muscle tone.

[00:09:49] Meghna Dassani: Hormonal changes impact things within our body. When we fall asleep, muscles relax, and that includes the muscles in the back of our throat, muscles in our neck. If we have excess tissue sitting there, all of that relaxes. And if we are ones that lay on our back, which a lot of the population does when we start to fall asleep, all of that tissue falls back.

[00:10:14] Meghna Dassani: The uvula, the little dangly portion in the back of our mouth, if that has excessive tissue, is what I call floppy, that’s going to fall back too. Your tongue can fall back and this creates an obstruction in the back of your throat. At this point, there’s no oxygen going through. So your heart goes, well, there really isn’t anything that I need to do.

[00:10:39] Meghna Dassani: There’s no oxygenated, freshly oxygenated blood that I need to pump to the rest of the body. So the heart slows down. There isn’t as much blood traveling. And at some point, the brain says, hey, wake up. I need oxygen. So we now have the heart jump starting, kick starting to make sure the brain gets the oxygen it needs.

[00:11:01] Meghna Dassani: And this happens over and over and over through the night for those that this happens to. What should be happening when we’re sleeping? Our heart should be healing, repairing, rejuvenating. Instead, the heart is being Exposed to these constant what I call insults, right? It’s a stop, start, stop, start, where like even my teenager could tell you that if you do that to a car or vehicle, that’s going to cause some damage down the road.

[00:11:36] Meghna Dassani: We’re doing this to our heart now, just so that our brain can get the oxygen that it needs. This is why when we have these people that suffer from sleep apnea, or more commonly women, we see upper airway resistance syndrome, and we’ll get into that. These are the folks that are at a higher risk for hypertension.

[00:11:56] Meghna Dassani: We see more metabolic disease in these individuals. These are the people that are at a higher risk for stroke. I’m fond of telling my patients, you know, I work closely with cardiologists, sleep MDs, EMTs, because it takes a team to treat patients. And my cardiologist was the one that said, it’s like, hey, when you see a person with resistant hypertension.

[00:12:19] Meghna Dassani: Or somebody that needs more than one drug to manage their hypertension. Look at sleep. Do they have sleep apnea? Are they stopping breathing? And the most common sign for those of us that may or may not have been diagnosed yet is snoring. Do you snore? Believe it or not, if you don’t snore, if you don’t have sleep apnea, but you have a partner that does, not only is that person not getting enough quality sleep, you aren’t as well, right?

[00:12:51] Meghna Dassani: Because what do we do? How will that person roll over honey? So it’s not just that person that’s suffering, but the pet partner is too. These are cycles. I mean, we see so much of this impacting so many aspects of life. Yeah. I just did a quick search to see, and it says that one in 15 Americans are diagnosed with sleep apnea.

[00:13:15] Jenny Swisher: And I have to assume that it’s a lot greater than that, who are undiagnosed, correct. And I like to, you know, I want to use my daughter as an example. So I have a six year old who was a pacifier user for the first couple of years of her life. And of course we, we didn’t know, we didn’t know, you know, it was like, give a baby a pacifier.

[00:13:34] Jenny Swisher: It calms them down. They like the sucking maneuver. Right. So it was like, okay, this is what you do. Right. And, uh, around the age of three or four, we started to notice issues with her. Um, at the time we thought, oh, this is just, you know, Developmental, right? Like she was waking during the night, there were nightmares, there was bed wetting coming in and out of the room, you know, and you talk to other parents and other parents are like, oh, my kid does that too.

[00:13:55] Jenny Swisher: Right. Like, and so you’re like, oh, okay. It must be normal. And yeah, I remember asking her pediatrician, which we’ve since fired. That’s a whole story itself. But I remember asking, you know, Hey, is this normal? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything’s everything’s fine. It wasn’t until I was talking to Dr. Jorgensen actually, where I had this light bulb go off of like, oh my gosh, like.

[00:14:15] Jenny Swisher: I never thought about it being her airway. I never thought about her breathing being what’s affecting her sleep. She’s always been an early riser. Like we’ve struggled with just keeping her in bed, keeping her asleep, especially compared to my youngest who, you know, that’s all we have to compare to. But my youngest is two.

[00:14:33] Jenny Swisher: She’s never had a pacifier. She was born with a lip and tongue tie. Doesn’t snore, sleep soundly for 12 hours a night. Right? So we didn’t realize that this was abnormal until we had something normal to compare it to. And so I say this because we, uh, because of that conversation with Dr. Michelle, we started seeing a functional dentist.

[00:14:51] Jenny Swisher: We are now fitting her for a myobrace to widen the mouth. We’re correcting her lip tie, which we didn’t even know existed. And we’re doing all these different things to sort of. open the airway up. And that’s definitely something that I want to talk to you about as far as how you treat this stuff. I want to ask you the question and I’ll jump in real quick because your daughter, um, and we’ll see this in adults as well.

[00:15:13] Meghna Dassani: You know, like I said, we see kids and adults within the practice, um, to help with these issues. When we have a child that goes past a certain age with the pacifier or the, what I call habits, and it could be a thumb, it could be a bottle, it could be a pacifier. My older daughter. So I have stories just like you to share.

[00:15:29] Meghna Dassani: We took away her pacifier at age one. I knew better. I’m a dentist, right? So I took her pacifier away where she had a little teddy bear. Bear that little Carter study bears with the beaded paws, the weighted paws. And she started to suck on that. And because it was my first born and I didn’t know any better.

[00:15:46] Meghna Dassani: I thought, Oh, that’s the cutest thing. And, you know, until I now I know what I know, when you have a child or even an adult, because we see habits in adults as well, that persist with these soothing habits. Always, always, always, we want to make sure we want to evaluate them for a tongue tie. When that tongue does not rest in the roof of the mouth, And it may not be an obvious anterior tie.

[00:16:14] Meghna Dassani: It could be a posterior tongue tie. When that tongue does not rest in the roof of the mouth, the vagus nerve, which enables our body to go from a sympathetic fight and flight response into a parasympathetic rest and digest tone. That nerve ending is right at that junction of the hard palate and the soft palate in our mouth.

[00:16:38] Meghna Dassani: So when our tongue isn’t resting there. We don’t get into bagel tone as easily. So now I have a child that has to quote unquote, soothe herself, be it with a pacifier, like your daughter or with her teddy bear’s paw, like my daughter. And these are children or even adults that are living in a constant state of sympathetic overdrive.

[00:17:07] Meghna Dassani: Their body isn’t ever truly getting into the parasympathetic tone. So always make sure we are assessing and evaluating or having these conversations. And yes, I’ve had the same, same experience with my pediatrician too, and I’ve come to the realization, you know, sometimes it just comes down to how much and what your training consisted of.

[00:17:31] Jenny Swisher: Yeah. And, and for mothers trusting your gut, you know, and I’m actually, I’m actually interviewing right after you. I’m interviewing my good friend, Shannon, who is, she was our myofascial release therapist that we worked with for my youngest that had the lip and tongue type procedure done at eight weeks old.

[00:17:47] Jenny Swisher: And that I can’t wait to share that journey because. It’s, it is one of just trusting the maternal instinct, firing all people in the way and just literally getting, getting answers and getting relief for her. But I’m curious, just while we’re on this, this is totally a selfish question. We’ve definitely noticed with my oldest soothing issues, even at this age, like she has trouble sort of what we call down regulating.

[00:18:12] Jenny Swisher: You know, she comes home from school, school’s a long day, you know, for a six year old, she comes home from school and she’s sometimes just exhausted, probably related to her sleep. But just curious, like, what do you endorse when it comes to like helping children that have been that position, or maybe even with your own daughter, how do you help them get the help they need when it comes to self soothing?

[00:18:31] Meghna Dassani: So there’s studies, there’s research articles that show that. A lot of kids that have a lip tie have some degree of a posterior tongue tie. It may not be as obvious as what your little one had, which was an anterior tie. I would go back and ask to reassess, re evaluate because this ties right back into that back of her tongue isn’t resting where it needs to.

[00:19:00] Meghna Dassani: that bagel tone isn’t getting stimulated. Um, let’s assume there really isn’t a posterior tie. All she needs is that lip released. Um, I would strongly encourage you to, uh, consider myofunctional therapy. See a myofunctional therapist that is going to teach her how to posture that tongue and where to posture it.

[00:19:22] Meghna Dassani: So ideal oral resting posture is lips together. We’re breathing through the nose and that tongue resting passively in the roof of the mouth, and it’s not just the answer, not just the tip of the tongue, because if I always tell people, where’s your tongue resting? And they think it’s the tip of the tongue that I’m talking about.

[00:19:40] Meghna Dassani: It’s that entire tongue that needs to be draped like a blanket across the palate. And a very heavy, baited blanket at that. Um, that is what’s going to enable the natural expansion and retention. Amazing that she’s getting into appliance therapy. But, uh, myofunctional therapy might be a great, in fact, I would encourage you to look into that.

[00:20:00] Jenny Swisher: Yeah, and I just want to, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I do think that we have mothers listening. And, you know, I, I know every day it seems like I meet someone who’s like, oh, my daughter had that too, or my child had that too. So I want to share this for them. You know, one thing that we noticed was when we took her to the functional dentist.

[00:20:18] Jenny Swisher: One of the things that he evaluated was, of course, he tipped her back in the chair, he had her open her mouth, and he showed me, he said, do you see how her tongue is falling back? It’s not, he showed me, like, it’s not going to the roof of her mouth, this is how it should be. And it made total sense, and it makes you wonder sometimes, you know, how many times, we were going every six months to a traditional pediatric dentist, Who were taking x rays for cavities and doing those kinds of things.

[00:20:41] Jenny Swisher: But there was never any assessment of the structure of her mouth. There was never any mention. I actually asked at the last appointment, uh, before we switched to functional dentistry, I asked about the lip tie because it was so obvious. I mean, you could see it kind of wrapping underneath the teeth and creating that gap.

[00:20:58] Jenny Swisher: And they told me, Oh, it would just be something that orthodontics would deal with later, like later in her life. And I thought, Oh, that’s great. Okay. You know, at the time you just, you follow what you believe people to know, right? I mean, this is the expert they should know. So I’m just here to say, I feel like I’m a broken record on this, but, you know, if you’re listening to this, whether it comes to your health or your children’s health, like, you know, your body best, you know, when something is off, so yes, you know, always seek your doctor’s advice, but at the same time, know that you are your own best doctor and that you’re giving them the information and you’re, you need to trust your gut to some degree, I want to go back to talking about, you said that a lot of women you find.

[00:21:33] Jenny Swisher: deal with this upper airway resistance? I don’t know what that is. So I would love for you to kind of tell us, you know, what, what is that? What does that look like? How does it present? Yeah, for sure. So sleep apnea, remember we talked about is when a person stops breathing for 10 seconds or more multiple times throughout the night.

[00:21:49] Meghna Dassani: In upper airway resistance syndrome, the airway is narrow. So without them stopping breathing, I liken it to having a coffee stirrer for an airway. I really, really, really want a smoothie straw, don’t I? Um, and these are the women that present with all of those signs and symptoms. They are the ones that are super exhausted.

[00:22:13] Meghna Dassani: They’re tired, low energy. A lot of these women present with, um, symptoms that sometimes their doctors don’t have answers for as well. And I find they get. Guided, for lack of a better word, into other diagnoses just because they don’t fit the traditional box of what’s going on. So when I see a woman that comes into the practice, and you know, they may come in for a cleaning.

[00:22:42] Meghna Dassani: But we are evaluating you as a whole, as an individual, as a person, not just as a mouth and teeth. Um, you know, we’ll look at medication list. And I see. More than one medication for anxiety or depression. If I see a diagnosis of chronic pain and they just haven’t been able to figure out what’s going on, uh, fibromyalgia, those are the times when I start to push.

[00:23:10] Meghna Dassani: For more answers. I’ll ask, I’ll dig deeper. We’ll get into the, but tell me more. Tell me more. But why? I’ll jump on a phone call with their doctors and see how or what we could do to, hey, is it possible they’re not sleeping? Is it possible they’re not getting enough oxygen? And they don’t quite fit the mold of, oh, this adult, overweight, obese individual where that has excessive tissue that’s falling back.

[00:23:40] Meghna Dassani: But the airway is just so narrow that a little bit goes a long way and they’re just not getting the oxygen their brain needs. Because when we sleep is when all of these other things get topped up, do they not? Growth hormone, which adults need as well, not just kids. Um, leptin, ghrelin, your cortisol levels get topped off for lack of a better word.

[00:24:03] Meghna Dassani: And when we have this disconnect in all of our hormones, neurotransmitters, Your body’s going to ask for answers. Your body has to communicate that to you and it happens in different ways. Yeah. I had a physical therapist, uh, several years ago tell me that sleep is a lot like a computer reboot. He said, you know, you turn off your computer at night or whatever, or at the end of a workday and you completely shut it down.

[00:24:30] Jenny Swisher: All systems shut down, right? Everything has to recover. He’s like, what happens if you don’t close your computer, right? Like it overheats, it, it fizzles out. Right. And so. Again, kind of coming back to what we said at the beginning, you know, I think the prioritization of sleep is so key and it’s what most people are missing.

[00:24:48] Jenny Swisher: Just in 2022, I, I made the conscious effort to, to really level up in two areas. And it had profound impact. One was with my sleep. Um, my husband and I, a year ago in January, we purchased the aura rings. So we wanted to kind of start biohacking our sleep and see, you know, was a good sleeper until I had that ring.

[00:25:07] Jenny Swisher: Um, and I think probably most people, like if you’re listening to this, If you’re not tracking your sleep with some sort of wearable, um, it will blow your mind because you might think you’re sleeping, but you might not be sleeping well. The quality of sleep matters. Uh, but that, and then increasing protein.

[00:25:21] Jenny Swisher: So I just decided, okay, I’m already eating really clean. I avoid inflammatory foods. I, I exercise five, six times a week. Like, I feel like I’m doing all the things. I’m getting regular labs and I’m, you know, I’m doing the right supplementation. So when it comes to those four fundamentals of hormone balance, I felt like I was really good at most of them.

[00:25:37] Jenny Swisher: I was like, the only thing I can really improve is my sleep. And I’m like, surely that won’t make a huge impact. It made a huge impact for me and just simple things of, you know, and I said this before on a different episode where it’s hard to, You know, when you’re talking about when people say to you, how do you stay motivated, right?

[00:25:54] Jenny Swisher: Like, how do you stay motivated to work out? Well, once you know how good your body can feel, that keeps you motivated. And so for me, like the wearable has been really transformational because the aura ring has showed me what happens when I prioritize my sleep, right? I get better recovery scores. I feel better.

[00:26:12] Jenny Swisher: My energy’s better. I don’t crash in the afternoon. I can work out harder. Like there’s so, there’s so many things that factor in. Um, you know, And I feel like before this, I just assumed that because I was in the bed for seven to eight hours. that I was doing, like, of course I’m sleeping well, but really, you know, and coming back to what you said earlier, these wake ups, um, this is something that I’ve noticed.

[00:26:33] Jenny Swisher: And ironically, mine tend to be around the week before my period. So bleeding like a menstrual phase, like that premenstrual phase of day 21 through 28, my sleep kind of starts to become rocky. And I have a lot more. night wakings, which I had a functional doctor on here, Dr. Calvin Ng, where he talked about if you’re waking between one and 3am, that can also be related to like liver detoxification, estrogen detoxification, and which tends to be my MO.

[00:27:00] Jenny Swisher: Um, but it’s interesting because There are times where I’m like, I think I slept well. And then I pull up the app and it’s like, Oh, I had three, three around, you’ve got a micro arousals. I threw, I had three micro arousals throughout the night. So there’s so many things that it’s, it’s more than just, what I want listeners to understand is it can be more than just making sure you’ve got nice crisp sheets and these things that we hear, right, like turning off the blue light.

[00:27:23] Jenny Swisher: Yes. I agree with that. Like cooling down your room. Yes. I agree with that, but really when you, if you really want to truly biohack your sleep. Even just using a wearable for a short period of time, like really looking at how you sleep and making those adjustments, meeting with a functional dentist and getting a perspective on your, the structure of your airway.

[00:27:43] Jenny Swisher: Like these are things that can really make impact its root cause. Right. We talk all the time about root cause. Like you can do all the exercise in the world and eat clean, but if you’re dealing with a hormone imbalance, girl, you’re going to be stuck, you know? So you’ve got to get to the root cause of what’s going on for you.

[00:27:57] Jenny Swisher: So what do you, I mean, why isn’t this the norm? Like, why isn’t like this functional approach, the norm? Can you, can you answer that? To be honest, it’s still the wild west out there with really, you know, as it relates to functional dentistry and sleep and how we impact it. We are basically providing dental answers to a medical problem.

[00:28:25] Meghna Dassani: This is a dental solution to a medical problem. Also, this isn’t something we’re taught in school. I’ll be honest with you. You know, I’ve been through dental school twice and. This just isn’t part of your curriculum. Yes, schools are now slowly starting to integrate it, but there’s so much to learn. So it comes down to how much and what training you choose to invest in for yourself.

[00:28:52] Meghna Dassani: And like I said, it’s just not something we’re taught in school. Yeah, I was just listening to something this morning. I think it was a model health podcast where he was talking about how medical traditionally trained medical doctors aren’t receiving any education on nutrition, right? It’s kind of the same thing.

[00:29:09] Jenny Swisher: So obviously a lot of systemic issues there, but I think that one thing that we should, we should touch on briefly is this idea of how, I mean, we’ve talked about how sleep can impact your energy, but how simple is it to make? So I’m thinking about modern medicine and how sleep apnea is treated, right? I have an aunt who is diagnosed sleep apnea.

[00:29:32] Jenny Swisher: Uh, she’s elderly. She actually uses like the CPAP machine. How do treatments that you do differ from that? So how does, how does functional dentistry treat this medical issue as opposed to how the medical industry is treating the issue? For sure. So like I said, remember it’s, we’re still early and where we are, even though we’re making great, great strides and advances every single day, the CPAP is still considered the gold standard for treating sleep apnea.

[00:29:57] Meghna Dassani: However, for those that are familiar with the CPAP, you know that all it is, is a reverse vacuum, right? It’s blowing air into you, making sure you get the oxygen, making sure you get enough air. Whether you like it or not, it’s going to do it for you. It’s going to breathe for you. That being said, about 70 maybe more percent of people that have the CPAP are unable to use it for whatever reason.

[00:30:21] Meghna Dassani: They hate it, cannot tolerate it, choose not to use it, travel too much, it’s cumbersome. The list goes on. That’s where being able to address this in a functional manner with dentistry comes in. Oral appliances that are custom made. that can reposition the jaw in a forward position when this person is asleep.

[00:30:43] Meghna Dassani: Great, great options. It’s an FDA approved protocol to help patients with mild to moderate sleep apnea. We are also getting into, you know, so far, expansion has always been something for children. Your child, if they have a constricted arch, uh, sleep issues along with the functional, myofunctional appliances.

[00:31:08] Meghna Dassani: The dentist may talk about expanding their arches, growing them, growing their area. We are now starting to do that in our adult patients as well. Everything is still in the very early stages. You know, of course there’s surgical options, but that’s not for everyone again. Uh, so there are certainly.

[00:31:27] Meghna Dassani: treatment modalities that we can incorporate that’s going to help with what can we do to keep the airway open. Appliance therapy is one. I mentioned myofunctional therapy, uh, to you for your daughter. Myofunctional therapy is a great adjunct for adult patients as well. Teaching that tongue where to sit.

[00:31:45] Meghna Dassani: I tell patients this, it’s like sending your tongue to the gym. You want well toned bicep shoulders. Legs, you’re going to work that muscle out. You’re going to teach that muscle what it needs to do. We’re doing the exact same thing with your tongue, teaching it where to rest. So we’re potentially lessening that obstruction that happens when you lay back with that tongue, not falling back into the back of your throat and causing that obstruction.

[00:32:12] Meghna Dassani: Um, another thing we have been incorporating is the use of lasers in the back of the throat, the soft palate, the posterior part of the tongue, the sides of the tongue. And what this does is it stimulates collagen production. We all have collagen in our body. And what this does is it stimulates that and tightens that collagen up.

[00:32:33] Meghna Dassani: But when the collagen tightens up, it takes the tissue that it is under with it, and you now have less of the floppiness of the soft palate of the uvula. If you look at it or think of it visually, that’s going to open up that area as well. We’ve seen great results even in our patients that have inflammation in the back of their throat.

[00:32:57] Meghna Dassani: You know, when you snore, that causes inflammation. You have the uvula that looks red because of all that movement that’s happening. Tonsils as well. If your tonsils need to be taken out, that’s a whole different conversation, but when there’s inflammation, using that laser around that area does cause everything to shrink, opens up the airway.

[00:33:18] Meghna Dassani: So it’s never just one and done. I tell people this, there is no magic wand to treating this. We’re human beings. Everybody needs a customized protocol that’s going to help them. And is it all of the options I mentioned? Is it some of them? If it’s all In what order is it going to be needed to help you versus me?

[00:33:41] Meghna Dassani: And that’s where working with someone that does this on a daily basis actually has a team. It’s there’s no one man show as much as I would like for it to be. Having that team around you is going to help. Absolutely. I maybe think of. When you were talking about sort of retraining the tongue as a muscle, you know, maybe think about my now two year old who, like I mentioned before, had the lip and tongue tie lasered at eight weeks old, went from being the unhappiest baby on the planet to finally being able to eat within a matter of minutes and the happiest baby on the planet.

[00:34:16] Jenny Swisher: I’ve shared this before, but my husband and I were the parents who were bouncing on a stability ball, wearing her in a carrier with the shower running and a noise machine on trying to get her to eat. So in case you, um, are wondering, you know, it was interesting when you’re sitting in front of the pediatrician and she’s saying it’s a made up issue.

[00:34:32] Jenny Swisher: And you’re sitting there thinking, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t bounce on the ball in the shower. One more minute. Like, you know, that something’s wrong, but. Regardless. That is exactly what you said. You know your body. You know your child better than anyone. And if you’re not convinced with the answers you’re getting, ask.

[00:34:49] Meghna Dassani: Get second, third, fourth opinions. Ask until you have an answer. Yes. Yes. But it’s interesting because we, you know, So the, it was like this little circle of people that we ended up getting involved with, right? Like the lactation consultant was the one who sort of was like, this is what’s going on. And we saw a chiropractor around the same time who’s a pediatric chiropractor who said, yes, this is what’s going on.

[00:35:09] Jenny Swisher: They both referred us to, um, myofascial release therapy. We started doing that and it was like this little world of people that we entered that. Formerly just like this world we didn’t know about, right. Which is why I’m excited to bring her on the show too, to expose people to this. But when we started taking her to MFR, of course, you’re, you know, picture an eight week old baby, right?

[00:35:28] Jenny Swisher: Like they don’t like to be sat down, but they want to be held. And so we, I would go twice a week to this myofascial therapist and. lay her on this table where she would most of the time scream for the full 45 minutes to an hour while this MFR therapist would put her fingers in her mouth. And she would explain to me things like, well, when they’re infants, you know, their palate is a lot more malleable.

[00:35:51] Jenny Swisher: So we’re able to really reshape the palate. We’re, we’re able to really train her tongue where to sit. We’re able to really. I almost pictured it like clay, right? Like they’re, they’re sort of molding her mouth in this way that will help her breathe and eat and whatever. And she even talked to me about things like, which we’ll dive into on that episode about like texture issues and children who have texture issues when it comes to eating it.

[00:36:15] Jenny Swisher: I see her now and it’s like, we put any food in front of her. She eats it. She, like I said before, she’s a 12 hour a night sleeper. Her teeth are all coming in and alignment. Like it’s crazy to me once again, that this isn’t the norm, but you know, one thing that I’ve noticed is even in talking to the functional dentist that’s working with my older daughter.

[00:36:34] Jenny Swisher: He talked about how, you know, the younger you are, the easier it is not necessarily easier, but the more simple it is to kind of, I don’t want, I don’t want to say fix the issue, but use appliances for my six year old, right? He’s like a six year old might only have to use this appliance for a certain amount of time.

[00:36:49] Jenny Swisher: Whereas. Doing orthodontics with a 13 year old is going to be a longer process, right? So I have to imagine the same is true for adults, right? You’re already in my case, I’m 39. So if I’m dealing with an airway issue, I got a lot of ground to make up, right? So one thing that I wanted to just bring up to share with people that was really, I wish there was a way to show this visually, but obviously this is an audible podcast.

[00:37:10] Jenny Swisher: But one thing that the functional dentist had given us was this sort of brochure booklet. About and it was, I think it was titled something about like small mouth syndrome and it was these pictures of children’s faces and how the school itself is really changing as we evolve. I’d love for you to touch on that because for me, even just seeing those pictures was this visual example of.

[00:37:36] Jenny Swisher: You know, because of things like pacifier use and pureed foods for infants and these, these things that are preventing us from chewing convenience foods, right? Soft foods, because of it, we’re, we’re changing the shape of our skull and of our mouth and of our jaw, which is causing us to become this small mouth society where we really have this sort of sunken in face.

[00:37:56] Jenny Swisher: So I’d love for you to touch on that if you can. Yeah, for sure. You know, I agree with your functional dentist. Like we’ll start treating kids as young as two years old. They’re never Bye. The sooner you can get in, the sooner you can address it, the easier it is. And tying into this small face syndrome too, and I know you mentioned textural issues.

[00:38:16] Meghna Dassani: Anytime I have a mom and some, some use it as, Oh, my child only eats three foods. That’s a problem. That’s a real problem. When they have textural issues, what that tells me is, And it comes right back to that tongue tie. Is that tongue restricted in any way to where that child is unable to clear foods?

[00:38:40] Meghna Dassani: Think about it. When you have, I don’t know, a piece of food. Meat or broccoli that gets to that very far back corner and you want to use your tongue to clear it out But you cannot for these kids that sits there and their brain tells them this is dangerous alert alert You’re gonna gag on this you’re gonna choke and the child starts to gag and at some point they can’t Communicate this to us and they’re like, I don’t like it And now our child gets labeled as a picky eater.

[00:39:10] Meghna Dassani: Hence your little one who will eat anything you put in front of her, because her body knows it’s safe to put in her mouth. And that’s, it ties right into our small face syndrome as well, because we’ve gotten as a society into convenience, you know, everything comes in pouches, everything is in purees, bottles, as opposed to chewing real foods, eating real foods.

[00:39:39] Meghna Dassani: I’m not saying give a little baby a carrot stick so they can choke on it. No, but there’s, you could give them a steamed apple or food in one of those little mesh bags that they’re actually using their jaws and their muscles to eat. And when we, breastfeeding is another big one. When you’re able to, and choose to do all of this, the jaws are able to develop in the way that our genes.

[00:40:13] Meghna Dassani: are coded. There’s a genetic code that tells our body how and where and how much to grow. I did not have room for my wisdom teeth growing in and had them taken out. But my dad, who is 75, has all of his teeth, enough room for his wisdom teeth and then some. So when we have these nice, wide smiles with teeth that drop in where they need to, it tells us growth and development has happened the way it needed to, the way it was meant to, the way we’re genetically coded to.

[00:40:46] Meghna Dassani: So when we move to these foods of convenience, the more, what I call fads, you know, it’s like give them the little meltable crackers or the Fruit in a pouch or whatever that may be. We’re taking away growth and development that needs to happen. The jaws aren’t able to grow. Like you just said, what they did with your little one, the molding doesn’t happen because those muscles aren’t used and we know when muscles aren’t used, they atrophy, they don’t grow to what they were meant to.

[00:41:18] Meghna Dassani: And when that comes to everything around your head, face and neck, it impacts the direction of growth of your jaws as well. And over time, as generations go by, like you said, you see the sizes of the face, the jaws getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And that is the reason why, so, I mean, it ties it all perfectly because when you have a small mouth, you have a, you know, small jaw, then it impacts your airway because then your tongue is falling back into your throat.

[00:41:48] Jenny Swisher: I can’t help, but think that, you know, for my oldest, another thing that has come up for us, we just started homeopathy for her because she has been so prone to like strep infections. And one of the things that the homeopath had told us was. That she’s not able to properly cleanse the back of her mouth, uh, leading to more bacteria back there, probably leading her to more, you know, more prone to infection.

[00:42:11] Jenny Swisher: So it’s, it’s all connected. You know what I mean? Like all of these things, all these little pieces are connected. And so I would encourage anyone listening, whether it pertains to your child or to you or to both to ask the question, why does this keep coming up for me? Like, why is my child bedwetting at night all the time or having nightmares all the time?

[00:42:29] Jenny Swisher: Why, why am I feeling so tired in the morning, even though I, I was in the bed for seven hours a night, right? Like start asking yourself the question why I found that I heard someone say this recently, they said. A lot of times traditional medicine just asks what, like what is wrong, what are your symptoms and functional root cause approach asks why, why is that wrong, where’s that coming from, is there a lifestyle factor that’s at play here.

[00:42:53] Jenny Swisher: What would be the first step for someone to have, you know, to find a functional dentist, I find it’s very hard to do, I know for us. We live in a relatively big city here in the Midwest. I had to really search and ask and figure out where I could go to find someone that’s knowledgeable in this type of training.

[00:43:10] Jenny Swisher: Do you have any recommendations for how people can go about finding somebody like you? It honestly is just that. It’s just ask people, reach out to your network. Ask some of us that do this. And we usually have contacts in your neck of the woods that might be able to help you. Um, and then there are some folks that travel just because they don’t have anybody around them.

[00:43:37] Jenny Swisher: So I always say, just ask, that’s the best way. Yeah. And I know for us, um, you know, I, I had used some of the websites that Dr. Jorgensen, I’ll link them up in the show notes too. She had said that, you know, some, there are some credentialed people that are kind of trained in this approach. And so when we searched that database for our city, there wasn’t anything that came up.

[00:43:55] Jenny Swisher: So I had to do the whole referral method of trying to figure out, okay, who do I know that’s into this space that might know? And the person we wound up with is actually, he’s not on those websites, but he’s a TMJ student. TMJ trained specialists that studied in the functional approach for TMJ. And so that’s also something to consider too, right?

[00:44:13] Jenny Swisher: Like it all coming back to like the jaw and all that kind of stuff. Of course, it makes sense that this, this makes sense to him. So that’s cool. So I want, before we wrap up today, you know, what are we, what am I missing? Like, what questions should I be asking you that I’m not asking that you think women need to know?

[00:44:29] Meghna Dassani: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground, a lot of ground. Um, Can’t think of anything that stands out as to, Oh, I, we need to share this with your listeners. I, we, we covered quite a bit. Great. Perfect. Awesome. Well, if you can, I would love for you to tell people how they can find you, um, more information about what you’re doing and follow you on social media and all that kind of stuff.

[00:44:54] Jenny Swisher: So I’ll hand it over to you and you can share, and then we’ll make sure to link it all up in the show notes. Perfect. Perfect. So I practice in the Houston area. The best way to, um, you know, get information about us or me is on my website. It’s magna dasani. com. The office website is dasanidentistry. com and I am on almost all social media platforms.

[00:45:15] Meghna Dassani: Instagram handle is healthy sleep revolution. As is our Facebook page, healthy sleep revolution. That’s pretty much it. Perfect. That’s easy. I love it. So if you’re listening to this, you can swipe up for the show notes. You can click on these links and follow Dr. Dasani. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to meet with me.

[00:45:34] Jenny Swisher: I know I’ve learned something. I’m hopeful that my, my listeners will learn something for themselves and for their children. I think this is so powerful and the more. More we can spread this message of just root cause approach in general, whether it’s our hormones or our sleep or whatever is just, it needs to happen.

[00:45:49] Jenny Swisher: I feel the revolution coming. Like I can, I just listened today, like I said, to the model health podcast and he said, he feels like there’s a stirring, right? Like, like people are starting to finally sort of, I don’t know, wake up to the idea that they are their own best advocate and start to ask the right questions and start asking why.

[00:46:05] Jenny Swisher: So thank you so much for taking the time. It’s great to meet you. I will link everything up. You guys in the show notes as usual until next time. Thanks

[00:46:22] Jenny Swisher: for listening to this episode of the Sync Your Life podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember, your cycles are your superpower, and by aligning with them, you can live your life with all the energy you need to be a mom, wife, daughter, and friend to those you love.

[00:46:39] Jenny Swisher: Until next time!