In 1996, I was giving a lecture in New York City to a group of dentists at the First District Dental Society—the oldest dental society in the United States, and now known as the New York County Dental Society. My lecture was about the uses of homeopathy in dentistry, and, if you surf through other areas of this website, you will see some of the material that I presented to the dentists in the audience at that time. One of the audience members was a dentist whom I had not seen in many years, my old classmate from N.Y.U. College of Dentistry, Class of 1983, Dr. Gerald Curatola.
Gerry was our class president back then and was always a strong advocate for our profession and also had a keen interest in nutrition and health. I was happy to see him, and happy to see that he was interested in homeopathy. At the end of the lecture, he came up to me and asked me if I had ever considered formulating dental care products that incorporated nutritional and homeopathic ingredients. Having had experience in science research many years ago, I had in fact considered the idea. I had gone so far as to formulate a dental polishing paste, known as ‘prophy paste’, using all natural, edible ingredients including nutritional supplements, homeopathics, herbs and a mild natural abrasive and made up small batches of it just for use in my practice for my patients. But knowing how involved it could be to turn a product into a business had kept me away from doing anything more with my little formula.
Gerry convinced me that the two of us should pursue this idea, because both he and I believe that current oral health care products use the wrong approach to establishing and maintaining a healthy mouth. Briefly, the mouth is like a little ecosystem, filled with beneficial organisms and harmful ones, each in a balance. Most oral health care products aim to ‘kill all the germs’, which opens the door to overgrowth of organisms that are not affected by whatever the ‘killing agent’ happens to be. In this approach some beneficial organisms will be lost; others can actually convert into harmful germs, and harmful germs that were previously in balance and not really doing a lot of harm start to get really nasty. A far different approach is similar to that of an organic gardener. Weed the garden, nourish the soil, and create conditions where the balance favors health over disease.
Our first commercial product that makes use of the research and development that we have put in over the past thirteen years is now available for sale. Revitin Oral Therapy is a product meant to replace conventional toothpaste.
If you would like to view an explanation about our approach to improving oral health, Click Here.
