Perhaps the first thing that happens when we are confronted with any sort of stress is that we jam our breath. We stop breathing. Watch the dental patient walk in the office and see the dental chair. Immediately his breathing will jam. He will have what we call a “respiratory stumble.”

I once gave a seminar for a dental society and there, as with nearly every other dental society, we found the following: When the dentists thought of dentistry, nearly all of them suffered a lowering of their Life Energy, indicating the stress of their profession and the fact that they are ill at ease with their work.

I saw a woman who was complaining of great difficulty with her thinking. She was aware that she was not able to think as clearly as she once could. We also found that she had quite a marked dyslexia. It was then that I discovered she was wearing a dental appliance that had metal crossing her midline.

Virtually every dentist is stressed by the statement that he likes his patients. If I ask a dentist to name the patients he saw the day before, he usually has difficulty remembering even one. But he can remember their mouths. If he does name a few patients − “I like Mr X,” and so on, he will usually find this stressful.

I once saw three students who were patients of three different dentists, all highly skilled. These students each had a different type of acrylic appliance. They had been checked by their respective dentists, and all the appliances had been found to be of great benefit. In each case, however, we discovered that the student was allergic to the acrylic and thus was being harmed at the same time as he was being helped.