Dr. Nammy Patel discusses the E in AGES: energy. She explains how hidden dental infections, mercury fillings, cavitations, failed root canals, and toxins may drain energy and how biological dentistry uses safe removal, detoxification, and regenerative tools to support healing.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher and I’m here today with Dr. Nammy Patel, founder of Green Dentistry in San Francisco, California, helping patients recognize the vital connection between dental health and whole body health and the author of the bestselling books, Age With Style: Guide to a Youthful Smile and Healthy Living and Total Wellness: Understanding the Link Between Your Teeth and Your Health. Today we’re talking about the AGES protocol and specifically the E in AGES, which stands for energy. Welcome, Dr. Nammy.
Dr. Nammy Patel: Hi, John. Thank you for having me.
Hidden Oral Drains Behind Chronic Fatigue
John: Absolutely. Dr. Nammy, millions of people are chronically tired and they go to the doctors, but the doctors do labs and they tell them that their labs are normal. How does their mouth show up in that story? And what are some of the hidden biological drains that most doctors are missing?
Nammy: So when it comes to the mouth, we must look at how the mouth is related to energy. Most doctors, most dentists are forgetting that the mouth has hidden infections that are not looked at. Whether it’s be a cavitation, whether it’s be mercury removals, whether it would be some failed root canals or gum disease, the mouth is at the source of hidden infections that influence your energy levels and are really important and need to be evaluated.
Mercury Fillings and Safe Removal Protocols
John: Mercury fillings are something that’s a little controversial and regular dentists might say that mercury fillings that you might’ve gotten years ago are fine, but I know that you feel differently. Where does the truth lie there and what does safe mercury removal really look like?
Nammy: That’s a great question, John. So let’s start talking about the mouth. When we talk about the mouth, we’re looking at two things. One is going to be chronic dental infections that actually will leak mitochondrial energy. That’s number one. The second is toxins. Toxins will also slow down the mitochondria and how that works. Your mitochondria is what makes ATP. ATP is the energy source. So we have to do two things. Number one, we have to get rid of the bacteria. The second is going to be we’ve got to get rid of toxins. And mercury is a toxin. A toxin is something that will have a negative and an adverse reaction on your body. Mercury fillings were placed many, many years ago and still are placed. Europe just banned it in February of this year. Can you imagine, in 2026? What happens with mercury is that when it sits in your mouth, it’s actually very problematic.
It actually, every time you chew, eat, drink a hot cup of water, it’s turning into mercury vapor. Now, that mercury vapor is being absorbed in your body and it’s being absorbed in your body and it binding to your DNA. And so it actually binds to glutathione. When it binds what it does, it deposits in cells. It deposits in the brain. It deposits in your fat cells. It deposits in the rest of your body. And as this occurs, we find patients who say, “I have foggy brain. I’m tired all the time. I can’t function. I just feel slow. I feel depressed. These are some common things I hear when patients have mercury toxicity.” So it has to be removed in the proper way. We want to get it out of the mouth. We also want to get it out of the body. So we have to focus on both.
So the way we get it out of the mouth is by doing the SMART certified protocol. And we do that because it’s a specific way to remove mercury so it protects the patient so that more mercury is not being released and they’re not swallowing it. It also protects me, because I’m doing this every day. And I want to make sure as I’m helping others that I don’t get sick. And so the SMART protocol is designed specifically to remove mercury in a way so that it’s captured and it doesn’t have any toxic effects on the patient nor the doctor nor the staff. Now, we remove these mercuries in the mouth. We also need to make sure that we get the mercury out of the body because that’s stored mercury. This is the source. We’ve got to get to the mercury that’s already been there for a number of years.
And the way we do that is a special machine that we utilize in our practice. A lot of times we use vitamin C, we use charcoal, we use a lot of different binders to help. We also use cholera. We also use this machine called the Hockatt, H-O-C-A-T-T. And that is really great because it is the machine. Mercury is best released when you sit in a sauna and you can take out metals. Metals detoxification is well done through the steam or a sauna, and your body is able to sweat it out. And so the Hawkin machine is something that we utilize in our practice as part of our protocol to be able to disinfect or get rid of all the toxins that are sitting in the body, whether it be bacteria, whether it be viruses, whether it be mercury, or whether it be some just daily toxins from the food that you’re eating.
And we do this so that our bodies are clean from the inside out.
Cavitations, Failed Root Canals, and Exhaustion
John: So in addition to mercury toxicity, some things like cavitations and failed root canals can affect a person’s exhaustion levels and chronic symptoms. Talk a little bit about cavitations and failed root canals and how they contribute.
Nammy: So cavitation and failed root canals are hidden stressors. They don’t cause any pain. That’s why I say they’re hidden. And unless you’re looking for them, you’re not really going to find them. Now, most general dentists are not trained to look for cavitations and aren’t looking for them on a regular basis because they’re drilling and filling. They’re doing a small cavity, a crown, or maybe putting some veneers on. That’s what their main focus is. Now, these hidden stressors are ones that we look at because cavitations, it takes a lot of training to identify a cavitation. Cavitations are areas where you had teeth extracted, whether it be wisdom teeth or any other area, and the bone has not healed really well. And so we want to look at that. It is done through a CT scan and it’s done and it’s very precise to be able to locate exactly where the cavitation is.
We want to figure out if the patient has a cavitation. We want to make sure we take out the cavitation. We also want to make sure that their body heals the cavitation properly and they must be placed on a bone healing protocol in order to make sure that it’s done properly and they have the proper results that they’re looking for. You don’t want to just go to any dentist to do a cavitation. You want to go to specially trained dentists who are using specific protocols to heal the bone to make sure that the cavitation is healed completely. And a cavitation is basically dead tissue. It’s if you had dead tissue in your jawbone, that would be problematic. Your body would not like dead stuff. Guess what happens to dead stuff? When we put corpses in the ground, they’re decomposing. That’s what happens in the body.
If you have a dead bone, your body is decomposing it, but it can’t get rid of it because it’s in your body. It’s going to continue to decompose over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 70 years, 90 years is what it’s going to do. And as it keeps decomposing, it starts slowing down the rest of the body in the way that it works. That’s what we find fatigue is because it’s working hard as it’s decomposing that dead bone. And what we want to do is remove that dead bone out of the body so that your energy is restored and you’re able to feel better and you’re able to focus on regeneration, which is the ultimate biohack, the ultimate way to heal disease and chronic illnesses. So that’s what we really focus on. Root canals also, same concept. Root canals are hidden sources of infections.
What root canals do is they’re dead tooth and when they’re not done properly, they are an infection that sits inside the bone. And what happens with that is, again, infection, your body must fight it off. It’s going to drain your energy because you’re at war. Your body is going to be at war with a tooth that has an infection inside it. So when your body’s at war, it’s not going to put energy into regeneration. You’re going to feel tired. You’re going to feel exhausted, not going to know why, but ask yourself, “Do I have a root canal? Is it safe? Is there a problem with it? Should I be checking it out? ” And the answer is absolutely. We should be looking at, do you have these hidden chronic infections like a root canal, a failed root canal, cavitations? Is that what’s going on? Leaky restorations that are harboring bacteria because they’re not done properly.
An overhang on a crown that continues makes bacteria stay there. Bleeding gums that are sticking around because you have mercury that’s leaking and it’s creating a magnet for bacteria to be attracted in those spots. These are all things you should be looking at as hidden sources of infection that are in the mouth and things that drain your energy.
Detox Therapies for Energy Restoration
John: So you mentioned Hocket as one of the things that you use to address these issues. And then there’s PEMF and there’s red light therapy. Talk about some of these different therapies that you use to address a patient’s energy and what they do and who they’re for.
Nammy: The first thing I want to always do with every patient is I want to detoxify them. So the way I detoxify and get rid of infection, number one is we’re going to do it in the source. We’re going to either do a deep cleaning, get rid of the cavitation, get rid of the failed root canal and get the source out. Now what we want to do is also get the body to detox. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can help the body detox. The first is going to be vitamin C, which is an easy supplement to take on a regular basis. Charcoal is an easy supplement to take on a daily basis. It’s very gentle. Now, when we start looking at more aggressive forms of detoxification, we like to use ozone therapy. Ozone is extra oxygen. We like to combine that ozone with heat and carbonic acid.
So what we first do is have you sit in these pods. What we do is they sweat out all the metal, all the mercury, all the mold, all the parasites. They sweat all of that out. They help detoxify the body. We also use PMF, which are electrical signals that tell your blood vessels to flow blood, because sometimes blood can get a little cloggy. So it says flow blood out into the system. So get rid of all the toxins so your body can flush it out. You can poop it out, you can sweat it out, you can pee it out, is what we tell the body. We activate that blood flow, the highways that was a lot of traffic jam. We start letting the flow of traffic happen again so that we can get certain toxins to exit and get out of your system. And we do that very gently.
We do that through, again, carbonic acid, heat. We do PMF. We do magnetic body balancing. We do red light therapy. There’s so many different modalities that we have in order to help the patient. And we customize the modality based upon your need. It’s not a cookie cutter approach that everyone needs the same thing. Your body may respond differently to red light therapy as it does to PMF. What we want to do is, depending on what toxin you have, we want to put a protocol in place that’s going to help you detox these toxins out of your system so that you can feel refreshed, have more energy and feel really good, sleep really good, and show up in the world with a lot of power.
Why Removing Toxins Comes Before Adding Supplements
John: A lot of people just think, “Well, let me take a pill or let me take some supplements or something like that to help me with this problem that I’m having.” But it sounds like what you’re saying is that we really need to be removing things from the body first as opposed to just adding things in. Is that an accurate way to think of this?
Nammy: That is an accurate way to do things. And the way I look at it is if we’re stuck somewhere, we’ve got to have some release. So we’ve got to first get rid of the toxins out of the mouth. Then there’s stored toxin that’s inside the body and in the cells, we’ve got to loosen them up and then we can flush them out of our system. So that has to be done. It’s a three-step process. Most people think, let me take a supplement and I’m fine. And actually that’s not the case. We have to first identify which toxins you have. Secondly, we have to get rid of the source. Then we immobilize, get them out of the cells, and then let’s coop, pee, sweat it out. And so we get them out of our system. And we do it in that three-step process so that it’s predictable, long-lasting, and again, getting the source so you’re not dealing with this over and over and over again.
Because sometimes patients will say, “Oh yeah, I had Lyme a few years ago and now I have Lyme again, or I have the symptoms of it, or I had mercury toxicity and I saw it really great, but then I have it again now.” So if we follow the sequence, we’re able to make sure the flow of traffic or the flow of toxins is out of the body consistently because that is how we live long.
Regenerative Dentistry and Mitochondrial Energy
John: What do we mean by regenerative dentistry and what does that have to do with the energy levels?
Nammy: So regenerative dentistry is your body fixing itself. We want your own body fixing itself because we want to get rid of the toxins. Obviously that’s one way to help get out of the way so the body is designed to fix itself. For example, we have cancer cells on a daily basis. Now, those cancer cells normally get cleaned out of our system because our immune system is naturally good at doing this. The only time it has problems doing it is because we’re overloaded in toxins. So our body doesn’t have the ability to clean them out and that’s what leads to diseases. So what we want to do is constantly clean out the body, clean out the bacteria, clean out all the toxins so that it can heal and it can regenerate. The way it regenerates is going to be get rid of the toxins, now add some nutrients in.
Let’s add some nutrients in that my body needs. Do I have my trace minerals? Do I have enough selenium? Do I have enough vitamin B? Do I have all the resources my body needs in order to regenerate? Sometimes do I need to be supplemented with regenerative materials like PRP or PRF where we take the blood and spin it down into our centrifuge, take the good stuff, the healing mechanisms, and inject it into our gums to help it heal faster. Do we need to do something like that to be able to help regenerate? And that’s what we mean by regenerative dentistry or regeneration of health, regeneration of tissue, regeneration of natural tissue using natural modalities.
A Chronic Fatigue Patient Story
John: Can you talk about a patient who came to you with chronic fatigue symptoms and talk a little bit about how you figured out that the problem really originated in their mouth and what was the process of treating them and the results?
Nammy: So I’ll talk about my patient, Julie. And this was many years ago. I would say it’s been about 15 years since we started working together. Now, Julie came in and she was sensitive to everything. She was literally sensitive to light. She was sensitive to foods. She was sensitive to her environment. She didn’t expose to mold. So she had a lot of things that were going on. And so when I first saw her, I looked inside her mouth and of course her airway actually was okay, which is really interesting. Her gums were not. So we fixed her gums to make sure that the bacteria was removed properly. Then the next thing we started looking at hidden infections. We started seeing that she had a lot of mercury fillings in her mouth that needed to come out. She needed cavitation surgery to make sure she got rid of dead bone when she had her wisdom teeth out.
And we got rid of all of these toxins and all of these bacteria. Then what we did is we started working with her to make sure that she had enough vitamins in her system and minerals in her system. Vitamin C especially, because mold, as I mentioned earlier, she had mold toxicity, which takes a long time to get out of the system. And so we needed to get the metal out of her body so that everything else can release. She was on vitamin C. She was on charcoal. She was on red light therapy. She was on ozone. So all these different things. But doing the cavitation surgery, getting the gums cleaned up, she didn’t have failed root canals, which was really nice, but getting rid of all of those things, we noticed a difference in her in six months. It took six months because she had the mold.
It took some time. It was not an overnight thing, but what we saw in six months is that she was able to come into the office without anxiety. She was able to take her sunglasses off that she used to wear all day, every day, even on a cloudy day. And she was walking to the office. She was smiling. She had quality of life. She was very happy and her blood results also showed it. Her energy also showed that she was feeling good. She had gone back to work because she was on disability. So she took … Now she was able to go back to work and she actually started a nonprofit, which was really awesome to hear about as well. And so it was really nice to see Julie really heal from the inside out and really do this in a most comprehensive way and working with professionals who really can help her in a way that is … And she was like 26 or something like that.
When I saw her, so it’s a big difference because sometimes we only think illnesses in old people, but actually illness does not care. Toxins don’t care what age you’re at. Toxins just care how much of them are in your body. The older we become, there’s more of them because it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, but to see them so young and to be able to change your life is really awesome. So I’m really delighted to share that story.
Energy Takeaways From Biological Dentistry
John: So sum this up for us, what would be the three takeaways that you’d want people to know about energy levels and what your type of dentistry can do for that?
Nammy: Well, number one, with energy levels, there are hidden infections that need to be looked at specifically. They need to be scrutinized. What is inside the mouth? Are there dead bone? Is there dead teeth? Is there bacteria? Is the airway off? There is something that’s hidden inside the mouth that has not been considered. Is there mercury that’s leaking? Is there an old crown or mold metal crowns that are leaking? So there are many sources of hidden infections inside the mouth, so it’s absolutely important that it gets tested and it gets evaluated by an expert who knows these protocol has been working with it for a long, long time.
John: All right. Well, that’s really great information, Dr. Nammy. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Nammy: Absolutely.
John: And for more information about green dentistry, you can visit the website at sfgreendentist.com or call 415-433-0119.
