Peter Attia· MD
it's the enamel and then underneath the enamel you have uh the cement and then you the dentin sorry the tentine and then i have the pulp and the cement is everything part of the peridone tune but this three layers of of the tooth itself they the enamel protects the underneath layers the second one that you see it's just like cushion and has a lot of tubules as well so it's hypersensitive um and then the heart of the truth is actually the pope so it's high you see a lot of nerves and they all connect to the body that's why you have a lot of tooth pain is one of the most detrimental type of pains that we have because you have all those nerves connecting everywhere and then you have the bone as well and the ligaments around the roots they protect it's that cushion that protects against the impact and it gives that gives you all that biological symbiotic so you can chill and you can function but why is it that we need a nervous uh connection to the tooth because it i understand that like if you had a dental implant obviously you've given up the nerve and vascular supply to the tooth correct so we can still we can still carry out the function of breakdown without that or well well uh so the first signs when you have of those loss right for example you start with educate and then if decay takes the pope then you have to excise the pope and you can still preserve the root so the main uh thing that we think the way we want to think in dentistry is that you want to preserve health as much as you want because you want to preserve function so you don't want to extract teeth because cheat they have a very precise reason because they need to hold this face you need to chill there's a lot of of things that uh that's part of the mouth so you need to have the jeep so you can do a root canal or if you don't have any more the crown because you lost to the decay you can take it out the ground you can put some metals and then you can put an artificial crown at the moment that you lose is infected and you have to extract the whole tooth then you need to put the implants on but not that implants is better it will never be better than your natural function in your teeth because it's a metal and it has many other issues and you still have periodontitis which is infection of the implant it doesn't mean that oh i'm going to take my teeth out and i would never gonna get inflammation periodontal disease right it's not true you still have that so i think my question is more that if you have an implant and therefore you have a denervated tooth it seems to still be able to carry out the function of breaking down food i think the thing i'm trying to understand is you pointed out something that unfortunately most people listening to this can relate to which is dental pain is some of the worst pain in the world and it speaks to i think that highly highly innervated pulp that you showed i'm trying to understand what the function is of having something so highly innervated like for example our fingers are highly innervated because they serve such an important function our ability to have fine motor control with our fingers is why we have so much innervation here so why is it that we have so much innervation in a surface beneath this enamel which as you said is the hardest surface in the body what what is the purpose that that innervation serves that's an interesting question uh it's the viral part of the truth um that preserves blood flow and uh and keeps the truth alive uh and it's a connection uh i now that i'm thinking through it's how you protect so it's a connection with your immune response if you have let's say if you have a caries infection so probably that's how your body might be able to respond and fight against infection inflammation so the moment you don't have there anymore so it's just a i see i see that's a good point so you're saying that's what i think now that we're talking about so maybe it serves as such an early warning indicator as a breach of uh