“I got attacked every single time from the podium,” says Dr Dominik Nischwitz, recalling how conventional dentists responded to his early conference lectures. “If they’d had tomatoes, they probably would have thrown them at me. Or spat at me.”

That was the price Nischwitz, author of It’s All in Your Mouth, founder of DNA Health & Aesthetics and one of biological dentistry’s best-known international advocates, says he paid for questioning some of his profession’s accepted practices.

The hostility began when he presented research about the possible health effects of root-canal-treated teeth. After his lectures, dentists would line up to challenge him. “You’re just a young guy. You’re talking bullshit. I’ve been doing root canals for 45 years.”

Then, in 2019, a local newspaper article about his book triggered what he describes as a nationwide “shitstorm” in Germany. According to Nischwitz, dentists sent letters to the paper, called his clinic and reported him to professional bodies. He received personal threats. His pregnant wife was abused on Instagram. A laboratory technician stopped working with him after other dentists threatened to withdraw their business. There was even talk of taking away his licence.

“It felt like a dark cloud over everything,” he says. “It was pretty brutal.”

What provoked such fury was Nischwitz’s argument that dentistry should stop treating the mouth as an isolated repair shop. Biological dentistry still repairs damaged teeth, but it also considers how dental materials, root-canal-treated teeth and unhealed extraction sites might affect the immune system, nervous system and wider body.

Parts of that mouth-body connection are well established. Others, particularly the clinical significance and treatment of jawbone cavitations, remain contested.

If Nischwitz is right, however, oral health may be one of the last overlooked frontiers of health optimisation. He argues that hidden dental problems can contribute to chronic inflammation, migraine-like pain and complex health complaints that do not feel obviously dental.

Even Peter Diamandis, the longevity entrepreneur and XPRIZE founder who measures and optimises almost every aspect of his biology, eventually underwent extensive treatment with Nischwitz. And if someone like Diamandis could overlook what was happening inside his mouth, most of us probably have no idea what is happening inside ours.

We sat down with Dr Nischwitz, also known as Dr Dome, to discuss what biological dentistry actually is, why conventional dentists have fought his ideas so fiercely, what may be hiding inside your jawbone.

What is the worst thing that you have ever seen in someone’s mouth?

You cannot even imagine what I’ve seen. Literally destruction. From previous dental repair — loose teeth, smell. Actually the worst is the smell. You cannot really describe it without seeing it, but it smells like the sewer. So bad. It burns in your nose.

And what you see is puffy, inflamed gum, bluish, loose teeth, pus coming out, infection sites, metals, full of calculus, rotten.

And what I’ve also seen is stuff inside a jawbone, which is insane. Such as cavitation pockets, sometimes this big, four teeth in a row, all mushy. It looks a little bit tumorous.

I think the biggest one I’ve seen was about four centimetres long by the complete width of the jawbone and about one and a half centimetres deep. I needed to place so much bone graft and stuff inside. That was probably the biggest.

And also you see stuff in there. You find old metal pieces from root canal removal or from wisdom tooth removal. You find broken tooth tips. It’s insane what you find.

How do you get to it in the first place? What are you actually doing when you get in there?

It’s below gum line, so it’s in the jawbone. What you have to do is make the bone visible. You need to inject a little bit so that the gum is numb. And then you just open it. You need a scalpel for that, and then you open it very gently.

And then what we do is we use piezo surgery to make a lid. We open the cortical part of the bone, because mostly in the lower jaw the outside of your jawbone is cortical bone, so it’s pretty hard and dense, and usually the body was able to build that. So you have to open it. But already while you open it with the little micro saw, you fall inside. And then you just lift it out, and underneath you see this fatty lump and tissue.

It’s just not bone. If you know how bone looks — bone is white, spongy. And there’s no bone in there. There might be dead bone particles and tissue, and fatty tissue especially.

So what’s it supposed to be? What would peak health look like?

Usually when you would do a lid in the jawbone, you can’t do a lid. The jawbone is solid bone. Inside would be not the same cortical dense bone, but it’s called spongy bone. Imagine like a sponge. It looks like a little trabecular structure. 

And what you see in there instead is no bone. This is the classic definition of a cavitation. A cavitation is just a layman’s term. So it’s ischemic bone disease, it’s NICO, neuralgia-inducing cavitational osteonecrosis. And I think Johann Lechner described it best — something called FDOJ, fatty degenerative osteonecrotic jawbone. So this is basically dead bone. Necrosis means it’s dead.

And those are typically a few bone particles swimming around or sticking in there. But the rest is this fatty tissue, which is chronic inflammation. And oftentimes this fatty tissue is literally yellow. Sometimes it’s also greenish, greyish, because there’s heavy metals inside and all the different things, and mould spores. So it’s nasty. You can even smell in there.

So somebody might have a bit of their jawbone just decaying and dying. Is that right?

Exactly. Everyone when I opened this beforehand, they had teeth removed. So you don’t just open any jawbone, you open jawbone where you have hollow space or holes. And usually when you extract teeth, the body builds the bone back. However, oftentimes the body is not prepared.

So that’s why we call these cavitations in layman’s terms. Just essentially wounds that never healed. It’s like the construction site that never got finished. 

The problem is if the body was not in a healing mode whilst the surgery occurred, at one point it stops. And then there’s no more reactivation, because it just got abandoned. And then it becomes ischemic. That means there’s no more oxygen in there. There’s no more life in there. And it gets necrotic. And then bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, all these different entities — especially the ones that love to be without oxygen — they thrive in there. It’s kind of like their breeding ground.

What instrument have you got in your hand at this point, and what does that actually feel like?

When I go in, I’m using a piezo surgery. Piezoelectric, in simple terms, is kind of like ultrasound. It’s a very nasty sound, but it’s just vibration and oscillation.

So I go inside. I try to find the epicentre. And then I try to find the middle. And as soon as I go through cortical, I fall in there. I already feel it’s empty, it’s empty. Whatever is in there, I don’t know yet, because from a cone beam scan I only know there’s no bone. I don’t know if it’s hollow, I don’t know if it’s fatty, I don’t know if it’s whatever else in there, but it’s definitely not solid.

So I fall in there and then I open the lid and then I have to clean it. Essentially what I have to do is clean it out again and reactivate the wound. So instead of a chronic inflammation, we make it acute again by using piezo surgery, by cleaning it with hand instruments. We don’t use any rotating instruments. So very gentle to remove, because there are anatomical structures in there that we do not want to hurt, such as your nerve. But we have a cone beam scan, we know exactly what to do.

What are you actually taking out? What is that substance?

You can imagine I’m taking out a couple of bone particles. Sometimes — you remember when you’re a kid and there’s this game where you have a water bucket and there are fish, and you have a rod with a magnet on top where you fish these tiny things out? This is the way you see it. You fish tiny bone particles out of there.

But most of the time you literally can suck it out with the suction, because there are liquids in there, or fat, fat tissue you can suck up. So it’s like a liposuction kind of thing.

At that point, what is that smell like?

It’s a little bit like compost. It’s a little bit like death, that smell to it. I would say it stings in your nose. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s definitely not healthy. And if you smell close to it, it’s pretty nasty. But I try to avoid it. It smells like something rotten because it’s rotten in there. It’s necrotic tissue. It’s dead.

And people are potentially reading this with that going on in their jawbone, right?

Yeah, exactly. I would say if you had your wisdom teeth pulled or any tooth pulled, in most cases your body was not prepared and ended up having a wound that never healed. So yes.

And the problem is, because it was acute at the beginning and then it never healed, it doesn’t hurt anymore. So it’s a chronic silent jawbone inflammation. This you don’t feel. Usually not. But there are people that feel it. That would be the diagnosis of a NICO — neuralgia inducing. So if for whatever reason you have neuralgic pain, which is more like migraine or sharp pains in your head. That’s quite rare. But this is how they discovered it in the first place. Some people have this. They feel it, but they don’t really feel it here. They just have sharp pains in their head, because it’s referred pain. Why? Because it’s directly connected to that nerve, the trigeminus.

Would I be right in saying that traditional dentistry is not looking for those cavitations, and not attempting to solve that health issue?

That’s correct. I would say a cavitation is also something that not every holistic or biological dentist knows about.

You could literally look into a couple of my comments on Instagram, a lot of them, where dentists are usually the ones defending themselves, that this is all quackery, and that it’s bullshit, and that that’s something biological dentists want to sell.

Why is that? So, first of all, not necessarily a biological dentist knows about cavitations. And in dentistry it’s not included in the curriculum. In the university, you don’t learn about cavitations yet. Even though they’re existing for ages and they’re described as ischemic bone disease, probably for the last 50 years or so. It’s just not part of the curriculum.

And oftentimes, if you find new things or you don’t know about it, most people react with denial and anger instead of curiosity. Because what if it is actually correct and it’s there?

So luckily at this point of time we have a few people that are studying this for a long time, such as my friend Johann Lechner. […] He studied it, and his particular interest is in a specific immune chemokine that they find in there.

And luckily, since I think four to five years, a good friend of mine, Professor Shahram Ghanaati, he is from the University of Frankfurt. When I met him, he said it’s bullshit. He is a maxillofacial surgeon, so he’s like, nah, that is quackery. But he is open-minded enough to say, okay, wait a second, what if it’s not?

And he just published a paper, I think last year, where he was able to demonstrate that after every tooth extraction — and specifically he used premolars, which are the two teeth right behind your canines — could show that after extraction something in the jawbone doesn’t heal.

If you had a dentist who thought cavitations were fictitious standing next to you in surgery, and you open up the jawbone and you see this rotting, decaying, fatty substance that you extract — what do they think is happening? 

I have no idea what happens in their mind. I have seen people see it like you just described in real life and then deny it afterwards anyway. And tell you that is just normal anatomy. And I’m like, what?

Why should this be normal anatomy? In spongy bone, there’s not supposed to be fat in there. So I have no idea.

I think this comes back to the current mindset of people. There are people with an open mind and they’re curious to see something changing. And there are just people in a fixed mindset. And I think it goes back to fear, or never wanting to change a winning team, or having the insecurity to say maybe I did something wrong in the past.

I have no idea what’s in their mind. It’s hard for me to put myself into their shoes because I’m the complete opposite. I love if someone tells me, hey, there’s a better way to do this, or there’s something new — I’m the first person to jump on it and go deep into it and find out everything about it. So it’s hard for me to understand.

How far away from where it should be is conventional dentistry? 

I think what we are doing is a complete new profession. It has literally nothing to do with conventional dentistry, besides the fact that we are doing conventional dentistry too, on the highest level, which is just the repair business. Of course we’re still repairing the teeth with the best possible technology, from digital to implantology, and using the best materials. That is the only thing where we overlap.

Besides this, whatever I’m talking about when it comes to whole body health, you do not learn a little tiny bit in dentistry. It’s a completely outdated system. So dentists do not know what they’re missing.

So the problem is, if you send me a conventional dentist in my clinic, they wouldn’t understand what I’m doing. They don’t even understand that what they are doing in the mouth might even remotely affect the whole body. So it’s a huge knowledge gap, not necessarily a technical gap.

But in university, dentistry is more like a repair business. And you mostly focus on learning chemistry and about the materials you’re using. Who is really interested in the alloy percentages of a metal that you’re going to install in someone’s mouth? That is how you study dentistry. Has nothing to do with health of the body.

This is what always during university was missing for me. I didn’t know what it was, but I was missing that I’m a doctor that can help patients heal overall. And there is this one saying, who heals is right. That is what a doctor has to do. And we actually have that oath. Dentists and medical doctors study the same. So we study medicine. It’s just instead of becoming an endocrinologist, we become a dentist. So we are only focusing on the teeth for repairing. But we swear the oath that we do no harm. And we essentially harm a lot.

So who benefits from things staying as they are? Because it doesn’t seem like the patient is benefiting at all.

No. The patient — and this is what hurts my soul — the patient is not benefiting at all, and the patient suffers out there with a multitude of health issues.

And the problem is again, it’s not the dentist that doesn’t want to help their patients. I think it’s because they studied it in a specific way, they think they’re just a dentist and they only focus on filling holes and maybe making it look nice. That’s it. And the same for medicine. They are so used to following rules and protocols that they do not think for themselves anymore. But luckily there is this global health movement that shifts everything.

What was the first time you encountered criticism or objection to something you thought or did in dentistry?

That started very, very soon, because of my own health issues. That already started at the beginning of university. I was always a little bit of an outlier because I was trying to focus on different things, on my health.

About a year after university I was already giving courses for implantology, and I started to teach on stage about biological dentistry very soon. When I was very young — let’s say about when I was about 30 years old, I was already teaching. So very young, on stages with most of the lecturers more in their 40s, 50s, 60s. And I got attacked instantly, because of course I chose topics that were fascinating for me.

I didn’t realise back then that they would attack dentists. I was invited to speak on a conventional dental podium, big conferences about ceramic implants, and my first topic I was speaking about was root canals — the potential overall health issues of root canal treated teeth. I wrote an article about this. No one wanted to print it back then. One paper did actually, and online, and it was the most read article. So that led me to start these courses.

And as soon as I gave a speech on a conventional podium — that was really researched, I was presenting medical studies and really building towards it, and just wanted to explain to them, hey, wait a second, root canals might have some serious health issues that could be overlooked and maybe your patients are suffering — I got attacked every single time from the podium. There was not one time that I wasn’t standing after my lecture for another 30 minutes being drilled down by the whole audience, by these supposed-to-be-neutral people on stage, the moderators and stuff.

It was quite uncomfortable. I left the weekend with a very bad feeling of attack, of emotions — because I got attacked emotionally, not scientifically. It was all just emotional. How can you do this? You just young guy, you’re talking bullshit. I’m doing root canals for 45 years, I’ve never seen such a thing. They literally got angry with me. If they would have had tomatoes or apples, they would probably throw that at me or spit at me.

So I just stopped giving these open courses, because it was no fun. It didn’t make any sense anymore.

Luckily I learned this, and then I wrote a book. It’s called It’s All in Your Mouth. And it came out in 2019 in Germany, and then in 2020 in America. So 2019, when this book dropped, I gave an interview to the local newspaper — the local newspaper obviously interviews every single one in their town that writes a book as an author.

And I’d had my little experience with dentists, so at the end of this interview I just told them, please do not criticise my colleagues, only just inform. Because I already knew from being on stage that you cannot criticise dentists or medical doctors. They have too high of an ego. They take it personal.

Unfortunately — the article was a nice article, the headline was “a dentist that hit a nerve”, I like that one — but the subtitle was essentially saying Nischwitz criticises all his dental colleagues, dentistry, and the complete university programme.

And then I was lost. I was fried. You cannot imagine. The local newspaper got letters — like a thousand, like 10 letters every single day, from dentists. Calls to the clinic, emails to the clinic, personal threat emails, personal threat Instagram messages, even to my wife, from local dentists. That was insane, man. That was literally a shitstorm.

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Unfiltered has examined the underlying claims separately: whether root canals are safe, what the science says on root canals and autoimmune disease, whether dental infections can cause chronic illness, and the symptoms of hidden dental infections.

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You mentioned your wife being attacked. What happened there?

The tip of the whole thing was that a maxillofacial surgeon from another town personally attacked my wife on Instagram. Stuff like this. I think he wrote something along those lines like, your nasty face couldn’t even be solved with Botox and plastic surgery. Very emotional, bad things.

And the problem was also at the same time — of course, because those are my colleagues — they would write to the local bodies and they were telling me they want to take my licence away. The university collects cases against you. And I realised there were whole dental forums about me personally, and whole WhatsApp groups in the university, because I was also teaching dentists on Instagram and showing my daily business there.

And then over the next six months I probably had a love letter, in exclamation marks, from every single professor in the whole university, writing pieces against me, against my book, against whatever I’m saying there. That it’s such bullshit.

And it wasn’t nice back then. I didn’t like it.

When you say it wasn’t nice — most people haven’t been in that situation, and to say it wasn’t nice is a bit of an understatement. What was the toll on you, and on the people around you who care about you?

It was pretty brutal.

My wife actually was, I think she was even pregnant at that time. So she got really scared. And my lab guy, who works with me a lot, he even called me and said, dude, I get so much hate from all the dentists I’m working with, I have to stop working with you, because otherwise they don’t use me anymore for lab technicians, so I lose my job.

You cannot imagine. It felt like a dark cloud over everything. And I got scared a little bit, because obviously I didn’t want to lose my licence. I had little kids to feed, my wife, I had a whole team in a clinic. And I just actually wanted to help people.

Did you have sleepless nights?

Probably had sleepless nights. I mean, I was open-minded. The local newspaper called me — hey, we didn’t expect so much hate coming back to you. Do you want to have an open debate? And I said, yeah, of course, bring everyone. If it’s a really rational scientific podium, of course I’m always happy to discuss. That’s my main goal. Teach it.

No one ever came. No one ever came.

The lawyers told me basically to step down a little bit, to stop my YouTube, to stop all my personal brand activities, to calm the storm down a little bit — which I didn’t like too much, because it killed my vibe completely. And my dad was so afraid, because he’s not used to these things and he hates that. He’s also my business partner in the clinic. So he hated it. He got really scared and afraid.

From the outside, I would call that bullying and worse. Intimidating. Trying to undermine your business, threatening people who work with you, going to members of your family to be hateful to them. That’s pretty vicious.

Yeah. It was bad. And like I said, even my lab guy. At one point I was like, okay, he’s just a weak man. I understand why he doesn’t want to work with me anymore, because if he loses business over me, I can understand. I didn’t like the integrity part there.

But you see who your friends are at these moments.

Did anyone else who you thought was a friend and a colleague stop speaking to you?

No, my real friends stayed my real friends.

The good thing — I don’t know if that’s my mantra, but I’m always seeing things as they are, not worse than they are. And then I see them better than they are, and then I try to reverse engineer and reframe them. So it took me a while to reframe it. And luckily I used it as a learning. I took a step back and looked at what I’m doing.

And I realised the biggest fear of every person is probably the fear of change, and I’m a young guy threatening their existence. So I understand why they come out of their little holes and attack me.

Did I like it? No. But I also realised it wasn’t bad for what I’m doing, because it gave me a lot of press. It gave me a hard time, but it also helped the movement. It didn’t help them. It actually helped me with my ideas, because you know how it is. At first you get ridiculed, then you get fought, and then they use your protocols.

Are you still having to deal with people saying things about you?

First of all, that was a learning for me. And I realised it has nothing to do with me. So I didn’t take it personally. I just saw it for what it is and made the best out of it.

At one point my social media community took over. And whenever there’s someone in there hating, they fight them off. And I realised these keyboard warriors — no one ever came to me in person, because they’re just so afraid. And they probably deep down know that I’m right, that we can change something.

I’m teaching globally a lot of dentists, and especially in America there’s still a lot of attack. You can see this on my Instagram. Also here in Germany, the dental profession didn’t really evolve yet. I’m still in the bubble. And I know that a lot of my trainees or students, they’re always still afraid. But I’m always encouraging them to say, hey guys, it probably cannot be worse than what I’ve endured already.

And this is why I’m working on a Biodentistry Global Standard. Because biological dentistry — to be fair for conventional dentists, I understand why they’re attacking it, because oftentimes a biological dentist doesn’t have the skills of a conventional dentist. So I understand it, and I took my lessons out of it.

And I’m known as the biggest — the biggest conspiracy theorist in the whole dental world, so I can say whatever I want anyway. And the good thing is, I have a huge network of dentists, the good dentists, because I’m a speaker and lecturer for more than a decade. And none of these dudes that attacked me have ever written an article, have ever written a book, have ever presented a case in front of other dentists. So they’re not even there, they’re not in the arena, so don’t even care about them. That’s just dogs barking.

Let’s look at the impact that what’s going on in your mouth can have on your whole body health. For example, metals in the mouth — why do you have a problem with metal fillings?

Dentists are very creative to fix holes and restore. But a lot of the things we’re using are from past centuries. In the nineteen hundreds maybe there were only metals, so there was no better solution. And the trade-off was obviously to use mercury fillings, to use gold fillings, to use whatever helps to restore bite, which is the main focus.

However, ever since I finished university, we do not really need metals anymore. For implants it came a bit later, but more than 15 years now ceramic implants are available. So it is possible to restore a bite in every single hole with material that is non-metal.

And for metals, you have to just understand: it works for biting, not a doubt. However, we use materials such as mercury in these black silver amalgam fillings, that is a neurotoxin. It’s the most toxic non-radioactive element known to man. And we have to dispose of it as high toxic waste. So this just makes no sense. I cannot, by a good feeling, put this in other people’s mouths.

So once a mercury filling is out of the mouth it becomes toxic waste. But somehow it’s fine in my mouth. That seems absolutely crazy.

This is how my mind works. This is what I thought when I learned about it.

This is, like you said, first principle thinking. Hey, this is toxic stuff. And in parts per million it destroys tubulin, so nerve cells in your body. It’s neurotoxic.

And what’s the consequence of that over time?

This is the problem. There’s even a medical disease called Mad Hatter syndrome. If you are chronically exposed to mercury vapours, you get mad. And I’m showing all these studies in my online courses — that especially the dentists themselves and the assistants, they are the ones with the highest mercury exposure, because they’re drilling it out and these toxic events happen sometimes a couple of times a day. And you can find studies showing that the pituitary gland of dentists is loaded with mercury, affecting the complete hormonal cascade, clear thinking and everything.

Maybe that’s why they reacted how they did.

Actually, to be fair, 10 years ago I used this as a joke. But then there’s also gold. People will ask, but what about gold? I removed my mercury fillings in the 80s, now I have gold. Gold is also a problem for your immune system.

But besides the toxicity of a metal, we also have the immune system component to it. So we know that your body and your immune system can become allergic to every metal. Number one is nickel. We know that. That’s why oftentimes nickel is not allowed anymore, let’s say in jewellery. But oftentimes you find nickel in dental material, because below 1% dental material companies do not even have to tell you what’s in it. So you don’t even know what’s in there. That is just a company liability thing.

And then number three for metals is always the receiver antenna, the electrosmog component — that every metal in the body, in this loaded world, is going to be an antenna.

When you get into the idea of metal in your mouth being an antenna, you’re also in the same area as some sort of conspiracy theorist ideas. How do we separate the fact from the fiction there? 

Yeah, completely. If you hear that, it sounds woo-woo completely.

But then you have to go back — we study physics and chemistry in dentistry, so we have solid foundations in these realms. We know how radio stations work. We need an antenna to receive. That’s usually a metal. And then you receive some sort of electromagnetic waves. We know that this is how cell phone towers work. Is that correct? That is science.

So we know that whatever metal you have in your body or on your body — could be a piercing, could be a titanium implant, could be a metal filling, whatever — it will attract more of these electromagnetic waves and amplify those. That’s the role of metal.

So for this you have to go a bit deeper and not just look into dental sciences, because there’s no study showing these effects. You could, for example, look into a condition called electrohypersensitivity, which is a medical condition. And this is that people literally get sensitive when they are in a Wi-Fi zone or if they have too much electricity around them, especially if they have more metals inside their body, because it’s just hyper-oscillating and more receiver stations.

Is this easy to demonstrate in research? It’s almost impossible, because you cannot have a double-blind placebo control study for this. You have to do multifactorial things. […]

And the problem here is, why are we allowed to put metals and stuff inside your mouth or on your teeth or in your jawbone? Because these fillings and crowns are classified as devices. Kind of like this is a device. Your glasses are devices. They’re essentially outside the body. And everything that’s outside of your body, or lying on top of your tooth outside of your body, does not need to have a toxicological report with it.

So you have to think outside the box and do not just look in dentistry. In dentistry you might not find the studies.

So what you’re doing is analysing the situation, breaking it down and saying, we know how this behaves, we know how that behaves, and piecing together the information to understand the potential impact. At the same time, there isn’t the literature to directly support that, because it’s almost impossible to study. So if I’m somebody who won’t agree without a suitably strong academic study, that’s where we part company. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, completely correct. And you also need to have such a big understanding of complex things that are not one thing at a time.

You have to understand a big picture of how a body completely works, from the nervous system. If you understand the autonomic nervous system, if you understand the hormone cascade, the stress axis, the hypothalamus-pituitary axis, if you understand deep level intercellular chemistry and detoxification, if you understand all these biochemical intricacies — then we’re talking.

And this is why I have all this information, my complete last 15 years of teaching, condensed down to a 10-hour software update. I call it my online courses. We need to speak the same language, because we’re dentists but I’m not another dentist. If you present me to a normal dentist, we can’t talk. We can talk about a veneer, yes. We can talk about a composite filling. But can we talk about what I’m laying out about whole body health? No, because they’re missing the knowledge gaps in between.