Dr Jacques Imbeau, an integrative dental and natural medicine practitioner, joins me today. He is one of New Zealand's leading integrative health practitioners, with a mindset that addressing oral health improves a person's general health and wellbeing. Jacques' approach is about working with each individual person to find the best treatment for them to improve their health and wellbeing.

Selected Links from Episode

Dr. Jacques Imbeau website

Australasian Holistic Dentistry Summit

Unstress episode with Dr Lewis Ehrlich on oral health

Unstress episode with Dr Steven Lin on the dental diet

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Oral health. Well, I include oral health or dental stress in my stress model. I'd do it for two reasons. One, as a dentist I feel qualified to talk about it and two, I included for anyone with the mouth who is interested in their health and has never fully connected the two. If you are not taking your oral health seriously, you should because your body already does.

Well, my guest today is Dr. Jacques Imbeau. Now Jacques is the Director of The Integrative Dental and Natural Health Centre in New Zealand where he practices as a dentist and a natural medicine practitioner with a specific interest in integrative dental and natural health. He is one of New Zealand's leading integrative dental medicine practitioners and is highly experienced in diagnosis and treatment of oral diseases with a mindset that it will inevitably have a flow-on effect in improving a person's general health and well-being. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Jacques Imbeau.

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Welcome to the show Jacques.

Dr. Jacques Imbeau: Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Jacques it’s so good to be talking to a dentist and also a dentist with as many years’ experience as you. You describe your practice in New Zealand as an integrative practice. I wonder if you could share with our listener a little bit about what that means and your journey to get there.

Dr. Jacques Imbeau: Well, basically the integrative approach is a dynamic ongoing process bridging what people could call mainstream or conventional dental medicine with alternative or complementary dental medicine. It also looks at bridging other health modalities as well. So, it’s about basically working with each person to find the best approach whether it is conventional, complementary, alternatives in a whole person focus.

So, it is holistic, but it is a process. So, it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but it is certainly looking for them.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Now when we went through that wasn’t really… I mean we were so preoccupied with the mind you sure of what we do you know, the finickness and the technical challenges of which there are many and but where you’re at now is quite a journey. What prompted that change?

Dr. Jacques Imbeau: Well, basically you probably you’ve been through the same journey to some extent. You go to dental school and you’re told what you have to do and what we have to learn, and you need to do what you’re told because you will not graduate. Once you have graduated and then you become fully responsible for your choices and your actions you start to realise that every person that you treat doesn’t necessarily react the same way to the same treatment. In other words, you are using a protocol that you’ve been told to use when have a diagnosis and then you follow the recommended protocol. Some patients respond quite well others not so well. So, you start to ask yourself what’s going on and then you look further, and you can discover that the lot of things that you were not taught at dental school. And some of those things are deemed controversial and then when you start to look into them you realise there’s a lot more to it than people think there is. In other words,