Dr. Lewis Ehrlich, holistic dentist, health coach, personal trainer and former professional footballer, joins me to chat about the Australian Government's Oral Health Tracker and the alarmingly statistics that it showed about the current state of Australian oral health. We chat about taking your oral health seriously, oral cancer, children's oral health, how few Australians are brushing their teeth and why pain is not a good indication that you need to see the dentist.

Selected Links from the Episode

Dr. Lewis Ehrlich

Sydney Holistic Dental Centre

Oral Health Tracker

Oral Health in America: US Surgeon General Report

Unstress episode with Dr Ross Walker on cardiovascular health

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                  Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Now being a health practitioner brings with it huge responsibilities and every single practitioner I know takes those responsibilities really seriously. Now I'm in a very fortunate position to work in a group practice and people come up to our surgery in the centre of the Sydney CBD and its beautiful space, we're very proud of it, it's a great environment in which to work but the best part of our practice is something which very few people see or experience. It's the five of us dentists share an office and we share our clinical experiences and our observations. We do that regularly and we mentor each other, and we advise each other. It is, it is terrific I have to say.

So, my guest today is one of those partners, Dr. Lewis Ehrlich. And Lewis got the academic medal at University and he is an outstanding clinician. Apart from being a great dentist, he's a holistic health coach, he's a qualified personal trainer, a former professional football player - soccer and he's literally grown up with all these things we discuss on the show on the whole podcast.

Now oral health is becoming a big issue. It's actually always been one but governments and other health professionals and many in the public are now realizing an amazing fact yes, it's apparently a huge breakthrough in health care. The mouth is connected to your body and most importantly is being recognized as the gateway to good health. Well, who would have thought? Actually, we did many, many years ago. But here we are.

Now there's been a lot of publicity lately about oral health because of in Australia what's called the Oral Health Tracker. Now, this was developed in collaboration with the Australian Dental Association, the Australian health policy collaboration and quite a few leading Australian oral health experts. The oral health tracker highlights the link between oral health and preventable chronic diseases such as diabetes conditions and there are lots of other conditions in their risk or risk factors. It's a national report card that sets out oral health improvement targets for all Australians and the tracker shines a spotlight on our current national oral health status which isn't all that impressive I have to say while encouraging everyone especially the nation's leaders which definitely need encouraging to work towards effectively addressing the oral health burden in Australia. It is huge.

Interestingly in the USA, the Surgeon General's report in 2018 or in late 2017 highlighted almost for the first time the importance of oral health. That's 2018 oral health been an issue for quite some time and made the point very importantly that oral health and general health were inseparable. So, this was a great opportunity to take you into our back office more or less and share this conversation I had with one of my partners Dr. Lewis Ehrlich. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Lewis.

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Welcome to the show Lew.

Dr. Lewis Ehrlich:               Thanks for having me on Ron.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                  Lew here we are talking around our… oral health week… Oh, oral health day was only well,