Dr. David Hanle of Complete Health Dentistry of the Emerald Coast will be the first to tell you he takes a different approach to dentistry than traditional dentist offices. While every dentist cares about the health of your teeth, gums and mouth, Dr. Hanle seeks to bring his patients to the root cause of their health problems by informing them of the many ways their mouth affects their overall health and wellness.
"My life changed in 2018 when I was at a lecture and was introduced to how oral bacteria affected people systemically,” Dr. Hanle said. “I thought, ‘I can’t go back to work doing what I was doing knowing what I know now.’ Since that time, I have been on a journey to optimize oral and airway health to improve whole-body health; that’s what we do at my practice.”
Dr. Hanle explained that what he learned during the lecture became personal to him, as he discovered that his wife had genetic health markers that were impacting her drastically and needed to be addressed to stop their effects. Wanting to learn all he could about how oral health could help reduce and prevent major diseases in the body, Dr. Hanle said he began a journey to redefine his life’s work.
“The problems affecting my wife became my why,” said Dr. Hanle. “I’ve now turned from working in my practice to working on my practice.”
Dr. Hanle explained that when problems arise in one part of the body, it can affect other parts of the body as well; this is why he takes a whole-body approach to oral wellness, considering each patient’s medical history as well as the bacteria levels in their mouth to find the best care plan.
“I try to optimize people’s oral and nasal environment to improve their health in the entire body,” he said. “From what takes place through your microbiome in the mouth to the airway and how you breathe. I try to inform my patients on how that all supports your body and how those things work together.”
One of Dr. Hanle’s unique approaches is to use laser technology to help restructure the oral passages for better breathing. This non-invasive procedure can help patients with snoring problems, as well as those who suffer from sleep apnea. The soft tissue laser treats the soft palate by helping with tissue rejuvenation. The laser treatment stimulates the production of collagen helping to firm and shrink the damaged tissue, making it more elastic and resistant to collapse.
"As a dentist, I can recognize physical signs of potential systemic problems in the oral and airway passages,” he said. “We also have 3D imaging to look at bone and soft tissue structures of the head and neck that give us structural clues to whole body problems.”
Complete Health Dentistry of the Emerald Coast is also proud to be one of only 50 providers in the U.S. to offer the ReCode program which focuses on Alzheimer’s prevention and early intervention.
"My goal with all of my patients is to reduce and eliminate oral bacteria that are systemically pathogenic, as those bacteria can create or worsen systemic diseases such as heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Hanle.
Dr. Hanle believes the whole-body oral health approach he is now using in his practice needs to be offered more widely and talked about among more doctors and providers as an option for their patients.
“Dentistry has been separated from medicine for a while now, but everything is connected,” he said. “The mouth is connected to the rest of the body, so what happens in the mouth happens to the rest of the body. If you don’t address everything, it is hard to solve anything. We are at the forefront of this root-cause medical process. This is the future of dentistry.”
Complete Health Dentistry of the Emerald Coast is located at 1115 Eglin Pkwy in Shalimar. To find out more about the practice or to set up a consultation call 850-651-2199 or visit completehealth-dentistry.com.
