🔗Shownotes Links:
- Dr Jalal Khan’s Practice Details: The Dental Station & The Quantum Kid
- Dr Jalal Khan: Unlocking the Secrets of Quantum Biology: Sun to Earth Transfer
- Dr Jalal Khan & Cole Clayton: Bridging Dentistry & Osteopathy
- The Dental Physician by Dr. A.C. Fonder
YouTube Timestamps (Concise & Key Points):
00:00 – Welcome & Introduction
02:30 – Jalal’s journey into quantum biology & holistic dentistry
06:00 – Listening to patients & rethinking chronic illness
10:40 – Nervous system dysregulation & the mouth
15:00 – The emotional layers of oral health
18:30 – Cranial movement and osteopathy explained
24:00 – Quantum biology 101: light, charge, and nature
30:00 – The jaw-C1 connection & spinal stability
36:00 – Tongue posture, breathing & swallowing
42:00 – Birth trauma, C-sections & cranial vectors
50:00 – NUCCA chiropractic vs cranial work
58:00 – Final thoughts: adapting with humility
Dr Jalal Khan: Oral Health, Your Brain, Breath & Nervous System Balance
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:01] Hi, Dr. Ron here, and I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health Community. Now, like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach to human health and to the health of the planet. The two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q&As on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstress Health Advisory Panel. Now we’ve done hundreds of podcasts all worth listening to, with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership, we have our Unstress Lab podcast series, where we take the best of several guests and carefully curate specific topics for episodes, which are jam-packed full of valuable insights. So join the Unstress Health community. If you are watching this on our YouTube channel click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Well, today I have the pleasure of welcoming back Dr. Jalal Khan. Now, Jalal is the principal dentist of the Dental Station in North Sydney, in Australia. And he’s also the CEO of the Dental Truck, which is an amazing service that he provides. A dental truck that literally visits remote communities in South Queensland. It’s a remarkable. Public service that he performs. He graduated from Sydney University and Jalal loves dentistry because it combines biology, science and art. And Jalal certainly combines all of those. We’ve had him on before talking about quantum biology. I had the pleasure of meeting Jalal about three or four years ago. And I do consider him to be a little bit of a mentor for me as well in that introducing me or reintroducing me to the importance. Of quantum biology, our relationship with light and artificial light. And it’s interesting to also follow his professional journey as well. He works in North Sydney at the Dental Station in collaborating with Cole Clayton, an osteopath. And this is a great collaboration. We had both Cole and Jalal on a previous episode. I’ll have links to both those episodes in the show notes. But today we really re-explore this whole relationship with the cranial bones and dentistry and the potential there. I mean, it’s worth remembering that our heads, our skull, the human skull, is made up of 22 bones in most adults. That’s eight bones that protect the brain, bones like the frontal bone, the temporal bone, the occipital bone. And others, and of course, there are facial bones, 14 facial bones like the maxillary bones, the zygomatic arch. This is a whole anatomy lesson I’m giving you here. But I’m just trying to remind you of the complexity of the bones which make up our head. And many people, many medical practitioners believe that above a certain age, maybe teens or a little bit later that the sutures close up and there’s very little or no more movement in the skull. But that is, I believe, naive at best and actually quite negligent and worst. It is much more subtle than that and that’s what cranial osteopathy is all about. It’s also worth remembering that the only mobile bone in the school is the jaw and the jaw gives stability to the spine. So there’s this whole interrelationship with cranial bones, with your teeth, with the way they fit together. And the impact that that has on a whole range of issues throughout the body and particularly in reestablishing balance, homeostasis and optimal health. This is kind of the subject of today’s podcast. It’s always great to have Jalal back. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Jalal Khan. Welcome back, Jalal.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:04:29] Good to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:32] Jalal, I always like to get people back on, and I particularly like to get you back on because I feel it does me so much good for us to touch base and talk because as a practitioner, we are all on a journey. From the moment we graduate and I often say I only wish I knew as much as I thought I did when I graduated. And what I realised was that was actually the beginning of my journey of education. And I’ve been a holistic dentist for many, many years, over 40 years, and when we met about, I think around four or five years ago, something like that, you introduced me to a whole aspect of health that I kind of had touched on, but hadn’t fully appreciated. Just, I’m really interested to hear your journey from when you graduated into the world of quantum biology and where we’re at up to now.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:05:28] Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I graduated back in 2011 and went straight into general dentistry but always had this curiosity that there was something more to the mouth than just repairing teeth and making sure that the gums were healthy. And so I started to dig into the mouth body connection and, you know, started to appreciate how periodontal disease, gum disease could have an influence on like heart health and brain health. But that still wasn’t enough for me. Then I started to look into the airway side of thing and the postural dentistry side of things and that’s really kind of where things have come through in my practise today. But along the way, I’ve kind of dipped my toes in other areas of holistic health and you remind me of that time when we first met and I was like this, this young gun really passionate about learning. Maybe I’m still young, who knows.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:06:22] You are you are
Dr Jalal Khan [00:06:24] It’s official, you are still young. And I was just younger and I was, you know, talking about quantum biology and electrons and protons and light and I was so excited about it because it was something which was completely new to me, really resonated with me and I remember saying to you that like, Ron, this is like, this is foundational to health, like if you don’t have this right, like what’s the point of everything else? And you had that wise smile about And let that one go through to the keeper, so to speak, if we use some cricketing terminology. But you always reminded me to kind of keep an open mind and keep your curiosity, which I’m always grateful for. And that the last three or four years has been a really interesting journey because I mean, I’ve spoken on the podcast before about like the importance of light, so we don’t really need to go over that. But it’s been an interesting journey because it’s It has been the journey of listening to my patients and appreciating that, like I know a bit, but I don’t know much, like almost I know nothing. But the body has this infinite wisdom about it, like every compensation that the body has whether it’s a structural compensation or a metabolic compensation is a compensation that the does to survive and to thrive. And it knows what it’s doing. As weird as it may sound, something like diabetes is, in my world, it’s like the body’s doing that on purpose and we just need to understand why and then unpack that. So when I started to approach patients with that mindset, I was playing a lot less kind of instructing and prescribing patients and much more listening and asking them through their history, through the words that they use, through their body language, through their language, what was going on with them. And I started to kind of pick up on little cues and little clues and follow those. And inevitably that would always lead me down to kind unlocking what was the thing that someone really needs, which was more often than not, not me, but was a referral to someone that knew more about. And you know MCAS for instance or you know upper cervical instability and so if you remember
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:08:54] MCAS for our listener is Mast-Cell Activation Syndrome, which we’ve done with Dr. Christabelle Yeoh and spoken about with a couple of our guests, so I’ll make a note of that because I think we should re-release that one. But anyway…
Dr Jalal Khan [00:09:08] And so it’s really been a journey of listening to patients and leaning on them to give me the clues on how to guide them. And that’s been like really, really good for my heart and soul and it’s really restored me back to, you know, humility and open mindedness and open heartedness. And I’ve just come to appreciate now that most people are struggling. Those that are struggling are commonly struggling because I feel their nervous systems are just like really overburdened. And that nervous system overburding can happen because of like a structural issue. It could be four teeth being removed for braces when they were 14 years old. It could a traumatic brain injury or whatever the case is. It can also be an emotional component or it can be a metabolic component or it could be that they’re living out of alignment with like who they really are. And so kind of approaching things from that perspective has been really, really exciting for me because I’ve seen patients who have done everything perfectly from a quantum biology standpoint and nothing has shifted the needle. And so that really forced me to go back to the drawing board. Much like in my previous podcast with you with Cole, our osteopath, when I was trying to expand jaws in craniums that were all locked up, something was missing. So I had to go back to the drawing board and that took me to osteopathy. When I was not winning with like quantum biology recommendations and structural recommendations around manual therapy and dental work, I’m like, what’s missing here? And what I found was missing was like… A lack of appreciation of my part about how much like emotions could have a role in nervous system regulation and loops that people get stuck in when they’re trying to navigate their way through life. And so really my journey has kind of, albeit short and there’s still a long way to go, has been more unlearning and more relearning and an open mindedness and a curiosity towards kind of those four or five key pillars. Which are structure, metabolism, nutrition, environment, electromagnetic frequencies, and then of course, that big emotional component as well.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:11:39] I mean, you know, what a place to be. I know I’ve said this to you many times in our personal communication, but what a great place to at this stage of your career with so much of your a head of you. There’s so much you’ve said there that I just want to unpack. I mean one of my mentors, a doctor who’s written textbooks who used to be President Kennedy and President Johnson’s. Doctor in the White House, Janet Travell, at the age of 92. I spent a week with her in the late 80s and late 1980s and she said to me, if you ask your patients, if you listen to your patients they’ll not only tell you what’s wrong with them but they’ll often tell you how to fix it provided you know which questions to ask and understand what they’re telling you. And I think this humility that you’re expressing and this you know, a ha moment of I need to listen more is such a powerful place to be. I’m really intrigued before we dive into some of those things about, you know the nervous system and all that is the journey of the practitioner as one leaves university with this incredible knowledge and knowing you know so much because so many practitioners continue on that trajectory, don’t they? Without I mean, there’s no shortage of continuing on the status quo. I mean if chronic disease management is what it’s all about, hey, you know, there is a whole industry there to support us, yet some practitioners like yourself, and I would say like myself, choose to look a little differently. What do you think the difference is there? What is, I’m intrigued by why everybody isn’t doing that when they graduate.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:13:27] That’s a really good question and I can only speak for myself, but I just have this thing inside of me that I have to always strive to be the best that I can be for my patients. And that takes a lot of courage I would say because we’re pushing the envelope, we’re pushing the boundaries, we are sticking our necks out so to speak in order to try and find a truth about dentistry or a truth about holistic health, which. Was written many, many years ago, more often than not, but was buried in a textbook in the 1960s. I mean, for instance, like A.C. Fonders book, The Dental Physician, like how old is that book? And if every dentist read that, dentistry would be in a much better place. So there’s that aspect to things as like a drive to do good for patients, to be our best. I also think on a personal level, I just want to be the best that I can be because if I’m doing a half-assed job of something, I’m not satisfied within myself that I’m giving everything I can. That’s why I started to do expanders in children and then stopped after six to nine months because I wasn’t happy with the results. And then two or three years later, found Col eand cranial osteopathy. And then started again.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:56] This is Cole, for our listener that didn’t, and I will actually have that episode in the show notes linked, but Cole Clayton is the cranial osteopath that we did a programme with called, I think it was called the Quantum Kids, and you and Cole worked very closely together in Sydney here, but do go on, yeah.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:15:17] Yeah, so it’s like I’m not afraid to learn and make mistakes and be honest about those mistakes and then be better for it. And I think that’s like something which I wanted to talk about today for anyone listening is like we as holistic health practitioners, like we put a lot on the line to do what we do and be the best that we can be for you. And sometimes that means we… Get misguided along a holistic health modality that after three or six months we realise, okay, that’s not really gonna work. It’s never a mistake with a malicious intent. It’s always a mistake born of curiosity than anything else because we’re doing the best for our patients. And so I think there’s a huge humility to people like yourself and I, Ron, because. We’re okay to make mistakes because I guess is there really such thing as a failure or a mistake or is it a redirection along the path and a lot of clinicians perhaps would find that an uncomfortable place to be because it does mean you have to like look at yourself in the mirror regularly and say who am I, am I stepping up for my patients, am i turning up the way that and I want to. Whereas you can almost get trapped in a level of comfort in the material world as well as in your mind if you’re not stressing your mind and pushing the boundaries. It’s really comfortable to just do the same thing for 40 years, isn’t it? It’s, it’s really easy. But there’s a few of us who are just not born for that. We’ve, we’ve got to make a bigger impact, not for the purpose of legacy, but more so for the purpose of just helping patients.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:06] I also think there’s a curiosity there because, you know, we’re not just on a professional journey. We’re on a personal journey through our own health life and how we approach our own health And my focus in recent years has been on practitioner health. And my goodness, that is just scary when I read the statistics, particularly about mental health in the workplace. So, you know, we as practitioners are on a personal journey and on a professional journey. And when you’re in health care, those two are intimately connected.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:17:44] It’s really interesting you raised that Ron because five days ago I deleted my social media accounts and it was born out of the fact that I’ve kind of gone as you touched on like last three or four years has been this big period of like expansion in me, expansion in knowledge, expansion in expression of that knowledge, perhaps an expansion an embodiment of that knowledge. And I just felt that the last four to five months on Instagram, I was not expressing as much and I was just consuming more. And so I realised that I was becoming the product as opposed to like someone that was producing value for people. And so, I decided to delete Instagram and felt really, really good about it. And it’s interesting because we talk a lot. In our messaging about how, you know, screens are bad for us and mobile phones are bad for us, et cetera. But we’re delivering that message through a digital medium.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:18:53] There’s a certain irony to that, isn’t there?
Dr Jalal Khan [00:18:55] And so I just felt like from a level of authenticity, et cetera, it was time for me to like, just cut that. I don’t know if it’s permanent or if it some temporary, but it feels permanent. And it’s been interesting just how much more present I’ve been at home and phone usage is like, you know, 30% of what it was. I’ve also gone as far as like removing email notifications from my phone. So like the phone’s not telling me when to look at it now. Um, I’m only looking at it when I want to look at it and it’s a really empowering feeling. And the other thing that’s been really interesting, Ron, is that I’m really, really deeply engaged in in-person interactions now. And that’s being, uh, it may sound well obviously that that would happen but it it has really struck me as a surprise a positive surprise just how much more engaged i am in in-person interactions because my phone isn’t near me and like i’m putting it away from me i purposely leave it away for me there’s nothing for me to look at there and i’m really just like very present in the conversations that i’m having
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:20:11] We’ve done programmes with Jocelyn Brewer, who is a psychologist, who writes about digital nutrition. And she talks about three M’s in your digital diet. And that is it should be moderate, meaningful and moderate, meaningful and anyway, I forget the last M. But the one that I added to that was modelling, because with young children. With young children, with anybody really, the way you model behaviour of how you interact by having your phone on you the whole time and being distracted by it, you just become a sideshow in your face-to-face interaction with people. And so the four M’s, and I’ll think about that fourth M, but modelling was a really important one. And I think that’s a great message for you, for all of us. In our interactions, particularly with our children and grandchildren to do that. We talked also, I mean, I know we’ve covered quantum biology before, and I think I totally agree with you that there are some foundational things that if you don’t get that right, so much else is difficult. And I would agree our relationship with light, as in sun and the earth, and the light in our homes and radiation we bathe ourselves in is fundamental, and a good night’s sleep, consistently good night sleep is fundamental. But remind our listener about some of the basics, because they can go back and listen to quantum biology, but if someone comes into your surgery and says, what, Jalal, what is this quantum biology business? Give me the elevator pitch, give me quantum biology 101, just for our listeners.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:22:02] So Quantobiology 101 is essentially a science that is explaining that returning back to nature and ancestral principles of living is a key aspect of healing yourself from chronic illness. Because you are reconnecting with nature’s frequencies, that is sunlight, that is grounding bare feet on the grass, bare feet on the sand, ideally better if it’s wet. And that allows us to grab electrons which increases our body’s charge and when our body is more charged we benefit even more from sunlight. We’re also reconnecting with the Earth’s magnetic fields and by reducing the the other aspect of light which is the man-made light which is artificial lights in our ceilings, in our screens, it is wi-fi, it’s all the bluetooth, those types of things. It is because what they do is they actually drown out our ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and so if we’re able to reduce our exposure to them wearing wired headphones like you and I are etc wearing blue light blocking glasses I mean your screen and my screen are set to orange so we don’t necessarily need to wear them right now but those types of things are are absolutely critical to restoring our body’s charge. And all we’re doing there is changing the inputs that are coming in, much like we can change our nutritional diet and that can start to change the way that the gut behaves. If we change our light diet with different inputs, our body starts to behave completely differently in an electromagnetic way. That in a nutshell is quantum biology.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:23:44] One of the challenges and this comes back to our initial question about why doesn’t everybody who graduates from health care facility explore some of these aspects because there’s a very very powerful public health message isn’t there which demonises the sun on the one hand and and says all of this radiation that you’re writing that you are surrounding yourself in and carry around with you. Is perfectly fine. No problem. Even though, as an aside, it has been classified as a class 2B carcinogen by WHO about 10, 15 years ago. But that’s just a by the by. It really isn’t a problem. The sun is what we need to be scared.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:24:34] Spot on, and how do we counter that? I mean, the way I talk about it with patients is, it depends, some patients, they’re very intellectual and they love to get into the nitty gritties. So I actually talked to them a little bit about the history of this tug of war in science over the last 300 years between mechanism, mechanistic principles and vitalist principles. So like we’ve reduced the body down to almost like a machine and we’re treating it as like boxcar biochemistry and like each system is its own and we are not treating the body as one and then you’ve got this vitalism school of medicine, school of health which is all about the fact that we are light beings, we carry frequency, we emit light and we turn light into electric charge, all of these types of things. Health is really all about chi. It’s about a life force that’s flowing through you, up and down, left and right. So sometimes I talk about that, other times I’m talking just into the nitty-gritty of like quantum biology and like, you know, the Nobel Prize in 2016 was for an area of mathematics, Nobel Prize of Physics was for area of Mathematics called Topology, and that prize showed that when you expose body to different or you expose any piece of matter to different electromagnetic frequencies the behaviour and shape of that matter changes. So what does that mean then for the human body? Well if you take a human body which is evolved which has evolved in nature for thousands of years and within the last hundred years we have a billion billion more electromagnetic frequencies than a man-made. Than we did a hundred years ago. So that’s like 10 or one with 18 zeros or something like that. Obviously then our matter, our body is going to change its behaviour. It’s going to its shape. And so chronic illness in a way is a response to, it’s an evolutionary response to the changes in the field that we are living in. And then you layer on top of that, the fact that like the emotions are Emotions are light in a way, they’re energy in motion. So like the emotions that we think of, I feel, can alter the field in which our body lives in. And so we can negatively or positively alter our own field and hence the topology and the behaviour of our matter, purely based on the emotions and how we feel about things. So I’m actually recommending a lot of my patients to read books. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, or I’m reading his book right now, his more recent one called A New Earth, which has been a really nice read. Because I’m hoping that they can gain these like greater perspectives of awareness and a high level of conscious awareness through reading these books.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:50] Yeah, no, I like totally agree. I think that, you know, when we think about the fact that we are walking electricity, I mean, literally, every nerve, every cell in our body is electrical, you know, when we generate energy in the mitochondria, it’s not called the protein exchange system. It’s called the electron transport system. It’s not called the carbohydrate. Transport system. It’s not called the fat or the protein transport system, it’s called the electron transport system so we are walking electricity and it’s interesting I always find it funny when I hear people going oh this earthing business wow that’s so woo-woo and I go well yeah isn’t it isn’t just crazy I mean what do you think of gravity I mean does gravity have any impact on you? I mean, and you know, the obvious answer is yes. Well, you know, hey, there you go. I just proved that earthing is important. Yeah. You know, so and the sun is a similar one. We talked also about the fact we both come to this in various times in our careers, that the fact that there’s so much about nervous, that nervous system, which is electrical, yes, but that nervous systems dysregulation. Which impacts on people’s health. Yes. And we were both smiling knowingly that, hey, the mouth actually has a very big part to play in that. Give us a little bit of that insight for our listener that may not be aware of quite how important the mouth is. The orofacial region is in nervous dysregulation, nervous system dysregulatory.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:29:41] So we’ve got something in health which is called the homunculus, which is a really hard word to say, word to say and spell, but and so with the homonculus there’s a motor homunculus which is mapping out the parts of the brain that are involved in controlling movement and there’s a sensory homunculos which is a map of the part of the brain or parts of the That are involved in receiving information from different parts of our body, like our feet, our hands, our eyes, et cetera, et cetera. And the sentry homunculus, as does the motor homunculus, has a huge input coming in from the mouth. I read somewhere, don’t quote me on it, but it was something like 36 or 37% of all of the information coming into the brain, sensory information is coming from the mouth. And if you think about just how big the mouth is with respect to the whole body, it’s almost like it’s not a linear set up there. Like surely the mouth should be like 37 percent of the body in terms of how much real estate it takes up for it to take up 30 percent of their real estate on the century homunculus. And so that firstly points to the fact that we are nonlinear beings, We are quantum beings, and that’s another. Piece of evidence for the vitalists but could we not use the mouth to help with nervous system regulation and that’s what I find myself doing a lot more of these days is not necessarily trying to make jaws bigger or restore teeth but more let’s just balance this person’s nervous system and sometimes that’s with like little mouth guards or in the children, it might be with like an alteration in the jaw size, et cetera. It’s a lot easier in children. But what I’m finding is that children in particular, after they start treatment with myself and our team of manual therapists, quite often they’re having quite a large emotional release soon after, it may be later that day, it might a few days later. And the parents come back at the next appointment and they’re kind of… They’re not concerned about it. They’re just reporting well, how was your last month? Well, you know and he’s going great with this and she’s um, and she hasn’t had any issues with the appliance But she did have a big emotional release at the park the other day and So then we asked what has anything happened since and they’re like, no there hasn’t been any big emotional In fact her mood is improved in general and so like these little kind of anecdotes I’ve just started to pull together in my mind, but and what is data, but a collection of anecdotes. And I’ve started to realise just through clinical practise and experience that the work that I’m doing is really helping people’s nervous system. For the children, it’s emotional regulation. For the adults, it just balancing stress, which is the number one reason or symptom of… Ill health that drives all the chronic health, whether that stress is structural and macro or micro and quantum. So that’s really been the big takeaway for me for 2024 is just how big the mouth is as a player in managing nervous systems.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:23] It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I have read similarly that between 30 and 40 percent of the body’s sensory nerves and the 30 to 40 percent of the bodies motor nerves, that means that move things are in this orophacial region. And I think what a lot of people what is unusual about this orofacial region, it’s the only joint, the jaw joint in the body that has a rigid end point. Like when you bite together your teeth guide you, whether they’re balanced or imbalanced, and for a lot of people, there are imbalances, that locks you into this neurological input that is unchanging. It’s like if every time I moved my arm, it always locked into the same position, you know? And no other joint in the body does that. No, the knee, the hip, the shoulder, none. But the jaw is unique in that every time You close your teeth together. That’s where you are. That’s home.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:34:25] System. That’s home. Exactly. And that’s what AC Fonder described it as. Imagine what it must be like, Ron, and I’m sure you’ve seen patients through the years that have walked in saying, Dr. Ron, I don’t know where to put my lower jaw. How do my teeth bite together? I don t know. Imagine how distressing it must be for a nervous system to not know where home is.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:52] Hi, Dr. Ron here, and I want to invite you to join our Unstress Health Community. Now, like this podcast, it’s independent of industry and focuses on taking a holistic approach to human health and to the health of the planet. The two are inseparable. There are so many resources available with membership, including regular live Q and A’s on specific topics with special guests, including many with our amazing Unstress Health Advisory Panel. Now we’ve done hundreds of podcasts all worth listening to with some amazing experts on a wide range of topics. Many are world leaders, but with membership, we have our Unstress Lab podcast series where we take the best of several guests and carefully curate specific topics for episodes which are jam packed full of valuable insights. So join the Unstress Health community. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel click on the link below or just visit unstresshealth.com to see what’s on offer and join now. I look forward to connecting with you. Well, well, that’s that’s for those that are aware, yes, because the, you know, the same may be said for those that aren’t aware of that, that that it’s just become normal. It’s like, you know, when you ask people about sleep, how do you sleep? Oh, no, I’m fine. Do you wake up feeling refreshed? No, but that’s the way I sleep. You know, well well, that’s not actually the way you should sleep. And and I mean, this is the thing about the imbalance. So the other thing about. Cranial is, which I find fascinating, is the subtlety of these cranial bones. And I think a lot of people also may not be fully aware of what cranial adjustments and craniosacral work is all about. How does one explain that to somebody who’s unfamiliar with that concept?
Dr Jalal Khan [00:36:56] So the cranium is a complex of 22 bones. And there’s 14 bones in the face, and there’s eight bones in, in the, in the head or the back of the head. And they’re all working together and they’re are all moving in sync. And the different bones have different styles of movement. And that movement is doing a few things. It’s, it’s pumping cerebrospinal fluid up and down the central nervous system. It’s draining lymph out of the heads. And it’s ensuring that life force is flowing through the entire central nervous system. It’s essentially the first kind of form of breathing that our body has in utero before we actually are exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide when we’re born. So this craniosacral mechanism, movement of the cranial bones in sync with the tailbone, the sacrum, is foundational to health. And coming back to the journey over the last three or four years, quantum biology is one huge foundation. Optimal craniosacral mechanism is another huge foundation. Then of course, optimal nutrition, seasonal local, grass fed, all that type of stuff. That’s essentially what that craniosacral mechanism and cranial osteopathy is about. It is about removing compressions within the cranium so that life force, lymphatic drainage, cerebrospinal fluid can flow better. Because the cranium is essentially a box with a brain inside of it and that brain wants to be as comfortable as possible and if it’s squished in one part because of the in the cranium then there’s less electrical flow to that part of the brain. So we’ve had patients who, over three or four months, we’ve been able to release the occipital bone compression. And the occiputal bone is at the back of the head. And that is, for anyone that knows a little bit of neurology, that’s the part of brain, the occcipital lobe, which contains the visual cortex. So all the information coming into the eyes is translated all the way back to the back of the head, that part of the brain. And so we are seeing patients whose vision is improving as we release the compression at the back of their head. So it’s allowing that part of the to breathe better, to allow more fluid and electricity to flow through it. And then that reverberates through to the front of the hand and then the sensation into the eyes improves. That is quite a powerful example of just how profoundly important cranial osteopathy and optimal as a modality and optimal craniosacral mechanisms are to help. The cool thing though is, sorry to jump in, is that the mouth can help to turbocharge that whole thing. Because as you said, it’s like this closed system, it is like there is a stop. And so. What stops us from breaking our jaw joints when we’re biting on something hard is the fact that we’ve got arches that are biting against something hard. So you’ve got the lower dental arch biting against the hard upper teeth, and you’ve the upper dental arch biting against them the lower teeth, which are obviously tooth enamel, which is hard. And so when you have an arch hitting something hard, much like the arch in your foot when it hits the floor when you’re running, you don’t break your ancle. The arch takes the force of the earth and springs off the earth for you to then land onto your left foot. So we’ve got an arch hitting something hard creating that spring force. That happens in our head when we bite together. And so what the cranial osteos are finding working alongside dentists is that it’s making their job way easier because when a patient, whether it’s an adult or a child, is biting against a mouth guard or a mouthpiece or whatnot. The whole head is like completely decompressed and then they can get in there and do their gentle manipulations and get things flowing nicely. And it’s almost like that mouthpiece or that mouth guard acts like a little bit of a memory chip and the head remembers what it’s like. So when that person puts that in their mouth, when they go to sleep, the whole heads resets to the way it was at the appointment and it’s like they have cranial osteopathy overnight.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:33] I mean, it’s probably also, you know, we’re talking about the fact that there are all these bones in the head and that the jaw joint is this unusual joint because it’s got this rigid end point like teeth. But it’s properly worth reminding us to the fact that, you we take for granted that we have five fingers on each hand and five toes. I won’t put my feet up on the screen, but five five toes on each foot. And for, I would say, 99% of the population, that is the case. And we’ve also similarly evolved to have two eyes and two ears and two nostrils, et cetera. We’ve also evolved to have 32 teeth. And those 32 teeth are what we’ve evolved with over millions of years. And yet, if I was to say to you, how many people come into your practise Over the last 10 or more years and that have had all 32 of their teeth through an imperfect alignment, giving great balance to this cranial structure. How many people would you say that would, you know, would feel that tick that box?
Dr Jalal Khan [00:42:49] I’m going to say less than 10% and I’m being generous.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:42:54] I think you are being generous. Probably less than five percent. Yeah, which is an extraordinary thing. You know, I mean, thank God the body is, well, I don’t know, but thank goodness that the body is, you know, as resilient as it is, because that would suggest crowded teeth and narrow jaws, which would set you up for cranial problems. And problems for the nervous system. I mean, it’s an accident waiting to happen, isn’t it?
Dr Jalal Khan [00:43:29] It is, and it’s almost like a nice reminder of just how adaptable the body is. And so when someone comes in, I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen patients as I certainly have where like you look at the mouth and you’re like, geez, this isn’t a textbook. Like I’d love to do this and I’d to do, this and if we could move this here, etc. It’d be a beautiful mouth. But you step back and you talk with that patient and like, they’re in like great help. They’re emotionally really solid, they’ve got a really balanced nervous system, their nutrition’s great, they’re not in any pain, they got a massive smile on their face, their oral hygiene is great, what’s there to change? And it’s just a beautiful representation of just how powerful the body’s ability is to adapt. And so if we’re going to make change in the body, at least from a structural standpoint, we have to use forces that are biomimetic, that are mimicking the forces that biology itself uses rather than mechanical because mechanical is going to lead to failure whereas biomimic is going to lead something a lot more gentler which the body can work with because it’s a physiological force. And that’s kind of the big premise behind the types of appliances that I use.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:54] Yes, because, I mean, nature has provided us with a fabulous orthodontic appliance in the tongue, hasn’t it? I mean that, the tongue and the cheeks and the lips are our built-in orthodontic appliance. That’s it. If they are working for us, not against us. So let’s talk a little bit about that, about how things can go wrong. I mean… You know, like even from birth, what are some of the things that can cause imbalances where people aren’t within their adaptive capacity?
Dr Jalal Khan [00:45:35] I would say the big one is breathing. So I read a book called A Touch of Life by Robert Fulford, who’s an osteopath. It’s an old book, but really simple read, like it’s not written for health practitioners, it’s written for anybody. And one of the biggest takeaways from that book was like a question which I now ask everybody, no matter what their age is. If they’re an adult, I’ll ask. Did your mum ever talk about if you had a big cry at birth? And for the young children, obviously the parents bring them in, so I asked mum or I asked dad, did Johnny let out a big crying when he was born? And if the answer is no, then for me it’s a primary breathing case more often than not. And the reason why is because Robert Fulford explains in the book how when we are born and pass through the birth canal, obviously we’re picking up microbiome from mum which we know about but what’s also happening is like there is a shaping of the cranial bones and there is also kind of like a crumbling of baby like baby gets squashed etc as baby comes through and when baby comes through squashed and crumpled and is finally born the big And so if baby’s born not breathing or they’re born blue or they don’t let out a big cry or there’s fluid in the lungs or whatever the case is, and they never get that big cry early in that like first few moments, then it’s a primary breathing case. And more often than not, those children, those adults will have breathing mechanics which are completely inverted. So like the rib cage might be, you know, tied to intercostal first rib or and like there’s a lot of. Breathing through here you know and I mean the that’s why I work with the osteopaths because they’re able to pick up the inverted breathing patterns or the less than ideal breathing patterns like very easily and make manual therapy adjustments to correct it. And then like it’s amazing just how much I mean we’ve had instances where children haven’t been able to breathe through their nose and then like there’s a bit of a rib adjustment and addition of that like on the torso. And all of a sudden like their mouth breathing is like way less and the volume of air they can breathe in through the nose in the clinic 10 seconds later is way more. So I mean those little experiences that I see in the room working alongside the manual therapist is like profound for me because it makes me realise that breathing is really central to a lot of issues and then the breathing sometimes it can be a structural insult like not having that big cry. But sometimes it can be a metabolic insult because a child is having too much gluten. And that can be inflaming the nasal passages and the sinuses or it could be a dairy allergy or some sort of other allergy, environmental. So those are the considerations that go through my mind.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:48:46] Hmm. What about with so many people now being born, you know, caesarian and not having that squeeze, um, you know, that what, what does that, uh, you know, what, uh what are sort of the
Dr Jalal Khan [00:49:00] that presents? From my knowledge it’s it’s more of a factor, it’s definitely a factor, but it’s a more of factor when it’s in an emergency C-section because a lot of the time the child has kind of engaged in the birth canal and so their head’s engaged and then there’s an emergency see because of like a failure to progress for instance and then the baby is is delivered through the tummy. And so there’s like a double vector. There’s like an engagement, and then there’s a pulling back out, which creates a stretch or a suction on the head. And so that child is then born with multiple vectors running through the cranium. And the first stop after hospital is cranial osteo. And a few sessions, I won’t recommend how many because I’m not a cranial osteo, and every child is different. But some regular visits to the cranial Osteo very early on, is going to… Or any cranial worker is going to help remove those vectors and restore optimal cranial mechanisms, which then sets that child on course to, if they’re less than one years old, to then start to grow the face and the jaws a lot better. I mean, one thing that’s crossed my mind a couple of weeks ago, Ron, with tongues and tongue ties is that one of the major nerves that runs through to the tongue is the hyperglossal nerve which is the 12th cranial nerve that drives motor movement of the tongue. But the hypergossal actually runs right through the middle of something called the occipital condyle which are like the two legs that the whole head sits on when it sits on C1. So right through middle of the condyle is the hypoglossal nerves. So what if like… The occipital condyles are compressed at birth, or growing up because of a bump on the head. And that squishes the hypoglossal nerve, which then restricts tongue movement. The point of all of that is to say that sometimes a tongue tie is a tongue tie, but sometimes it’s a hyperglossal nerve compression. Sometimes it’s just a fascial tension. Sometimes it is a fascia tension that’s not in the tongue. It’s in another part of the body, because we know that the tongue is connected through this deep anterior fascia line all the way down to the big toes and so we as dentists aren’t taught all of these things, right? But if we know about them, then we can point people in the right direction towards at least crossing that off the list, okay, the occipital condyles are fine, the fascia’s fine, the breathing’s fine. Maybe it’s just a tongue tie, and let’s deal with that. And then firstly, can we deal with it with bio-functional therapy, first an orophacial muscular retraining, or do we need to do some sort of sniff? So… Yeah, the last three or four years of journey has just been knowing as much as I can about all the different possibilities and potentials and then pointing parents and patients in the right direction.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:52:06] Well, I mean, to work in as close a team as you do with Cole Clayton and other other people in the in the structural world and to have this humility and open mindedness, wow, what an opportunity to learn.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:52:24] It’s been an absolute game changer for my career. And I feel like I’m in school again, just not dental school, but like just, you know, whole body health school, because I’m always learning. I’m learning from my colleagues, I’m leaning from the kids and the parents, and here’s an interesting thing, Ron. Have you ever had a day in clinic where like you’ve done the same procedure like five or six times, and you’re like. Oh well like today just must be a day where I’m working on the upper right first moa the whole day, you know
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:52:57] Yes, yes, it has happened, it’s happened.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:52:59] So we have that in the clinic, in the quantum kid, where it’s like, we have like seven patients in a row where they all have an inferior vertical strain in their cranium, or they have like, or it might be like a side bending rotation to the left. And really it’s kind of the body’s infinite wisdom because we are all one, we’re not individuals. We are all One. It is. Collective wisdom, that collective consciousness, telling you as a clinician this is what you need to learn today. This is what your need to master today.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:53:42] Interesting. That’s an interesting way of looking at it, Jalal. I like that. The other one, of course, is tongue. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but the tongue plays such an important role in making sure that we have enough room for our teeth. What can go wrong? I mean, you mentioned the the the glossel, the hyperglossal nerve, which supplies it and all of that. But swallowing and breathing are also very important.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:54:11] They are, I mean, tongue position whilst breathing is a huge driver. We don’t spend much of our time throughout the day with our teeth together, but we are breathing 20,000 times a day. We are swallowing a lot of times a day. I can’t remember what the exact figure is.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:28] I think it’s around 500 to 700 times a day.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:54:31] So like, and what that does to the cranial base is quite profound. It’s like, it’s not just swallowing to get the bolus of food down. It’s a pressure on the base of the cranium at the sphenobasal adjunction, SPS, SPJ, to continue to pump that craniosacral mechanism from underneath. And in the kids that drives the growth of the upper jaw. So, I mean, the tongue is instrumental in. In dental arch form, it’s instrumental in cranial decompression, it’s instrumentally in swallowing and it’s instrumental in breathing as well because that pressure of the tongue up against the roof of the mouth helps to decompress the the nasal sinuses and um and and all of the lacunae that line the um the the sinuses in the nasal cavity so it’s um it’s no mistake that five of the 12 cranial nerves 5 of the 12 some sort of interaction with the tongue, some sort of supply to the tongue. And let me see if I can get this right. The hypoglossal nerve, the glossopharyngeal nerve the vagus nerve, the facial nerve and the trigeminal.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:55:42] Well, listen, I’m sure the listeners will be so relieved that you were able to list them. I’ve got to tell you, that’s impressive. I thought you put yourself under pressure there, Jalal. But that’s OK. You got it. You got there. Breathing is another one, isn’t it? Like we ask our patients, are you a mouth breather or are you a nasal breather? And from a cranial perspective, that is important. It is, 100 per cent. Tell us a bit more about it.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:56:10] So with breathing, are you referring to just the mechanics or the rib cage?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:56:17] I mean position positionally tongue tongue again. Yeah, you know using these forces to for us not against us
Dr Jalal Khan [00:56:25] Yes, it really is that upward pressure of the tongue against the roof of the mouth and then the swallowing behind that decompresses the entire skull. Gets the temporal bones moving. If you look at the anatomy, the tongue actually hangs like a sling between the two temporal bones. It’s like a hammock almost between the 2 temporal bones and it’s used to stabilise the two temporal bones. And then it’s almost like a rudder for C1 as well, because like when someone’s C1 is off to one direction, more often than not, you just see the tongue kind of tipping in one direction to follow the C1. So it’s like this central player in the game of the cranium from a muscular and force delivery standpoint.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:57:19] I was one of the real aha moments for me. And you mentioned C1, the first cervical vertebrae, a couple of times here. When you look at vertebra throughout the body, there is a kind of a tripodise, tripodisation that occurs that gives each vertebra stability, except C1. Yes. And somebody said, I remember being in a lecture a long time ago and somebody said the jaw. Tripodizes, stabilises the first cervical vertebrae. And I thought, wow, that is a big statement. And that is really important statement because there’s a whole area of chiropractic which says if I can get the first cervical vertebrates stabilised, everything else will fall into place. Have you heard that? You know, they call them the hole in one.
Dr Jalal Khan [00:58:10] So there is a school of chiro called the NUCA Chiros and National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Association born out of the US. But I completely agree with you because if you look at the shape of the mandible, the lower jaw in cross-section, it’s almost like a triangle, right? It’s almost mimicking the shape of the lower vertebra. That is definitely my feeling as well. And I mean, one of my patients, unfortunately had a high velocity adjustment with a manual therapist. And her C1 slides to the right, quite a distance. And as a result, as a body compensation, her lower jaw is like quite literally, like off to the side by, if anyone’s watching, I’ll try and mimic it, but it’s like. So it’s almost like a tense three to four centimetres off to the left to compensate for the C1 that’s going to the right. And she was referred to me by NUCA chiro, which was great because they’re obviously understanding the way that the jaw is playing a role here. And she was having to press her finger on the right side of C1 and push it back in in order to hold her jaw in place. And the poor thing is, she’s a mother of a young boy who’s like one and a half years old and like, you can’t care for your child and be a present wife and work and whatnot walking around like this. Um we made her a device for um for her to wear on her lower jaw which supported the lower jaw and sent a bit of a spring force to mimic the tongue through the lower draw and um it took us a bit of toing and froing but within a couple of weeks we got it right and like she’s like almost not dropping out now like her c1 and mandible is now is now stable um which is quite profound because I had made no promises to her. Because I’d said, look, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m just gonna try something. And it was my third go at it, but we finally got something that has worked for her, which goes back to like a nice full circle, back to our original conversation, which is like, you know, we do our best for our patients and we try and we test and eventually we get something that works right, because we have the humility to be okay with making mistakes. And she was totally cool with it. She was, she said to me the other day, She’s like, Jalal. The thing that matters the most to me as a patient is that you and Cole have never given up on me. And like that literally just, I was like almost teary because we very rarely get that type of feedback as clinicians where someone actually sees us for how hard we’re trying to be the best for patients. But that is a beautiful representation of the C1 and lower jaw and how strong the relationship is.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:01:27] Yeah, the that whole area of chronic pain is so frustrating, isn’t it? And and for people who suffer from chronic pain, who have gone off chronic musculoskeletal pain like headache, neckache, backache, jawache, and they’ve gone off and had every MRI and every CAT scan. And the doctor looks at them and says, hey, listen, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all it’s all fine. It’s it’s normal. That is just such a tough thing for someone to hear who’s suffering from pain. Whereas with a little bit of humility, perhaps that doctor could have said, do you know what, I don’t know what’s causing you this pain and what a liberation that is for the patient and actually for the practitioner, truth be known. The thing I like about about the craniosacral approach. And you mentioned this person that had a high velocity. You’re talking about a cracking to manipulate the neck, which I’ve always felt very uncomfortable with. I mean, one could say, well, look, maybe once or maybe twice. There’s a place for it. But if you’re going for a manipulation once a month, oh my god, that scares the hell out of me. What I love about the craniosacral approach is the subtlety of it.
Dr Jalal Khan [01:02:46] It’s beautiful to watch them realign a C1, which such gentle touch and it’s, it’s as a, as a, a third party, so to speak, cause I’m not the patient, I’m not the clinician, but as someone that’s just watching it’s like, it makes my heart feel warm. Just knowing that like that C1 is being treated like that, you know. With the respect that it deserves. Exactly. You think about like all the nerve flow and all the blood flow through that C1, like it’s just insane to think that like those high velocity cracks are a regular occurrence for some people.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:03:24] Jalal, I always love talking to you. I want to just finish up if we someone was listening to this. And and all that. That was one other thing I wanted to mention about. We’ve talked about cranial movement and movement of cranial bones. And I think this is where people have a little bit of a problem. And I Think it’s a semantics issue. Like, for example, if I lift my arm up, you know, that is a movement that is very easy to see. But if I pressed on the table that I’m sitting at at the moment, you wouldn’t describe that as moving the table, but if there were pressure sensors on there sensitive enough, they would see exactly where my finger is impacting on what doesn’t appear to move. Yes. And I think this is what cranial motion is about, is that it is so subtle that we can get bogged down in the semantics of, hey, come on, how can you move a cranial bone?
Dr Jalal Khan [01:04:22] It’s, it’s such a good point you raise. And I mean, we as dentists would find it very difficult to appreciate this because we’re taught about like the best mechanistic approach to things. Like, you know, there’s drilling and there’s filling and there is macro movement of teeth, et cetera, et cetera. I have felt the heads of patients with like optimal cranial rhythms after like 12 months worth of treatment and like my hands are very untrained when it comes to cranial palpation and I can feel it and every time I feel it I’m just like wow, like how profound is that and you can almost understand why the osteopaths love what they do because it’s quite a profound feeling to be able to feel someone’s life force flow through their head. And it’s a privilege and a gift for them to be to feel that. And almost makes me wanna go and learn how to do it as well. But as someone that’s very untrained, that was as far from the inner circle of osteopathy, I’m a trained dentist, I felt heads. It’s there, like it genuinely is that movement. It’s very subtle, but it’s there. And when you feel it, it’s profound and it’s life-changing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:05:45] Yeah. Now, listen, as I was going to say, it’s always great to talk to you. And it always is. And I love getting you back. It’s good to share you to share with my listener. If someone was listening to this, though, and was thinking, maybe I should what should I be looking out for? What would be some advice that you give a person who was interested in exploring this a little bit?
Dr Jalal Khan [01:06:08] I would think about, well first do you have any aches or pains in your body, any part of your body because the mouth could certainly help. If your sleep quality is a little bit down, if you wake up tired or you wake a bit groggy or maybe there’s like an element of like poor quality sleep, it’s fragmented sleep, it’s insomnia for instance, because sometimes that’s not just a structural discussion that’s discussion of blue light and electromagnetic frequencies. And central nervous system regulation. So yeah, think about your sleep, think about you’re breathing, are you mouth breathing, are you nasal breathing? Do you wake up with a dry mouth? Think about if you have any pain or tension in your body, particularly, you know, necks, traps, upper back, tailbone, hips. And finally, think if you’ve got headaches or migraines and if that’s affecting your quality of life because… In the postural slash functional dentistry landscape, which is a little bit different to biological dentistry, which has its place, but my hat is more the postual functional dentistry. Those are like a lot of the common things that I help patients with.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:07:22] Well, Jalal, that’s a great note for us to finish on. And I will, of course, have links to your clinic. And I want to thank you again for joining us, sharing your knowledge, wisdom and your personal and professional journey that we are on.
Dr Jalal Khan [01:07:37] Through life. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be on again, Ron. Thank you very much for having me.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:07:41] Well, it’s an interesting statement, isn’t it? Because I do know that when I first met Jalal and he was really getting into the whole quantum biology area and being inspired, as I have been too, by Dr. Jack Kruse, who’s a neurosurgeon, formerly a dentist, an oral surgeon, a medical practitioner, and now a neurosurgeon. But he’s known worldwide for his work in quantum biology, EMF, radiation, the effect of blue light. The importance of sunlight and earthing on our wellbeing. And it was interesting when I first met Jalal that he thought it was the be all and end all of all things. And I cautioned him at that time because I do have a very open mind. I love learning new things. And the more I learn, the more realise I don’t know. But I’ve always found the challenge is not necessarily to decide what is right and what is wrong, but listen to it with an open mind, with common sense, with some… Understanding of how the human body works and work out how each part contributes to the other. And that’s why nutrition is still important. That’s why sleep is still important.That’s why movement is still important. And that is why getting your light relationship with light is important as well. And that means not just the sunlight, but the blue light that we bathe ourselves in continuously. But here Jalal is returning to his roots in dentistry and also looking at the impact that he can have on cranial bones, on neurological health, on homeostasis, and on people’s just good health and wellbeing. We’ll have links, of course, to his clinic, the dental station, and I hope this finds you well. Until next time, this is Dr Ron Ehrlich, be well. Feeling stressed, overwhelmed? It’s time to unstress your life. Join the Unstress Health community and transform stress into strength. Build mental fitness from self-sabotage to self-mastery and together let’s not just survive but thrive. Expert-led courses, curated podcasts, like-minded community and support and much more. Visit unstresshealth.com This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioners. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.
