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approval...
Your final avenue of perception is your own insight, and the cards are stacked against this to
an insurmountable degree. Your mom and dad had bad teeth. Your husband or wife has bad teeth.
You have bad teeth...hey; your dentist has bad teeth! Surrounded by this sea of dental disease,
your insight has no chance to make the quantum-leap through to the truth. Emotionally, you are
geared more toward despair than hope; and this subconscious reverse insight has a powerful
effect on your rational thinking.
Your perception of "dental reality"  your frame of reference toward dental disease  has set
you up like a clay pigeon: Your name has become "target" and guess who is sitting on the firing
line? Two bad actors you've already met, earlier in this book: Lactobacillus acidophilus and
Streptococcus mutans. What will they do to you? They'll destroy your dental health and damage
your overall health.
Of course, you knew that all along, didn't you ...even before you read this book?
What you didn't know was that these germs, and the odontosis they are responsible for, is
totally, absolutely preventable...it does not have to happen ...those denture product advertisements
should be a waste of time and money; you ought to ignore them...or laugh at them!
This chapter on "psychology" is to help you feel fully grounded in your "new" frame of
reference. It is going to be tested, the first time you talk to a dentist; or when your next-door
neighbor, "the world's foremost authority," gets a can of beer under his belt.
You should understand, about yourself and your new perception, that it is presently based
only on inductive reason: In other words, we've been throwing a lot of facts at you, facts, that,
taken together, make a lot of sense. You've been able to reason; to tie things together with logic,
and to modify your belief patterns accordingly. We have not been able to do anything about your
pre-programmed beliefs; nor have you, as yet, had any empirical proof that we are telling the
truth.
We've given you the basic tools with which you can employ both cognitive (thinking) and
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conative (insight) understanding, but we can't  in a book  give you the actual experience you will
need before your perception becomes grounded in personally experienced fact.
When someone challenges your new thinking, they will sooner or later ask you to prove it. As
of now, you can't...you can give them this book to read; or you can cite some of the evidence
we've offered...but you can't "prove it," at least not yet.
Be careful of this...because you are one of a relatively few people who have ever found all of
this information in one place, between the two covers of a single book. No dentist has...unless
he's read this same book. Your neighbor hasn't; your co-workers haven't. They will still view
odontosis through the old frame of reference...and they will be just as "sure" of themselves as you
once were, when you shared that frame of reference.
"They" are going to try to shake you. Your oral health hangs on your ability to resist both
challenges to your new-found perception and the "tug" of the old, familiar way of thinking; a
perception and set of values that is more comfortable than these new values simply because it is
familiar; you're "used to it."
Before any of this book can personally benefit you, it must be the catalyst that causes you to
modify your behavior. Just knowing about these things won't do you any good unless you do
something about what you know. When we accept that behavior as the way we react to our
perception of reality, then the value of this book is to change reality about your oral health...so
you can react differently  by taking charge of your own dental destiny.
Only after you begin reacting in different ways to the new reality will you begin to accrue the
personal, empirical proof that dental disease can be conquered; and not whether we can stamp it
out worldwide...but only whether we can eliminate it in your own mouth.
When you talk to someone about these things today or tomorrow, they'll challenge you:
"Prove it." You won't be able to.
If you modify your behavior and begin to participate actively in controlling the factors of
dental disease, and if you do it for a month to six weeks, it will then be a whole different story.
Then, when someone challenges you to "prove it," you can smile and say something like this:
"Would you be willing to bet a hundred dollars in cold, hard cash that there is any active disease
in my mouth?"
You see, when your own, personal Navy Plaque Index is down below or near level three, and
when your saliva culture indicates no organized bacteria activity, you will have conquered
odontosis.
Today, we want you to hang on tight to this thought: "I believe..."
Next month, we want you to be able to say it a bit differently: "I know!''
There is one other thought we should look at before we leave this chapter on psychology of
oral health: What's in it for me? We are all motivated, at the bottom line, by personal loss or gain;
by the twin goads of fear or reward, the attraction of the carrot or the threat of the stick.
Is freedom from odontosis worth changing the way we look at things? Is it worth modifying
behavior so that we are actively participating in our own dental destiny?
If this book is telling the truth, what do you have to gain? If you don't do anything about your
dental destiny, what have you got to lose? Why should you let this book affect your life at all?
Well, first of all, you don't have anything to lose when you come right down to it. If none of
this makes sense, or if you do your best to modify your behavior and still nothing comes of it, you
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haven't lost anything. Your dental health is bad and getting worse right now anyway, isn't it? So
what else is new?
What benefit could there be, if this book is telling it like it is and if you modify your
behavior?  We could tell you about clean, pretty teeth as a benefit. We might want to try to sell
you on the idea of socially acceptable breath. We should emphasize the pleasure of eating what
you want to, when and where you want to. There are many, many "plus benefits" of good oral
health. To summarize; to make this whole thought meaningful, let's just mention one factor:
You have nothing to lose if we're wrong. We'll "give" you an extra ten years on your life-span
if we're right. Would you like that repeated? Okay: If we're right, and you modify your oral health
behavior, you might very well live an additional ten years beyond what you otherwise would
have. How's that for incentive?
Is that based on some sort of statistic? No, it isn't: It's a personal observation; but one we
think most people can trust. Doctor Charles Mayo, founder of the famous Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota, observed that all other things being equal, denture wearers could look
forward to the loss of about ten years from their lifetime.
Hopefully, this chapter has given you some insight into your own thought process, your own
decision-making process. If so, it will have helped you begin to use this new-found knowledge to
move from the perception stage to the behavioral stage... because it won't do you any good to
"know" these things if you don't use them.
In short, we now hope and expect that you will:
1. Discard your old programming, your "frame of reference."
2. Study and absorb this new information, and think about it long and carefully; so that it
becomes your new "frame of reference."
3. Begin changing your behavior so that you can, as soon as possible, begin to build up
positive experiences to shore up your knowledge.
You haven't anything to lose, really.... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]