Quick Links

*** Pictures *** Videos *** DIY *** About Me

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Dental Update

Well, I've been using the Periogen for 2 weeks and a few days, nearly 2 and a half weeks. I have not used it everyday, I really am my own worst enemy about doing things consistently for myself. But I can say that I use it more often than not, 4 or more times per week. I've been making it a bit stronger using 1 and 1/2 to 2 scoops each time (which is well within the usage directions), I'm using it with the Interplak WJ6RW Dental Water Jet using the Subgingival Tip, this is an angled soft tip that I can push into my gums, it really gets the Periogen deep into my gums.

OK, here is what has been happening, as I said before, I can't leave well enough alone, several times a week I grab a mirror, a loop and a dental pick, I get up close and personal with my tartar, something I have done before, but now the tartar is different, it's even a different color (lighter in color), and more brittle, it's as if it's not attached to my teeth the same way as it was before, it's much MUCH easier to scrape off. In the past, I've been able to remove the larger chunks that build up on the inside of my bottom teeth, but I've never been able to remove the thinner layers that are between my teeth and on the gum line. Now I am able to remove it, quite easily. I tend to work on one or two teeth at a time, I don't want to mess up or do damage, I also don't want to release too much toxins, you know when you go to the dentist even to just get a cleaning, they will often prescribe antibiotics, that's because when they are working on your teeth, they are releasing lots of toxins into your body and you need to be able to fight it. So I take it slow, not doing too much at any one time.

I have noticed that if I try to work on the tartar BEFORE using the Periogen, the tartar is hard and doesn't want to let go, but after I use the Periogen, it really does change the tartar, making it easier to remove. I am really happy with how this stuff is working. :)

Tonight, I really worked to clean my teeth extra well before using the Periogen. I flossed (something I don't regularly do) and I also used one of those skinny brushes that go between your teeth called a interdental brush. I noticed immediately that flossing was much easier, before this time, I often had to force the floss to go between many of my teeth, and often the floss would shred because of roughness of the tartar buildup. The little brush also went between my teeth much easier than before, in fact there had been some of my teeth where I couldn't get one of those brushes to go in, tonight I was able to easily get the brush in between all of my teeth and it went quite easily. That is telling me that the tartar is going away, there is more space between my teeth that hadn't been there before, it had been filled with tartar, and now it's going away.

I have to say that if I had been using the Periogen everyday as I am supposed to, I know that even more tartar would be gone. I'll continue using it and report more about it in the coming days and weeks.

Disclaimer, I am not a health professional, nothing written on this page or website is meant to diagnose or treat any health issues, this is not meant to replace any medical professional's advice. I am only telling you what I am doing and what is working for me, follow at your own risk, I am not responsible for any damage, health issues or worse as a result of you trying anything I am using or writing about here.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Saturday, February 25, 2012

They're Back....

The mulies are coming back around, unfortunately I haven't spotted my favorite girl, Notch, I suspect she didn't make it this year, but there are lots of new girls (and bucks) to feed. We don't "feed" them on a regular basis, we just give them snacks every now and again, usually something like some crackers, a heel of bread, things like that.





All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Dental Poll

I created a poll to help determine how much interest there is about my dental product trial/review, please take a few minutes to answer this poll, your answers are 100% anonymous, if you want you can leave a comment about it here, especially if there is something I didn't cover in the poll. You can choose multiple answers in the poll.

Thanks so much.



All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Monday, February 13, 2012

Second Part of the Dental One-Two Punch

I have been teasing you with the other part of my one-two punch dental plan, this is actually what got me started on this. I listen to and follow several alternative health podcast websites, one of them is called OneRadioNetwork, I get an email a couple of times a week letting me know who they are interviewing next. I am especially interested in the dental shows, I have learned that the silver amalgams that used to be used to fill cavities (I HOPE they aren't using those any more!) are very toxic and unfortunately, I have several of these in my mouth. I have also learned that drill and fill are not the "be all-end all" of dental treatments. I have learned that it is possible to remineralize your teeth, and actually reverse cavities, I don't know if you can do that for large cavities, but certainly for the smaller ones.

I listened to a podcast interview of Dr. Mark Manhart, DDS, he has been a practicing dentist since 1962, he believes in and practices healing rather than the barbaric methods used today. His secret? Calcium and zinc.
You can listen to the audio podcast here or click on the link above to go directly to the page and listen, it's just under an hour, I believe you will get a lot from it.
Download
This is what really piqued my interest, I like the idea of non-surgical dental therapy. I purchased the Calcium/zinc kit and the Calcium Carpule System. I'll explain more about each of these in a follow up post, for now let's just say that the prices for these products were in the very inexpensive range, if they work as advertised, they are well worth twice the price.

I have learned that in order to remineralize or rebuild the enamel on your teeth, there are some very common dental product ingredients that you need to avoid, this will actually prevent remineralization, namely glycerin, it's an ingredient in many dental products, toothpaste, rinses and such, glycerin coats your teeth and prevents remineralization, it stays on your teeth for a while after using it, I've read it can take up to 20 rinses to remove this glycerin layer. Just do a search for this and you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about it
click here for search

Before considering using anything on my teeth or in my mouth, I read the ingredients, if it contains glycerin, I put it back on the shelf, period. It's not worth it to me to use something that will coat my teeth and prevent my teeth from remineralizing naturally.  I've been doing this for a number of years, while I haven't been to a dentist in many years, I don't believe I have any cavities, or if I do, they are small, I believe one of the reasons is that I stopped using anything containing glycerin. I also don't use fluoride,  it is a well known toxic waste product and it is not needed, for the record Periogen does contain a small amount of fluoride, a very tiny amount, it is used in the process of removing the tartar, not for "strengthening" teeth, I am willing to use it for now. Their website says:
Question
Periogen has fluoride; how much?  Why?
Answer
Periogen contains a small percentage of sodium fluoride ions (.04%) in order to have a guaranteed ion source to facilitate tartar dissolution.  Typical fluoride toothpastes contain about .24% sodium fluoride, or 6 times as much. 

you can read more about that here:
http://www.periogen.com/pages/faq.html

So here it is, my one-two punch on dental health care, I'm trying both of them now, one to remove tartar and the other to heal my teeth and gums. I'll keep you informed as to how these are working for me. What I can say now, 3 days into using them is, so far so good. :) 


Disclaimer, I am not a health professional, nothing written on this page or website is meant to diagnose or treat any health issues, this is not meant to replace any medical professional's advice. I am only telling you what I am doing and what is working for me, follow at your own risk, I am not responsible for any damage, health issues or worse as a result of you trying anything I am using or writing about here.


I received 2 bottles of Periogen free of charge for the expressed intent of giving it a trial and writing about that trial here, I purchased the other dental products, this in no way influences the outcome of the trial, I will write an honest review of these dental products and expect to receive no other compensation for the trial or review.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Periogen Trial

A few weeks ago, I ran across a dental health product on Amazon, it's called Periogen Tartar Dissolving Oral Rinse, their claim is that it dissolves tartar on teeth and below the gum line. I read the reviews and for the most part there are positive reviews, like any product and the public, not everyone is going to be pleased with every product. I read one review that seemed to unfairly give Periogen a bad review, I responded to it with questions for the reviewer, mainly wanting to know if he had actually used it, or the concoction he came up to replace it... his reply was that he had tried it, but not the DIY mixture he came up with, his main complaint was the price of the product, not the efficacy of it. He also (somewhat) accused me of working for Periogen. There were a few other replies (from both of us) tossed back and forth, in the mean time I contacted John at Periogen, he was also replying to this and other reviewers, I gave him a bit of background on myself and asked if I could do a review of Periogen. ~~~EDIT it would seem that this review has been removed by the person who wrote it, not sure why, I am hoping it is because reviewer saw the logic of my questions about his review.~~~

John being the nice guy he is, promptly send not one but two bottles to me. I was very excited to receive enough Periogen to really do a test on it. Last night I tried it for the first time. I haven't been to a dentist for a cleaning in many years, I have quite a major buildup of tartar on the inside of the bottom front teeth, I have tartar on my other teeth, but not nearly as bad, I can feel it more than see it. I'm sure I have pockets in my gums, though I don't have a dentist telling this to me.

Periogen recommends that you use a WaterPik with their product to get the product deep between the teeth and into any pockets in the gums. I previously purchased an Interplak WJ6RW Dental Water Jet at a local store, it was a great deal and too good to pass up. This one has the Subgingival Tip meant to really get into the pockets. I put a scoopful of Periogen into warm water in the water container, it fizzed up quite a bit, then I turned on the unit and began flooding my gums, every once in a while I would allow some of the Periogen water to build up in my mouth and I swished it around for about 30 seconds, spit it out then continued spraying the Periogen water on the rest of my mouth/gums. I will say that my teeth felt cleaner than they had before, my molars actually squeaked when they rubbed together.

I grabbed a mirror and flashlight and began to check on my teeth. I wasn't expecting miracles, Periogen says it can take a week or two to start seeing results, tartar doesn't build up overnight and you aren't going to remove it overnight (without going to a dentist). I have a dental scraper and I was able to scrape off some of the softened tartar, I have done this before (being extremely careful as I do it, I can't afford to make a mistake and have to go to the dentist to have a tooth fixed or my gums sewn back up), I noticed that there was a thin layer of tartar that was able to be scraped off. I do not recommend anyone to scrape on their own teeth, and I'm sure that Periogen doesn't recommend that either, but being who I am, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and I was pleasantly surprised to note there were some areas that seemed to be softened enough to remove myself, not the whole layer, just some pieces here and there were able to be scraped off. In the past when I've attacked my own tartar, it didn't let go easily, this time it seemed quite a bit easier to remove.

Tonight I'll use it again, I plan to use it every night, though knowing myself, I'll probably miss a night or two here and there, but I'll do my utmost best to use it each night, I'll periodically report what my findings are, probably about once a week or so, though if something drastic happens, I'll report about that sooner.

I'm also using another dental health product, I just started using this as well, I'll write more about it soon, I've been using it for a few more days than the Periogen, so far I really like it and how it's making my teeth and gums feel.. more about that later. :)

Here's the deal, I figure that there are lots of people out there like me, with a mouth full of teeth and no dental insurance, it's been so long since I've been to a dentist that I know it's going to be more than just a simple cleaning, so I've been on the hunt for dental products that do more than just clean, I want to have healing and tartar removal, it would seem that I have found both, if these products do what they claim to do, then my mouth is going to be in a healthier state, and therefore my body will also be healthier. There are proven correlations between poor dental health and the state of your body, specifically your heart and other organs. I know that having poor dental health slowly dribbles bacteria into your blood stream, these bacteria attack other parts of your body, so it's not just a case of having bad teeth and/or gums, it ends up ultimately being about life and death.  I am giving this a one-two punch, take care of my teeth & gums and removing the tartar, hopefully with the tartar gone and my teeth and gums in a healthier state, I can prolong having to get dental and/or medical treatment, I can stay healthy and active.

Each bottle of Periogen is a 45 day supply if used as instructed on the bottle, I'll use both bottles and write about my experiences as I go. I will certainly keep you, my readers informed as to the results of using both of these products, be sure to ask questions if you have them, I'll be more than happy to answer.

Disclaimer, I am not a health professional, nothing written on this page or website is meant to diagnose or treat any health issues, this is not meant to replace any medical professional's advice. I am only telling you what I am doing and what is working for me, follow at your own risk, I am not responsible for any damage, health issues or worse as a result of you trying anything I am using or writing about here.


I received 2 bottles of Periogen free of charge for the expressed intent of giving it a trial and writing about that trial here, I purchased the other dental products, this in no way influences the outcome of the trial, I will write an honest review of these dental products and expect to receive no other compensation for the trial or review.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Monday, February 6, 2012

Minors

mi·nor
[mahy-ner]
adjective, noun
1. lesser, as in size, extent, or importance, or being or noting the lesser of two: a minor share.
2. not serious, important, etc.: a minor wound; a minor role.
3. having low rank, status, position, etc.: a minor official.
4. under the legal age of full responsibility.
5. Education . of or pertaining to a field of study constituting a student's minor.
6. Music
a. (of an interval) smaller by a chromatic half step than the corresponding major interval.
b. (of a chord) having a minor third between the root and the note next above it.
7. of or pertaining to the minority.
8. ( initial capital letter ) (of two male students in an English public school who have the same surname) being the younger or lower in standing: Jackson Minor sits over here.

Seems it can be a adjective or a noun, in this case, I'm talking about music. An newish friend of mine, a neighbor of sorts (he lives in the same neighborhood) who is really into music came to our house about a while back, we discussed among a lot of things, music. He plays acoustic guitar (very well I might add), I happen to really enjoy listening to acoustic guitar too... I played a bit of piano for him, he seemed to enjoy it, I was nervous though, it's not easy for me to play in front of people, though it's getting easier and easier. He mentioned that he would like to jam with me sometime, my biggest worry is I know that guitar players don't typically play in the key of C, and that's the key in which I play best... I've been working on getting comfortable playing in some of the other keys though, I have my keyboard all marked up with tape and ink, I'm working on learning to play in the key of E, a key that guitar player do play in. I'm also learning the other keys, randomly.

So my friend says he likes playing in minor keys quite a bit, that is a step further (or is it farther?) than I have learned so far, I took it as a friendly challenge to learn more about minors, the musical kind, tonight I found a few websites that had all of the minor keys in graphical form, a picture of the keys with the minors marked for each key, yipee! Finally I can see what keys so I can place my fingers, I played the minor for F and it sounded really good with some of the songs I like to play. I do so much better when I can SEE the key placement rather than being told what they are, such as the reference above saying (of a chord) having a minor third between the root and the note next above it, that just makes my eyes glaze over and not in a good way, but if you SHOW me the chord, then I get it.

The thing that inspired me to expand my horizons tonight on the piano was an email I received from the company from where I ordered my gospel piano lessons, they sent me a $50 bribe to come back and order more from them, this is the second one they have sent to me, they are very generous if you have purchased from them before. This time I chose to order Christmas piano lessons, last Christmas I went through the hymnal and out of the dozen or so songs, I could only play 4 or 5 of them, the rest of them had what I referred to as weird chords, actually they were minor chords and they stumped me, I can sing it, but couldn't figure out how to play it, so now between the new lesson DVD I ordered and the pictures of minor chords on the internet, I expect that by next Christmas I'll be playing lots more Christmas songs at church and home.

I tried to video myself playing some of my new found chords, but the sky castle is very dark at night, and the computer mic wasn't doing a very good job at capturing what I was playing, so I'll have to figure someone out, I'll work on it and hopefully I'll have some video with decent audio to upload.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Health, of the Dental Sort

Health, if you have it, then you probably aren't thinking about it much, if you don't have it, then it's probably what you think about most of the time... part of getting older is realizing that you aren't as young as you used to be... that isn't supposed to sound funny, it's honest and true. I just don't bounce back as quickly as I used to, I am a pretty healthy individual, in-spite of the fact that I haven't done all the things I could have to take care of myself.

So in a "better late than never" attitude, I am kicking up my health routine, I've already talked about the big M that is working its way around my body now, (sorry guys, I know some of you are still cringing over that discussion), another part of my body that needs more care is my dental health.

Let me give you a bit of history, growing up, my family didn't have things like dental insurance, I don't even think we had regular health insurance, it was just too expensive for a big family, so things like going to the dentist just wasn't top priority, fortunately our genetics allowed for good teeth, we didn't have dental problems even though we did very little to take care of our teeth.

Well, when I hit 15 or 16, for some reason it was decided that we would go to the dentist for the first time, I know it's shocking to some of you, but that was just the facts of life for us. Believe it or not, I only had one cavity, a small one on a lower back molar. Unfortunately the dentist we went to had a terrible bedside manner, he berated me severely for having so much tartar on my teeth, like it was my fault! It seemed to irritate him to no end that I had tartar on my teeth and he was having to deal with it. He unceremoniously scraped the tartar from my teeth, filled the cavity and sent me home, well I went home with a toothbrush and a very sour attitude toward dentists. His negative words seared my soul and kept me from going to see another dentist until I was in my 20s.

Once I became an adult, I worked in an industry that was very hung up on appearance, I was a hairdresser. By then, I had very crooked teeth and was very self conscious of my smile, I just wouldn't smile, if I did smile, I kept my lips closed as much as possible. I also had a major buildup of tartar by then, mostly on the inside of my teeth, not so visible but I knew it was there. The company I worked for was a big company with deep pockets, they wanted to keep their stylists happy so they sent us to continuing education and they sent us to motivational speakers, my favorite one was Zig Ziggler. Ziggler told a story about a man he knew who had crooked teeth, he didn't smile much either, Ziggler asked him why he just didn't have it taken care of, well that man did have his teeth fixed and it changed his life, of course Ziggler elaborated much more on that story than I am here, never the less, it filled me with hope, I sat there with the dozens of other stylists soaking up that story in particular, I decided I would fix my smile too.

I'll cut this off here and continue with a part 2 in a few days... I have a reason for posting this particular story, I need to pick up where I left off on my dental health, I did get my smile fixed, at the cost of $1000's of dollars, it was worth every penny I spent and fortunately at the time I could afford it, but now with little access to dental care even if I had the money to go, I am having to take action myself, I have a plan in place that hopefully will get my mouth back into a healthy state and will also keep up my physical health.

Look for part 2 coming soon... :)

Disclaimer, I am not a health professional, nothing written on this page or website is meant to diagnose or treat any health issues, this is not meant to replace any medical professional's advice. I am only telling you what I am doing and what is working for me, follow at your own risk, I am not responsible for any damage, health issues or worse as a result of you trying anything I am using or writing about here.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Going On A Diet

I admit it, I needed to go on a diet, when I hit 301, I just couldn't add any more...





...blogs to follow. What, did you think I was talking about something else??? hehehe

It seems that the magic number to hit the maximum blogs to follow is 300, or perhaps it's 301, in any case, it was high time to do some house or rather blog cleaning. Blogger doesn't make it easy either, I continually get an error message when I try to manage my blogs from the dashboard, up until now I have just ignored it and kept adding more blogs as I found them. I went so far as to leave a message on Blogger help, not that it does any good, I found pretty old messages on there asking about the same thing, with no answers...

It is possible to unfollow a blog by going to said blog and clicking on follow, it will tell you that you are already following said blog, and asks you if you would like to stop following. That only works if the blog still exists, personally I think Blogger should automatically remove these vanished blogs from the follow list, why make me jump through hoops to unfollow something that no longer exists? And you can't unfollow non-Blogger pages, again it has to be done though the manage link...

I finally decided to try a different browser, Chrome, and it allowed me to go to the manage page, I was able to pare down my 301 blogs to 226, I will admit that I added 3 or 4 too, some of the blogs I followed grew up and got real domains and real websites, so as I removed the defunct blog I had to add the new site.

Some of it was a bit painful, like looking up old friends only to discover they died a year ago and I'm just now finding out. Some of them, I had to wonder what was I thinking at the time? I'm sure there was something that caught my eye that day.

My criteria for unfollowing, if the blog or page doesn't exist any more, if it's been a year (or two) since the last post, if it's been a month or more and the last post was apologizing for not posting for a year..., if the site completely changed from what interested me in the first place... or I just lost interested in said blog or site. There were a few that I would have liked to continue following, but they became private blogs and I wasn't invited to play, so I had to say good bye to those. :(

There were a precious few that even though they had no current posts, the info contained there, the history was valuable and worth keeping a link to, of course it's quite possible that next time I go on a blog following diet, those site may not exist any more.

Sorry if you are the owner of one of the blogs deleted from my list, on the other hand, if your blog made the cut, rejoice, or not :)

Oh, one more thing, I haven't mentioned this (I think), I thought I'd throw it in here, if you are still reading... I signed up for a site that pays me in gift cards (or cash through PayPal) for doing really simple things, things like watching short videos and clicking on a button, I'll not go into detail here, if you are interested, go to my other site http://you-need-this-now.blogspot.com/ and check it out, if you spend time on the internet on a daily or semi-daily basis and want to earn some extra dough in the process, check it out. You will not get rich doing this, not unless you have a LOT of friends who will sign up, but if you play daily, you will earn some extra $$$s. It's all free, completely free, and no spam either, I haven't paid anything to play, and the only emails I get from them are one (and occasionally two) emails with more points to earn, all free. If you do sign up, and I hope you do, be sure to complete your profile, that will allow you to earn even more points, and points = money.


All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!