It was the summer of 1982 and I hadn’t become a dentist yet. I was a twenty-something student at the University of British Columbia, studying biochemistry and art history, when I found a book on my mother’s shelf—Life Extension by Pearson and Shaw. I didn’t realize it then, but that book put me on a path toward what would later be called functional dentistry, long before the phrase “functional medicine” entered common use. Decades would pass before I understood I was helping to chart a new direction in dental care.
Life Extension described the body in a way I had never encountered. It didn’t just offer health tips; it presented the body as an interconnected system where small disruptions can cascade into disease and early signals matter far more than late-stage symptoms. It gave me a framework to think upstream: to search for what initiates illness long before symptoms appear. The authors didn’t label it “functional medicine,” but the philosophy was the same—intervene early, treat root causes, view the body as a system, and use biochemical science to stay ahead of disease. That perspective felt radical in 1982, and I read the 858-page book cover to cover—again and again.
A few years later I attended dental school in San Francisco. Dental education trains you to recognize symptoms, define disease, and deliver efficient treatment. The workflow is straightforward: identify, diagnose, code, and bill. It’s not designed to help you step back and connect the dots. Dental school aims to produce licensed, competent clinicians—“safe beginners”—ready to treat. Once you enter practice, the insurance model reinforces that pattern. The system rewards compliance and predictable procedures, not curiosity or time spent looking for root causes. That helps explain why few dentists pivot away from conventional dentistry.
As a new dentist you are inundated with emergencies—pain, infection, necrosis—and the pressure to keep up is relentless. Insurance reimbursements are usually fixed, regardless of case complexity or time invested. To keep the practice afloat you must see more patients faster. The business model depends on predictable, billable treatments, and that forces providers into choices that aren’t always in the patient’s best interest.
Graduating dentists often carry heavy debt, and the volume of disease wears down curiosity. The need to repay loans pushes many to prioritize speed and procedures that are easily coded and reimbursed.
My first job after dental school was in a high-volume clinic focused on production. I was fired for spending too much time with patients. My supervisor pulled me aside and said, “Just get back to work, you’re wasting time.” I also began referring patients to specialists when our clinic couldn’t provide appropriate care. When a periodontist called to ask if our center had started sending patients out, he was surprised to learn it was my decision. His reaction made it clear I didn’t fit the clinic’s expectations, and within eight months I was let go.
With support from my wife, I opened my own practice in Silicon Valley, near the headquarters of Apple and Intel. Many of my patients were programmers—people who instinctively debugged systems rather than treating surface symptoms. That mindset perfectly mirrored how I had begun to think about dentistry. Rather than just filling cavities, I started asking what had gone wrong in the body’s operating logic. I searched for the source code of dental disease—the early dysfunctions and prodromal phases that precede obvious symptoms or formal diagnoses.
I continued to perform conventional procedures—fillings, root canals, restorations—and my patients were satisfied. But the work felt incomplete; fixing the surface didn’t stop recurring problems. Clinical precision alone wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to spend my career treading water alongside patients. Practitioners should interrupt dysfunction, not simply manage it. That calling requires stepping beyond textbooks and billing codes to think for yourself and advocate for patients’ long-term health.
Colleagues and patients began labeling my approach “holistic dentistry,” but that didn’t capture what I was doing. At the time, “holistic” often implied concepts like energy lines or meridians, which I couldn’t endorse without biological evidence. My work was more than philosophy—it was a systems-based framework for oral health that needed a more precise name.
For years I didn’t have a clear label. I didn’t fit within biological dentistry, which focused heavily on materials, nor did I fully align with integrative dentistry, which was often reactive and downstream of symptoms. I found myself between worlds—too clinical for some, too systemic for others. It wasn’t a deliberate choice to be different; it evolved from the tension between how I was trained and what my patients genuinely needed.
Life Extension had planted a seed by challenging the idea that disease is inevitable. I wanted to do more than fix problems: I wanted to improve patients’ lifespan and quality of life. Many of my patients, being systems thinkers themselves, were receptive to that approach.
Decades later, my eldest daughter—born five days early on the day I opened my private practice—has helped amplify this message through YouTube, newsletters, Instagram, podcasts, and more. Increasingly, dentists are recognizing that this systems-oriented approach is where the profession is headed.
We are losing nearly a million lives each year to preventable diseases, and the chronic disease crisis is accelerating. Dentistry—focused on the mouth, airway, digestion, and immunity—remains isolated from the broader healthcare conversation. That isolation cannot continue.
We must redefine what it means to be a dentist. We should be systems thinkers and engineers of human health who move upstream to the prodromal phases of disease and fiercely advocate for patients. We must stop treating only symptoms and begin intercepting disease earlier. That is the promise of functional dentistry.
If this resonates, you’re not alone. My continuing education course, Foundations of Functional Dentistry, distills four decades of practice. It’s designed for dentists who are tired of constant firefighting and who find greater fulfillment preventing disease than merely managing it. Prevention is harder to quantify, but it’s where meaningful change happens—changing a person’s health trajectory before symptoms arise. That is true care.
The true role of a doctor is both teacher and healer. Do you want a healer who is constantly reactive, or one who thinks upstream, takes charge, and helps patients rewrite their health destiny? Join a community of dentists committed to redefining the profession.
We’re not just treating teeth. We’re treating systems.
Hit reply and let me know if you’re interested, and my team will add you to the waitlist.
If you’re looking for a dentist who “gets it”—start here. You deserve a partner who understands airway, nutrition, and the oral-systemic connection.
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