A Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger Interview with DR. MARK MANHART
(the-moneychanger.com)
Sometimes I don’t follow up on leads quickly enough. A Mississippi dentist told us about a website called www.calciumtherapy.com and its amazing results on teeth, but I was too slow to investigate. When I finally got back to it, ordered the products and tried them, I was astounded at their efficacy and inexpensiveness, and not on teeth alone.
I contacted the website’s principal, Dr. Mark Manhart, an Omaha dentist, but I will let him tell you the story. He graciously gave us time for this interview on 13 May 2011. – F. Sanders
PUBLISHER’S WARNING & DISCLAIMER: By publishing this material, neither The Moneychanger nor Dr. Manhart recommends or endorses any specific treatment or therapy for any physical condition or disease. This interview is offered for information & research purposes only, & the reader should receive it as such. Neither The Moneychanger nor Dr. Manhart guarantees or warrants any results from any treatment discussed. Neither The Moneychanger nor Dr. Manhart assumes any express or implied liability for any use to which this information is put. By this interview Dr. Manhart does not prescribe any treatment whatsoever for anyone who is not his patient. All the information here is offered subject to the reader’s own research, prudence, and judgment.
MONEYCHANGER How long have you been practicing dentistry?
MANHART About 49 years, 46 years in Omaha. After three years with the Air Force Dental Corps in the 1960s I came back to Omaha and went into practice.
MONEYCHANGER How did you find out about calcium therapy?
MANHART Quite accidentally. I was an avid reader and after practicing not even a year, came across an article about root canal therapy on rhesus monkeys. They used calcium to help it heal and the article concluded that using a little calcium actually made the root canal heal better. I thought, well, maybe it will work on human beings and I began trying all different kinds of calcium materials with root canals. I came up with one that was really workable, started using it, and then it really hit me.
I had a lady who had a draining abscess on a bicuspid. I injected the calcium right into the fistula, a hole into the bone. I’d never done this sort of thing, but it made logical sense – if only it worked. Three days later she came back and I could not even tell which side of her mouth I had worked on because everything had healed so well!
MONEYCHANGER In three days?
MANHART In three days. I had to look at my records to see what tooth I treated. [Laughter] It was amazing. There was virtually no evidence that I had done any root canal, and she was feeling terrific. It hit me so hard that I went into my private office, sat down, and almost cried.
That incident led to others. When we treat molars a problem called the trifurcation infection often occurs between the molar’s three roots. I started using it on that and also inside the tooth on root canals, and it worked wonderfully.
We’ve used calcium on teeth for a hundred years or more. I was merely using different forms because root canal work is really tedious, and I wanted to make it easier. Otherwise I wouldn’t do them. That led to treating the gums and very soon, we were into full-blown root canal therapy using calcium, inside and outside the tooth and on the gums and periodontal work all over the mouth. That was in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Now we use it on every area of dentistry. We’ve been able to solve the most difficult problems with different techniques or different calcium formulas, to the point where now we have formula usable on skin anywhere on the body.
MONEYCHANGER That’s the one I’m familiar with, right? The “Calotion”?
MANHART When I heard from you about your success with it, I thought, that’s terrific, but we’ve been doing that for a long time and it’s routine.
MONEYCHANGER I wrote to a dermatologist friend and he didn’t know about this particular technique or formulation.
MANHART We approached dermatologists. I also went to the vice president of the university where I was working and asked him about possibly using this to prevent osteoporosis. Considering its terrific performance on the skin and in the mouth, I thought they might be interested. They weren’t. About six months ago I approached a physician here in town, but got the same answer – “You’re a dentist and so you’re really not qualified to say much about this.” If you don’t have the right license, you can’t discover things.
MONEYCHANGER You have several different products: a calcium/zinc-toothbrush, a calcium brushing and mouth rinse (“Cal Oral”), calcium-zinc chips for gum infection, the skin lotion “Calotion”, and that CZ7 Calcium Skin Crème. Are these all just calcium salts?
MANHART They’re different components and compounds of calcium, yes.
MONEYCHANGER But they must be highly bio-available?
MANHART You mean bio-friendly?
MONEYCHANGER Does the human body take them up very readily?
MANHART Oh, definitely. We use a prophylactic paste for polishing teeth. You can watch the calcium being sucked up the by gums and teeth.
MONEYCHANGER This stuff re-calcifies teeth?
MANHART Absolutely. A dentist who wasn’t interested in our work, only in calcium, explained it to me. Even though the tooth is the hardest substance in the body, it sucks up calcium furiously. We see this every day in the office with one compound we use with the polishing agent and the Calotion. The Oral-Cal rinse whitens teeth. Calcium is white, so when structures pick up a lot of calcium, teeth whiten.
MONEYCHANGER Don’t root canals present a problem cleaning out all the infection?
MANHART Some alternative medicine people have given root canals a bad rap and I don’t like that. Alternate medicine people are terrific but they should be careful about root canals. The calcium that we use, and almost any kind of calcium, really does cleanse the inside of a tooth and stimulate the tooth structure to harden and close itself off to bacteria. We all know this.
More often root canals fail due to fracture in the tooth and roots. Fractures are extremely hard to find. This is not me speaking as much as it is Dr. Franklin Weine, the root canal therapy guru who wrote the book in the 1960s. If a fracture occurs anywhere, it will very likely cause the tooth to die eventually. It will forever leak bacterial invasion and therefore, the root canal will fail. So you can’t really blame the root canal therapy, as much as the fracturing. Calcium will make the root canal work better, but it won’t heal the crack in the tooth. You are done with it right there, you cannot bond it, you cannot calcify it, cannot glue it with super glue, or anything.
MONEYCHANGER Your therapy works by transferring calcium ions?
MANHART Five cellular transfers must occur in healing, or getting calcium from the stomach to the bone. There’s hardly any biological reaction in the body that occurs without calcium. However, it also works by simple pH change [pH measures acidity or alkalinity. Below 7 is acid, 7 is neutral, and above 7 is basic or alkaline. – Ed.] It affects and controls the environment’s pH so that healthy cells can work.
Once when I finished lecturing in India this periodontist, a young fellow, stopped me as I was about to jump on the bus for the plane home. “I have to talk with you, I have to talk with you.”
I said, “I can’t, I have to go.”
“Well, doctor,” he replied, “I can tell you why your calcium works.” He began to explain in terms of two factors: the need for calcium in the body and the way it changes the environment’s pH. He said he had written this article and this is what he had learned.
Before he could finish I said to him, “9.5.”
“Yes. How did you know that was the answer?”
“That’s the same answer that we came up with and my guess is that it’s 9.5.”
MONEYCHANGER You mean the pH necessary for the calcium to work?
MANHART Not exactly. That’s part of it. His research was so detailed, so beautiful. That was the answer that he got, too, but he didn’t understand. I told him, “Well, we got that same answer, but we didn’t understand it either. You got the histology, we got the clinical results, and you ought to get that published.” I never heard from him for a long time, but we’re still working with them in India.
MONEYCHANGER I understand that you use this calcium therapy when you have a big intervention problem, like a terribly infected tooth. What about long term maintenance for dental hygiene and periodontal disease?
MANHART We use this in every field of dentistry. We use it on the most hopeless cases that can imagine, cases where you have to hold the teeth in place in the mouth to clean them.
MONEYCHANGER Oh, my goodness! [Laughter]
MANHART Invariably, we treat these patients and they save almost every tooth in their mouth. We have had so many cases like this that it’s completely routine. They come in for a weekend, for three treatments, and we treat them once or twice and then take them to dinner. They enjoy eating an Omaha steak on teeth that not long before they were having to hold in their mouth. Before they wouldn’t eat an ice cream cone, let alone dare chew a steak. We treat them from that end of the spectrum to the other end.
MONEYCHANGER Those people are suffering from periodontal disease?
MANHART Absolutely, fierce periodontal disease. I got a letter today from a woman from Germany. She came over several years ago because eight German dentists said she needed all her teeth pulled. She and her husband came over and stayed a few days, went back, she’s fine. A couple years later, she came back, I treated her again. Now it’s been about five years and she wants to come back again. She hasn’t lost any teeth, she hasn’t had periodontal disease ever since we saw her, and that’s routine. Next weekend we have four people, driving in from eastern Iowa who say their mouths are just hopeless. Well, they’re not hopeless.
To give you an idea of maintenance, on the average, when we see a patient for a six month recall, we do the recall appointment in six to eight minutes, which is to say, we haven’t needed a hygienist in our office for 20 years.
MONEYCHANGER Wait — what?
MANHART It would be silly to pay a hygienist to see one or two patients an hour when we could see, and sometimes do see, four, five, six patients in one hour. We get to spend far more time with the patient. Rather than 30 seconds, or a minute, we spend four to eight minutes, and their problems are so minor that it just doesn’t take any time at all.
MONEYCHANGER You don’t need a hygienist?
MANHART We haven’t needed a hygienist for 20 years. We haven’t hired a hygienist for 20 years.
MONEYCHANGER Wait. You mean that if people use this Oral-Cal . . .
MANHART No, it’s not that simple. If a patient comes in — even a hopelessly terrible, patient — and we treat him and in six months or a year get the problem’s cause solved and under control, the next time he comes in it only takes five to eight minutes to clean his teeth and that’s it. He gets a little mild calcium treatment at that time. Financially, it doesn’t make any sense to pay somebody $80,000 to $100,000 a year to clean teeth in 40 minute appointments when we could’ve seen four patients for the same fee.
MONEYCHANGER If my teeth and gums are healthy now and I use the Oral-Cal and the calcium-zinc toothbrush, then I’m not going to have problems with dental plaque? I’m not going to have –
MANHART You better not, or somebody’s not doing his job. It isn’t you, it’s the dentist and the hygienist. For example, every time you go to the dentist he measures your [gum] pockets. But measuring the pockets spreads the infection all over your mouth and all over your body.
In the 1970s dentistry was told that measuring pockets does nothing except spread infection all over the mouth. Yet the dentist that said this was called a fool and driven out. But he was absolutely right. Measuring the pockets causes your gum problem to continue.
MONEYCHANGER When you talk about clearing up problems in two or three days that other dentists spend months, even years, treating and never address successfully, they will be doubtful and suspicious. You are saying, “Look, this is simple. Use these materials and it’ll work.” Is this why they won’t listen?
MANHART Yes. We eliminated the need for periodontists 40 years ago. Here’s an example. Any city the size of metro Omaha, a million people, should support 16 to 18 periodontists, yet there are only five periodontists in Omaha, Nebraska.
That isn’t something we decided; the specialists and organized dentistry decided that. They’ve decided not to listen to people like us, but when they don’t, they’re the ones who lose. Listen, the people who are suffering the most from dentistry’s refusal to accept this therapy are the wealthy. People who have no money do not go to the dentist or go much less frequently. If you want to know which people are getting screwed by excessive dentistry, they are your friends, the wealthiest people around, the middle class. The lower class poor don’t seek dentistry, and not because dentistry doesn’t work, but because they instinctively know that if they pay for something, it has to work.
MONEYCHANGER Does periodontal disease occur more along wealth lines, or does it cut across the whole population?
MANHART That’s a hard question to answer. I know who spends money on dentistry: people who have money – women over 40 who have a good income. That’s really too bad because some dentists have gone back to the 1940s or 1930s saying, “Oh, don’t have a root canal. Pull the teeth and do implants.”
They’ve given up on periodontal therapy but we have not. We save more teeth than anybody else and when you save them, patients want to put money into them. If you can’t save teeth, there’s no sense putting money into them. That’s exactly why many periodontists are no longer treating periodontal disease. They have failed at it and now they’re doing implants, which is the most questionable dental therapy around.
MONEYCHANGER What cost does your therapy involve? Typically, what would you charge someone with severe periodontal disease?
MANHART That takes two or three sessions, an hour or two each session, and they’ll spend anywhere from $300.00 to $500.00. If in the process they need a root canal, or other work, that is much more expensive, probably another $500.
MONEYCHANGER Won’t an implant to cost more?
MANHART An implant is a joke, $1,200 minimum, and here’s the thing about implants. Implants are put in and if they work and stay in six months to a year, then they put a crown on them and you have an implant with a crown. Taking statistics from the day that implant was put in, about 75 percent work. If they last for six months to a year, then they are called successful implants, but there is nothing else in dentistry we treat this way. You put a crown in, and you have to keep statistics from the day that’s put in, from the day a filling is put in, the day a root canal’s done, but with implants it’s different. If they fail to stay in for a year, or ten months, they’re not even counted. Nothing in dentistry works like that and that isn’t very scientific analysis of success or failure. Moreover, that money has to be paid up front. We pretty much stay away from implants.
MONEYCHANGER Here’s what I don’t understand. When I started using your products, I was astonished at their effectiveness. The question that runs over and over in my mind is, Why is this such a secret? Why hasn’t the dental profession adopted it?
MANHART My wife and I work at a theater of ours directing a show. At intermission I was talking to a dentist, the former dean of my dental school. I loved the guy. We’re talking about the show and how good it is and all at once he says to me, “Mark, I don’t understand how you ever made a living in Omaha, Nebraska.”
“What do you mean, Ben? I’ve worked here, I love dentistry, it’s been good to me.”
He said, “Well, you know we spent the last 30 years trying to stop you from practicing here.”
That, Franklin, happened 20 years ago, and it was his way of apologizing. I said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ll tell you who it was and everything.” and he started yakking about it.
I said to him, “No wonder this thing has never gone anywhere!”
And he answered, “Yeah, it’s not going to go anywhere.” The biggest guru in dentistry, a periodontist in Pennsylvania, published in a national dental magazine, “We’re going to put Manhart and his calcium stuff on the shelf.” I think that was in 1983.
Another little story. We go down to the university, my university, to hear a guru dentist, a periodontist from Connecticut, lecture for two hours. I turned to my associate and asked, “Tom, where is this fellow, compared to where we are?”
Tom replied, “Well, in 1970.”
I said “Tom, I thought it would be 1972.”
What makes us say that? In his lecture he said, “You know I’m in big trouble with my peers back in Connecticut, because I’m doing five percent of my periodontal work non-surgically and only 95 percent surgically.” Franklin, we have not had to use periodontal surgery for forty-five years.
MONEYCHANGER You mean cutting the gums away and so forth?
MANHART Yes. In 1985 I told a TV interviewer that I considered periodontal surgery “barbaric and it should never be done ever again by anyone.” Ten years later, I met her at a party and asked her “Why didn’t you follow up on that TV interview?”
She said, “From that story we got the most violent, terrible response that we ever had from any other news story we ever put out.”
Right then I had to admit to her that I was wrong back in 1985. In view of an effective non-surgical method to treat gum disease, gum surgery isn’t barbaric, it is worse. You lose more blood during periodontal surgery than abdominal surgery.
MONEYCHANGER Goodness gracious!
MANHART That was in the 1980s. Today, you lose more blood having gum surgery than you do in heart surgery. I just had a quadruple heart bypass, and to give you an idea how they have advanced, they didn’t have to stop the heart to do a quadruple by-pass. That is real science. I asked this old dentist about it a year ago, “Are dentists doing much surgery gum surgery still?”
He said, “Oh, God, Mark, it’s outrageous.”
MONEYCHANGER Does calcium therapy work in any applications other than dental?
MANHART Sure. In recent years we have developed a treatment for nasal palatine cyst that lies 10 to 15 millimeters deep in the bone, completely non-surgical, without anesthesia, completely safe, and it heals within six months. We have radiographic evidence that I put on the Web along with an article about it. Where else in the bone and in the body could you use these calcium materials, even where the bone is that thick? The skull, the foot, the knee. We’ve done everything through our own research, from our own pockets, and putting our own necks on the line, without any help from organized dentistry, and we have learned incredible things.
MONEYCHANGER Would calcium therapy help heal burns?
MANHART Burn your hand and then put on some Calotion. The pain leaves immediately.
MONEYCHANGER What interested me in your calcium therapy is that my wife had a half-dollar-sized dark spot on her shin. It itched like crazy, and nothing she applied, even super saturated potassium iodide, could touch it. About a week using your calcium cream whipped it. The area was still dark but evidently healing and the itching had vanished. I was astonished.
MANHART That’s why we put on the bottle this “Heals acne, wounds, zits, rashes, blisters, sunburn.” It’s terrific before and after you shave and for “itching, soreness, chapping, calluses, scars, stings.” Now we’re learning that it prevents leg cramps and now people are trying it for varicose veins.
MONEYCHANGER What about drawbacks? What about contraindications or adverse side effects?
MANHART That is the craziest thing. Sometimes I wonder why don’t we hear from people about bad effects. Something’s gotta go wrong with this stuff. I only remember two specifically. About 25 years ago a fellow started having an allergic reaction. He went to the doctor, and it turned out he was allergic to aspirin. This doesn’t contain aspirin, but it has a cousin to aspirin. It was just too close a relationship. That’s about the only thing I’ve ever heard, until a few days ago. Another man started having a reaction to the toothbrush. He went to an acupuncturist who used some kind of laser therapy over his body and stopped the allergy. Now, I don’t know what the Sam Hill the acupuncturist did, but he stifled this man’s allergic reaction. Those are two examples of untoward reactions, and there might be two other cases in the last 45 years.
MONEYCHANGER Can my readers only order this products from your website. www.calciumtherapy.com?
MANHART Virtually, yes.
MONEYCHANGER Do you list those dentists on your website?
MANHART No. Once you’ve been through the gauntlet with my professional colleagues, you don’t share other people’s names very much. I don’t want their bank accounts locked up on Christmas Eve – as mine was — because they’re using the calcium therapy. Got a call from the IRS the day before Christmas that we hadn’t paid our taxes. It was such an outrageous, arrogant, phony attack that I don’t want a dentist in New York to be taken to court and have his colleagues make absolute fools of themselves trying to stop him from practicing this in New York. So I tell these people, here’s all the information you need, practice it, enjoy it, and keep your mouth shut, because my profession will really get after you.
MONEYCHANGER Well, that’s true of every licensed profession, unfortunately, but what astounds and encourages me is that you’ve found an unconventional therapy that works and you have persevered. It is available from your website, www.calciumtherapy.com, right?
MANHART That’s correct.
MONEYCHANGER I deeply appreciate your generously giving your time for this interview, and thank you for the benefit we have already enjoyed from your products.