AMEN 2015: CrossTraining

Breakout Sessions C

AMEN 2013: Following the Leader

AMEN 2013: Breakout Sessions B

AMEN 2010: Christ - Patient Restorer

AMEN 2010 Breakout Seminars

<p>Dr. Clark has practiced dentistry in the small Arkansas city of Amity for 36 years, 28 of those years learning new approaches with biological dentistry. He and his wife, Harriet, have raised 4 children, worked with several church plants and founded Ouachita Hills Academy and College.</p>

Chester Clark

Ronnie Hold

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Community Involvement

I hate to interrupt your conversations, but it is time to start our last dental session.

And so we can get out in time for supper.

If you could please take a seat and we'll have a word of prayer and get started.

Gracious Father in heaven, we thank you for the things that we've learned today We thank you for the experiences of life and for the privileges We have of serving the needs of our patients and our families and friends.

I pray that you will bless this session here as we share the ways you've led in at least the lives of 2 of us here.

And I pray that we might continue to learn and find ways to serve you better.

Well, the topic today is community service, community needs, And I was asked to share how the Lord led and directed in my experience in serving the community in a way that probably very few of you have been called to do.

We went to a dark county after I finished school.

We owed $30, 000, which was too much for the general conference to send us to mission service.

And so my wife and I decided we'd go to mission service in our home conference, which was Arkansas and Louisiana.

And we found a county that had no Adventist witness and began a health ministry and a church and later on a school, and we had no intention of doing that originally.

But It was the era when it was unethical to advertise.

Now not many of you remember that period of time.

And so it was suggested, you know, when you're starting a practice, and this was a scratch practice, I built my own office, spent the first 6 months out of dental school, you know, hammering nails and building the office according to the design that I had developed in my senior year of dental school.

Anyway, so 1 of the suggestions was get involved in the community.

And so it wasn't long, I think I'd been practicing maybe a year and someone asked me to serve on the housing authority board.

And I said, well, whatever that is, yeah, I'll do that.

But the city had a low income housing project of 20 or 25 units, I guess, and so I served on that board, and it met every 3 months, I think it was, and I met with him twice, and then My receptionist was the wife of a former mayor in the town, and she suggested that I run for city council because they really needed some help and leadership on the city council.

Of course, that was never in my wildest dreams, but the Lord impressed me to run for city council, and of course I was elected.

1 thing you'll find in a small town, and I was a town of about 800 people, there's always a leadership void.

And so if, regardless of where you practice, if you want to get your name in the public and, you know, get some exposure, then it's good to serve in a public way like this.

So I served about 18 years actually on the city council which was a commitment of about 2 hours a month.

They had a council meeting, you know, second Tuesday of every month.

And it wasn't long though before there was some things going on.

1 of the council members came to me and said that the mayor, who was his uncle, was doing some things illegal and wanting me to take care of it.

And, and so it took a while for me to figure out what was going on.

Actually, he was drawing disability and he was paying his wife for work that he was doing for the city on the side.

And anyway, so When we figured this all out, we asked him to resign.

And everyone thought that even though it wasn't public, that I wanted the job of mayor, and which was far from the case.

So as years went by, I regularly declined every 4 years when there was election for the mayor.

And during this time we also saw there was a tremendous need for a new city hall and fire station, and I won't even try to describe how deplorable what we had was.

But we had voted a half cent sales tax to pay for a new city hall and fire station.

After about 5 years or so, we had $50, 000.

And council wanted to build a nice farm type building just a little metal structure that Would house the City Hall and fire station and I said no I'd really like to see a nicer building I'd like to get an architect and and and have a building we can all be really proud of And actually in the back of my mind I was also devising a building that had large enough room for health education and evangelistic meetings and things like that as well.

And so they said oh no we can't afford that Let's just take the money we have and build what we can.

And I said, well, there's a foundation that was just formed.

3 little ladies that had owned the bank had sold it and formed a foundation.

And I said, if I go to the Olds Foundation and ask them for a hundred thousand dollars to build a new City Hall Would you agree to get a architect and do something nice?

Yeah, we would So went to these little ladies and they said oh we'd be delighted to contribute a hundred thousand dollars for a new City Hall and we'll do that under 1 condition.

And that was coming up that year, so I was kind of in a box.

So that's how I became the mayor of the town.

So anyway, my assessment was the city just needed leadership.

And the overall attitude was we've never had anything, we never will, the city's going down the tubes, you know, and so just coming along and saying, look, we can do differently, you know, we can have something nice.

So we built actually a 7, 500-foot City Hall and Fire Station, which included a room that would seat about 200 people.

And we've done a lot of health education classes and some evangelistic meetings.

In fact, we're doing evangelistic meetings in that facility right now, 5 nights a week.

Some people have driven by thinking it's the county seat because it's such a nice nice building.

Well we've done other projects we've restored the city circle that's business areas built around a square with a circle in the middle and we have a nice fountain, colored lights and period lighting around the outside.

And that was about a $250, 000 project and mostly paid for by the federal government.

But I was very blessed because, and actually I shouldn't be talking about myself so much, but this foundation would, almost every project I came up with, they would help fund.

When we ran out of money, they would help fund it.

And as you look at a city's needs, there's needs for safe water, safe streets, recreation opportunities, medical care, jobs, adequate education, and religious freedom.

Well, we, I was also able to, there was a little medical clinic there that was sitting idle and I was able to find an Adventist physician that served the community for about 10 years, which was a tremendous blessing.

And we also were able to build a city park with mostly state funds and this foundation funds as well, a really nice park with a fitness trail, quarter-mile fitness trail around it.

And it was all a real blessing and 1 of the benefits to the Lord's work was that during this time we were Also, the Lord had led us to start a school and we had an academy, began in 1988, about 5 miles out of town in the country.

And way back when David Koresh was in the news and all people were, the rumor going around was there's another Waco right out here.

And so my involvement in, with the city council really was a help to give people credibility that no this isn't, you know anything like that.

And the school's been involved in the community.

We do community service days twice a year in helping the older people take care of their yards and houses and various things.

So it was a blessing in that it squelched a lot of the rumors and a lot of the false ideas people had of who Seventh-day Adventists are.

And we also were, well, it, we found that we, there's always an element of people who are not really, they're against or negative about just about anything.

Most people that spoke to me were very appreciative of what I with the Lord's help had done in helping the city visually and with you know economic development.

We actually, the city hall and fire station, we borrowed money and about $500, 000 and paid it off in 12 years and so the city is actually in excellent financial condition with many cities around us have borrowed millions of dollars and just barely paying the interest on that or the principal.

But about 2 years before my last term, I was mayor for 16 years, and Word got out that we were building a new Adventist church, and it was gonna be right on the main highway, actually just across the highway almost from my office.

And from then on, the last 2 years of my term, I experienced what Paul tells us in Timothy, 2 Timothy 3, 16, that all that do righteous will suffer persecution.

And It was really quite an interesting experience.

And I felt that the desire on the part of some people, and granted it was mostly the rabble, but we had a newspaper editor and our little town has a newspaper that circulates in about 3 counties, and this newspaper editor is a Church of Christ pastor, in his spare time, and he is quite prejudiced racially and also religiously as well, And I'm not sure which of his prejudices are stronger, Adventists or those of other races.

But anyway, those last 2 years, he never spoke to me once.

He would publish just about anything anybody told him, which was often fallacious.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, someone told me that they understood that they were wanting to get rid of me and the school, and my school, which of course is also just, I'm sure, a very small group of people, but nonetheless, as the last...

And the other factor going along with this was that there was a long-term employee of the city something like 22 years who was very treating the city very dishonestly and I had been trying to tell the City Council this for several years and they didn't believe it but finally after things came out the way they did and actually someone tried to burn down our house about 2 months before the end of my term but that's another another story we won't we won't get into but a week before my term ended the council voted to hire somebody else to replace him and my last day in office I had to fire him and hire this other this other person and So it was extremely stressful and ended with a lot of relief that I was no longer the mayor.

But during this, actually 32 years of serving the community, I felt that it was a very positive thing.

And I would encourage any of you, even though, you know, there's a lot of dishonesty and, and ugly things going on in politics.

But we can be a real light and a source of truth and righteousness in situations where often times there isn't that much of that influence.

But thankfully, the people in the community still stop me and tell me how much they appreciate what what was done in the in the community during during those times and we were able to leave the city with some good leadership and strangely enough the 2 people also during the last couple of weeks of all kinds of things going on, the city clerk resigned and the man that was hired to replace her is a pastor And the other water operator that was hired is also a part-time pastor that was wanting to be able to work closer to the church that he was pastoring.

And so, It was a blessing to see ungodly people replaced by people that are, at least, standing for Christian values and truth.

In terms of what I learned from this experience is that it's probably not good to take on so many things at 1 time.

And also that if God calls you to serve your community, there are many ways that you can be a blessing and point others, have opportunities to point others to truth and righteousness.

And that's basically the experience that I've had in community service.

And now Ronnie Holt is going to share what he has been doing.

I want to thank Audioverse, too, for all their hard work putting our programs together, and that's the reason we're staying behind the mic, so we can make a smooth transition there.

We've had some excellent, excellent from our speakers here with Dr.

Periodontal Disease: New Treatment Methods

I am Chester Clark, just to give you a little background.

I finished Loma Linda in 1976 and moved back to my home conference of Arkansas and Louisiana and been practicing there for 36 years.

I was tired of studying, and I was going to start a practice in a big city of then 685, I think it was.

But anyway, I spent the first 6 months helping to build my practice, build the office.

And although there had been a dentist there for 35 years prior, had retired about 5 years before, and so there was a lot of people that hadn't seen a dentist for those many years.

But We also felt the Lord led us there for a purpose.

And the reason we found this place was because we were looking for a place that needed an Adventist witness.

And so the first few years, we started a church in our county seat, Arkadelphia, about 25 miles away.

And then a few years later, the Lord led us to start an academy.

So my wife and I started a little academy in our home that grew and grew.

And we won't go into those stories at this point.

But it has been thrilling to work with many young people from all over the United States and other countries as well.

But my dental practice has been a lot of fun and over the years I have always been looking for things that would make life simpler for me and my treatment for patients more effective.

And 1 of the things that was rather frustrating for years was periodontal disease.

You know, we could encourage people to brush and floss and see some improvement.

But it seemed like over time there was always a lot of regression.

And if we didn't see them for a few years, we'd have to go back and do the deep scaling and deep cleaning and so on.

And it wasn't until about probably 5 or 6 years ago that I learned about a program called Centers for Dental Medicine.

And it's kind of a bridge between dentistry and medicine.

And I wish that we had provided CME credit for this hour, too, because there should be a lot of physicians here, because they will see some ways in which they can serve their patients better, I think, by the end of this lecture.

But the thing that attracted me was that there was a way of actually measuring and defining the disease systemically as well as just paradontal probing and measuring the gum crevices.

But let's go through these slides and I'll have a few other comments and information and then we will have some time for questions at the end.

The oral systemic connections are so many.

About 5 or 6 years ago, if you Googled oral systemic connection, you would come up with about 400, 000 hits.

And I'm sure it's more than that now, because the research has been so extensive, so many areas and people around the world doing research that show how things happening in the mouth are related to things happening in the body as well.

And so if we ask the question, what increases the risk of diabetes by 50%, heart disease 72%, and certain cancers by 50%?

And of course, the answer is periodontal disease.

50% diabetes, heart disease 72%, and some cancers by 50%.

Those are some significant percentages, aren't they?

If your hygiene program were to help me lose weight, lower my blood pressure, lower my CPR, eliminate medications, lower HbA1c or cholesterol and triglycerides to normal, I would be your raving fan.

And this is the opportunities that we have right now in treating periodontal disease.

We can do every 1 of these things in helping people achieve a healthier state.

A growing body of evidence indicates that weak as dentists can help people in all of these areas of their health parameters.

Medical history reports that Asahaddon, king of Assyria, was constantly plagued with rheumatism and did not respond to any conventional method of treatment.

His doctor was quoted as saying, On the order of my Lord and King to tell him the true diagnosis, I have told him the diagnosis in 1 word, inflammation.

He whose head, hands, and feet are inflamed suffers this trouble due to the condition of his teeth.

For this reason, the internal organs are inflamed." So not only a lot of current research and information, but it looks like it goes back quite a few centuries.

What was that, 660 AD, something like that?

And about 100 years ago, and 90 some years ago now, Charles Mayo, who noted over 90 years ago, when this actually is longer than that, that people who keep their teeth live an average of 10 years longer than people who do not.

I don't know if it was based on scientific study or not, but at least this prominent physician recognized this.

And about 14 years ago, there was a special report by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Every year, they publish a big, thick volume focusing on 1 area of health.

And Donna Shalala said in her address back then or the introduction of this book, the terms oral health and general health should not be interpreted as separate entities.

Oral health is integral to general health.

This report provides important reminders that oral health means more than healthy teeth, and that you cannot be healthy without oral health.

And so, the partnership against inflammatory disease, that's actually what we're talking about.

The periodontal disease is, much of it is inflammation of the gums, And we'll talk about what the cause of that is.

But inflammation, as many of you physicians probably know better than the dentists even, is related to almost every condition in the human body.

At the top, we see cardiovascular diseases, a list there, diabetic complications, chronic inflammatory diseases, bone, muscular, and skeletal diseases, cancer of a number of kinds, and metabolic disorder complications, and neurological disorder.

And I think that probably covers just about the whole gamut, except maybe gynecological disorders.

But anyway, that is rather all-encompassing.

So, you know, I'm not standing in front of the screen here.

In a wellness letter from several years ago, this comment was made.

Acute inflammation is characterized by the redness, heat, swelling, and pain that is the immune system's normal response to infection or injury.

Immune cells congregate at the site so that they can overwhelm and dispose of infectious organisms or debris from injury.

But there's another kind of inflammation, low-grade, chronic, and systemic.

It's been getting a lot of attention lately.

And then just a little bit here in the next paragraph.

It says, the reason you hear so much about this kind of inflammation is that it may underlie a kind of unified field explanation of disease.

That is, some researchers now believe that low-grade inflammation is associated with everything from heart disease and diabetes to Alzheimer's and arthritis, and may even be the cause of most chronic diseases.

Inflammation was implicated in cancer many years ago.

And Aetna, a prominent insurance agency, did a study of 145, 000 of their members.

And with both dental and medical coverage, show that periodontal care reduces the cost of medical care.

And treating periodontal disease lowers Aetna's cost of treating members with diabetes, coronary artery disease, and cerebrovascular disease.

Of course, with the changes in insurance, who knows what they will be covering in the next year or 2.

But another insurance company, Cigna, will pay 100% of out-of-pocket perio expense for members with diabetes, cardiovascular disease.

IADR and IDADR study shows lower medical costs for diabetes and cardiovascular patients when treated for periodontal disease.

So another insurance who found basically the same thing as Aetna.

And the University of Michigan researchers found that individuals who received regular non-surgical periodontal care during the term of the study also demonstrated lower diabetes-related medical care costs of more than 10% per year, more than 20% lower annual medical costs for treatment related to cardiovascular disease in individuals with both diabetes and heart disease.

More than 30% lower annual medical costs for kidney disease treatment for individuals with diabetic diabetes and kidney disease.

And 40% lower medical care costs for treatment related to congestive heart failure.

Wouldn't that lead you to think that there is a connection between disease in the mouth or periodontal disease, and heart disease, diabetes.

But that's a test that many physicians are realizing is as predictive of heart disease as cholesterol anymore.

It's assumed there's some inflammation going on somewhere in the body.

And interestingly enough, patients with periodontal disease often have, almost always have, high CRP.

And that CRP goes down when treatment is successful.

And this, for some of you dentists, if you were like me a few years ago, you weren't familiar with CRP.

But if the value is 1 or less, then there's very little risk.

Most of you probably have a CRP of 1 or less.

Restoring Dental Patients to Optimum Health

Since I don't have my projector here, I'll just read it from my PDA.

It says, It's Psalms 103 verses 2 through 5.

It says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with loving kindness and tender mercies, who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagles.

Well, that's a beautiful few verses about God's interest in blessing us in so many ways.

And I believe he wants to heal all our diseases as well don't you that's why we're here at this conference isn't it I want to share just a little bit of my path my professional path since leaving Loma Linda.

I graduated from the School of Dentistry in 1977 with also a degree in public health.

And because we owed too much money, $30, 000 at that time, the General Conference would not send us to the mission field.

So my wife and I decided we would find a mission field in our home conference which is Arkansas, Louisiana.

She was from Louisiana, grew up in New Orleans and we met at Ozark Academy.

And so we looked at the map, it was called a dark county map back then, and found an area that had not been served.

It wasn't actually what we were looking for, but that's another story.

And we moved back to a little town of Amity, at that time population 515, I think it was.

It's been a marvelous experience of starting a scratch practice we actually bought a lot and built an office and I like to build things so I help the builders build the first 6 months after I graduated and opened the office in August of 1977.

And I practiced pretty much traditional dentistry, what I was taught, during the first 8, 9 years of practice.

And however, things once in a while just seem to have some problems.

I would have patients come back to me and say, You know, Doc, since I saw you last, I spent 2 days or 3 days in the hospital.

I was really sick, and I think what you did caused it.

Well, you know, of course, I was very defensive.

No, no, what I did was perfect, you know.

But gradually, other things began to impact me, and I felt that I wanted to be open to the Lord's leading and professionally there was an article published in the May 1984 Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry which I had subscribed to for many years and Have a whole eight-foot shelf of those magazines and American Dental Association journals and And I was really impressed with this this study.

Eggleston and he was comparing mercury fillings with doing T lymphocyte tests.

And he did a T lymphocyte study and found out that the percentage of T lymphocytes with mercury fillings, a young lady, 26 year old, who had about 6 fillings I think, all beautiful fillings, she had a T lymphocyte count of about 48.

And he took the mercury fillings out put in composites and did another mercury T-lymphocyte test 4 months later and found the percentage was 73 and which is about a 30 40 percent increase And then he put little tiny mercury fillings in the middle of those composites and 4 months later did another T lymphocyte test and it was almost exactly the way it was before, 47-48 percent.

And so he took those out, restored the teeth with gold restorations, 4 months later did another T lymphocyte test and it was back up an area of 73, 72, 73 again.

You know, T-lymphocytes, that's a pretty important part of our immune system, isn't it?

You physicians know more about that than I do.

But I wondered, should I be placing something that has the potential of impairing someone's immune system?

Presenter

Chester Clark

7 Teachings

Description

Website

Recent

Community Involvement

59m

Periodontal Disease: New Treatment Methods

53m

Restoring Dental Patients to Optimum Health

52m

Most Listened

Dr. Clark Personal Testimony

29m

Panel Discussion: The Ministry of Healing

49m

Restoring Dental Patients to Optimum Health

52m

Series

Series

Breakout Sessions C

4 more

5 parts

Series

AMEN 2013: Breakout Sessions B

2 more

4 parts

Series

AMEN 2010 Breakout Seminars

8 more

13 parts

Also Appears In

Conference

Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2015

AMEN 2015: CrossTraining

5 series

Conference

Oct 29 – Nov 3, 2013

AMEN 2013: Following the Leader

5 series

Conference

Oct 28 – 31, 2010

AMEN 2010: Christ - Patient Restorer

2 series

Sound Doctrine