It was the summer of 1982, and I wasn’t a dentist yet. I was a 20-something biochemistry and art history major at the University of British Columbia. I spotted a book on my mom’s bookshelf—Life Extension by Pearson and Shaw. I didn’t know it at the time, but that book would set me on the path to functional dentistry—long before the term “functional medicine” had been coined. It would be decades before I would realize I’d be charting a new path in dentistry.
The way this book talked about the body was unlike anything I’d seen. This book wasn’t just health advice. It reframed the body as an interconnected system—where small disruptions could ripple outward into disease, and early signals mattered more than late-stage symptoms. It gave me a framework to think upstream, to search for what set illness in motion long before the symptoms showed up. The authors didn’t use the term “functional medicine,” but their philosophy anticipated it: intervene early, treat the root cause, view the body as a system, and use emerging biochemical science to stay ahead of disease. It was radical for the time—especially in 1982—and it captured something I didn’t know I’d been searching for. I read it cover to cover—all 858 pages. Then again and again.
A few years later, I would attend dental school in San Francisco. In dental school, the curriculum is tight. You’re taught to recognize symptoms, define diseases, and treat them efficiently. That’s the formula: identify, diagnose, code, and bill. It’s not about stepping back or connecting dots. Dental school is designed to get you licensed, to pass your boards and to become a “safe beginner” and start treating. Once you’re in practice, insurance companies reinforce the same pattern. The system doesn’t reward curiosity. It rewards compliance. I think that’s perhaps why so few dentists ever make the shift away from conventional dentistry.
As a new dentist fresh out of dental school, you’re inundated with emergencies that pile up—pain, infection, necrosis. You’re underwater, and you want to do more to help your patients heal, but the insurance model expects you to stay there. In most practices, reimbursements from insurance are fixed. That means it doesn’t matter how complex the case is or how much time you spend—your pay is the same. The only way to keep the lights on is to see more patients, faster. The business model only works when treatment is predictable and billable.
And it’s the provider—caught in the middle—who’s forced to choose. A provider who wants to do the right thing but is still at the whim of a third party—the insurance company—that determines reimbursement.
When dentists graduate, we are buried in debt. The volume of disease wears down curiosity, and the pressure to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars pushes you toward prioritizing speed and billable procedures.
My first job out of dental school was in a high-volume practice where the focus was speed and production. I got fired for spending too much time with patients. My boss pulled me aside and said, “Just get back to work, you’re wasting time.”
I was also referring patients out—sending them to the right specialists for procedures our clinic wasn’t equipped to handle. The first time I did it, the periodontist called me back, confused. “Do you work at South Bay Health Center?” he asked. “Is South Bay now sending patients out? That’s not like them.”
I told him no—it wasn’t them. It was just me, an employee. He couldn’t believe it. They wanted to know who I was.
Then he asked, “And Mr. Ward is okay with this?”
I said, “Mr. Ward is not a dentist. He’s half-owner of South Bay Health Center, but he’s not a dentist. He doesn’t get to make these decisions about what’s best for the patient.”
No surprise, I was fired shortly after that. The whole thing lasted about eight months.
Within months, and with the support from my wife, I opened my own practice in the heart of Silicon Valley, effectively in the backyard of Apple and Intel HQ.
So, naturally, a lot of my patients were programmers. And programmers, especially in those early days, were also beta testers. When something didn’t work, they didn’t just look at the symptoms—they went back to the source code—in other words, the underlying logic that determines how the whole system runs. Debugging it meant digging into the origin of the problem and rewriting the instructions.
That was the perfect mirror for how I had started thinking about dentistry. I wasn’t just treating the cavity—I was debugging the body. I was asking what had gone wrong in its operating logic. I was looking for the source code of dental disease—the earliest dysfunctions, the prodromal phase of disease—where things start to go off course long before a diagnosis is possible or symptoms are obvious.
I wasn’t just placing fillings anymore. I was tracing root causes. The culture of Silicon Valley encouraged that—and I leaned into it.
I was still doing what I was trained to do, of course—and my patients were happy. I filled cavities, did root canals, restored teeth.
But something was missing. It felt shallow, like we were just treating the surface. It didn’t matter that the clinical work was technically sound—clean margins, proper occlusion, predictable outcomes—because my patients would keep coming in with the same issues.
And I knew it was unacceptable to tread water alongside my patients for the rest of my career. That’s not what a practitioner should do. We shouldn’t be complicit in dysfunction—we should interrupt it. This is the higher calling of the healthcare practitioner—whether you’re a nurse, doctor, myofunctional therapist… but it requires stepping outside the curriculum, outside the billing codes, and deciding to think for yourself.
As patients and colleagues started to notice the unconventional way I was practicing, they called it “holistic dentistry.” But that label never felt quite right. Back then, holistic often meant energy lines and meridians—ideas I couldn’t co-sign because they weren’t grounded in biology or data. And even when I agreed with parts of holistic dentistry, the label didn’t fit the bigger picture I was trying to work from.
What I was building wasn’t just a philosophy. It was a framework. A systems approach to oral health. And that needed its own name.
For years, I didn’t know what kind of dentist I was. I didn’t fit into the biological dentistry camp—too focused on materials, not enough on systems. Integrative dentistry was helpful in its emphasis on collaborating with other healthcare providers, but still reactive, and working downstream of symptoms.
I always felt out of place—too clinical for the holistic dentists, and too crunchy for the conventional ones.
I didn’t set out to be different. It happened organically—a slow collision between the way I was trained and what I knew my patients actually needed. I couldn’t ignore the gap between clinical protocol and long-term health outcomes.
I believe that that book—Life Extension—had planted a seed in how it challenged the assumption that disease is inevitable. I didn’t want to just fix problems. I wanted to improve life span and quality of life for my patients. And, luckily, because many of them were systems thinkers, they were receptive and open.
And now, decades later, my eldest daughter (who was born five days early on the day I opened that private practice) has helped me bring my message to YouTube, this newsletter you’re reading, Instagram, podcasts, and more. And now, more and more dentists are realizing: this is where the future of our profession is headed.
We’re losing nearly a million lives every year to diseases we could have prevented. The chronic disease crisis isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up. And dentistry—the mouth, the airway, the starting point for digestion and immunity—is still sitting in a silo.
That can’t continue.
We need to redefine what it means to be a dentist. We need to be systems thinkers. Engineers of human health. We need to go upstream, to the prodromal phase of disease. And fiercely advocate for our patients.
We need to stop only treating symptoms and start intercepting disease.
That’s the promise of functional dentistry.
If something in this clicked, you’re not alone. My CE course, Foundations of Functional Dentistry, is built from four decades of practice. If you’re done firefighting and ready to get upstream—hit reply. I’ll send the details.
This CE course is for the dentist who’s tired of firefighting. Who finds more meaning in preventing a cavity than in filling one. Who knows it’s harder to quantify disease prevention—but it’s where the real power is. Prevention means changing the trajectory of someone’s health before symptoms ever show up. That’s not management. That’s true care.
Because the true meaning of “doctor” is teacher—and healer. And how effective do you want your healer to be? Constantly underwater, reacting to symptoms? Or on the other side—thinking upstream, taking charge, helping patients rewrite their health destiny?
Join a community of dentists and rewrite the story of what dentistry can be.
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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