Dr. Tara Griffin: Sleep Science & The Impact on Your Health | HYFH #114

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health, and culture as we bring you, tech innovators, thought leaders, and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:36)
Hi everybody, welcome to HOT For Your Health. Today's guest is going to take us on a sleep journey that you have never been on before. We have had other sleep scientists, we have had sleep researchers, but Dr. Tara Griffin is a sleep clinician. By training, she is a dentist, and through her own story with sleep difficulty, developed this field and approach to sleep that you probably have never heard of. She is not only a dentist, she is a practice innovator and an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Sleep Solution Centers, one of which is right across the hallway for me in Lake Nona. And so I am so happy to welcome you here today to talk about sleep in general, how it affects midlife people because of how collagen goes away. But honestly, the thing we all deny, but probably do at one time or another, which is could you please help us sleep in the same room as our spouses again because of the snoring. So Dr. Griffin, thank you so much for being here today and for telling us first your own story about why a dentist became so profoundly interested in pivoting to sleep science.

**Dr. Tara Griffin** (2:06)
Thank you, Vonda. I really appreciate you having me on and just love what you've been doing in the health and longevity field. And coming from the perspective as a dentist, being a surgeon, I mean, just different type of surgeon than you are. But every day operating on people and restoring things, it's definitely outside of the box from your general dentistry to be practicing sleep medicine, and specifically dental sleep medicine is how it gets categorized now. And there's not a formal specialty around it. So 15 years ago, I was practicing general dentistry. I owned my own practice. I was only about four years out of dental school. And I was loving what I was doing. I was really helping impact people and change lives and all of that. But I was suffering with my own problems. And these issues, I was in my early 30s. And these issues had built up really over a lifetime. And the problems that I was having were the typical types of symptoms that most females, young females, actually will suffer with. And these were things like headaches, specifically a lot of head and neck pain, TMJ issues, problems with the jaw, sinus issues, which had been a lifetime for me. And sleep problems started coming on at that time, all of a sudden, you know, waking up at night, going to the bathroom multiple times, which I had never done before. I'd always been a great sleeper. And these chronic pain and issues started settling in. Well, as I started to look for different ways to solve the problem, because I was in so much pain, I couldn't continue to practice dentistry. I mean, it was agonizing, like it was exhausting, and it was extremely painful. And I thought, you know, there has to be another way. Otherwise, I'm not going to continue to stick with this. And so I started looking at different treatment options, and everything led toward surgery, surgery for my jaw, and surgery for my sinuses. And the amount of years that I had been on different types of antibiotics and therapies like that to relieve these symptoms, I also had colitis issues. And so the gut, everything was messed up. And owning a business, the stresses of all of that, the practice, all of the life things that everyone goes through. So it was really my own pain and suffering that led me to this field 15 years ago. And I'm very grateful that it did because I was able to find some solutions for the sleep and for the other pain issues that I was having. And jaw issues and sinus issues. And those are part of what we do today. And really looking at a non-surgical and often non-pharmaceutical way of approaching it. And so addressing more of the root cause. And I never had any idea when those symptoms came on that they would really stem from the underdevelopment and issues that I had as a child because of the growth and development early on that was never addressed until later exacerbated, you know. What?

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (5:27)
Once I was an adult. Well, as I was reading through some of the information that you have, you state that the nasal airways and sinuses are the main anatomy that interfere with sleep disorders, and then up to 70% of all problems occur within the nose. And so is that developmental? Is that traumatic? Is that hormonal? Where does, what is the root cause? Or what are the main root causes of sleep disturbance?