Root Fillings - A Root Cause of Chronic illness
Chronic dental infections are often a missing part of the illness puzzle that keeps people chronically sick. One of the most common dental infections is the root canal filling. This occurs when a tooth dies, and your dentist fills it with preservatives, like the ancient Egyptians preserved dead bodies by mummification. It is essentially a dead organ. In fact, it is the only dead organ that the medical profession encourages you to keep in your body. If you had a gangrenous toe or infected appendix, you would be whisked into the operating theatre to remove the diseased organ to save your life. What effect does keeping a dead tooth in your mouth have on the rest of your health?
Tooth anatomy
To answer this, you need to know a little tooth anatomy. The second layer of tooth, called dentin, is not solid, but composed of tiny tubules that look like a sponge or a honeycomb under a microscope. In an average sized tooth, if all these tubules were stretched end to end, they would extend over three miles long. A tooth has between one to four central canals. Picture the tiny tubules branching off from the central canals like the branches of a Christmas tree. It is what can get trapped in these tubules that can be so damaging to health.
What starts the rot?
What causes a tooth to die and you end up in the dentist’s chair getting a root filling? A healthy living tooth has a mechanism to clean itself out where fluid flows from the inside to the outside of the tooth. As it does so, it washes away the bacteria that live on the surface of that tooth.
However, when you eat too many refined foods and sugars, your body’s phosphorous level drops to below 3.4 and this unleashes a cascade of unpleasant events. You start losing minerals in your teeth and the fluid stops flowing from inside to outside and starts flowing in the opposite direction - from outside to inside. Now that the fluid flow is reversed, it sucks bacteria sitting on the outside of your tooth into your tooth. These bacteria then march right into the inner tubules of your tooth where they will find a nice comfortable home. This starts the rot.
The problem with root fillings
When a root filling is performed, the central canals are sealed with preservatives. Dentists do this very expertly these days, so what is the problem? Remember the tooth’s dentin looks like a Christmas tree with approximately three miles worth of tubules branching off from the central canals? The problem is that it is still impossible for any dentist to sterilise the tubules branching off from the main canals and the bacteria living within them. Various methods have been tried but tubules remain sterile for only about 30 seconds. Lasers have been tried but they can’t go round corners and tubules are curved. Once the tooth is sealed like the burial chamber in a tomb, the bacteria are sealed in with it.
Anaerobic bacteria
Don’t bacteria die in their sealed tomb devoid of oxygen? Unfortunately not. Studies have firmly established that the bacteria in dead teeth are very hardy beasts and are predominantly anaerobic i.e. they don’t need oxygen to survive. Trapped inside the honeycomb chambers of dentin, dental bacteria become smaller in size and number, but also more virulent. Like any living creature, they pee and poop toxins. Without oxygen, the toxins become even more toxic.
If the bacteria can survive without oxygen, surely they can’t escape, so where is the problem? There are actually two main ways that bacteria can escape the seemingly enclosed cavern of a sealed tooth: through accessory canals that branch off from the main tooth canals and by seeping through the cementum itself.
Focal infection
Where do escaping bacteria go? Although the circulation in the jaws is not as good as other parts of the body, there are still superhighways of blood vessels that can transport the bacteria to other parts of the body - any organ, gland, tissues - whichever look most inviting to set up a comfortable home. This migration of infection is known as focal infection.
Dr. Weston A. Price
This is not new information. Scientists, doctors and dentists have written about it for over 100 years. Prominent among them is dentist, nutritionist and leading researcher of his day, Dr. Weston A. Price, whose pioneering work on root canal research was one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years relating to health and systemic disease.
Like many dentists of his time, Dr. Price had noticed that patients with chronic diseases often got better when infected teeth were removed. Inspired by the fact that when scientists took bacterial cultures from sick patients and inoculated these into the skin of animals, they were able to reproduce the same illness to test drugs, Dr. Price determined to put this to the test with one of his female patients.
The Rabbits’ Tale
This lady was crippled with arthritis and had been confined to a wheelchair for six years. She had a root filling which seemed fine, but Dr. Price advised her to have it removed as he felt it held a clue to her chronic suffering. She consented and immediately Dr. Price had extracted the tooth, he implanted it under the skin of a rabbit. Within two days, the rabbit developed the same kind of crippling arthritis suffered by the patient and died after 10 days. The lady made a successful enough recovery to be able to walk without a stick and take up fine needlework again.
Like the start of many great scientific discoveries, the success of this initial experiment led to a led to a meticulous 25 year research project during which Dr. Price repeated his initial experiment hundreds of times, removing root-filled teeth from sick patients and implanted them under the skin of rabbits. Rabbits chosen because they have similar immune systems to humans. In almost every case, the rabbits developed the same or similar disease as the patient and died within three to 12 days. His research discoveries are recorded in two volumes published in the 1923 and still available to read.
Case Studies
Dr Price meticulously recorded his findings and the improvements noted in a broad range of medical conditions when infected root canals were removed. These include the full gamut of conditions: cardiovascular, respiratory, kidney, hormonal, digestive, nervous, skin, musculoskeletal and other tissues. Here is a brief outline of two of the hundreds of cases Dr Price and his team documented.
Case no. 1346 - This was a 49 year old male who had been unable to work for three years due to an enlarged, inflamed heart. His drawn features reflected the nervous tension he felt constantly in his head and he could not carry on his business because of the stress produced by having to think. The ionic calcium of his blood was well below normal and he had to drive himself with a whip, being in a state of nervous irritability. First X-ray impressions were that teeth were unlikely to be a serious contributory factor. However, more thorough examination revealed infected molars. When these were removed and placed under the skins of several rabbits, the animals suffered enlarged hearts and spontaneous haemorrhages in many body parts. The patient’s recovery was such that in 10 days' time his ionic calcium was back to normal, his heart irritation disappeared entirely and a feeling of wellbeing and joy permeated his features that had been haunted by nervous tension while labouring under the strain of dental infections.
Case no. 345 - This was a 51 year old male who had been sent to a sanitarium to die of tuberculosis. He had a distressing cough and had been refused life insurance because of his enlarged heart which kept skipping beats. Upon removal of all infected teeth, the patient’s cough and heart irritation disappeared. The insurance companies could not believe such an improvement and wrote to Dr. Price for an explanation. Dr Price records,
“The fact that he has taken $50,000 of life insurance, and that he has had no recurrence of his trouble in five years, and is carrying on his business apparently in normal health, is sufficient evidence that his dental infections were the principal cause of both his lung and cardiac disturbances.”
Immune defence is key
Modern research technology confirms the findings of Dr. Price last century. Whereas Dr. Price found a majority of strep infections in root filled teeth, modern DNA techniques have isolated a gamut of additional infections including strep, Bartonella, Lyme, Epstein Barr Virus and more.
Does this mean that everyone with a root filling should get it extracted? Not necessarily. For Dr. Price, the determining factor was a patient’s immune reaction to infection and their genetic susceptibility. Some people had a high defence for dental infections and others had a poor defence. To this end, Dr Price always took a detailed case history for each patient. He noted that if there was a family history of arthritis, heart disease, cancer, autoimmunity and similar ailments, a person was much more likely to to succumb to dental infection, especially if they encountered serious overloads to the immune system.
Immune overloads
The serious overloads Dr. Price listed were: pregnancy, breastfeeding, flu, grief, bereavement, physical and nervous strain, and ageing (middle age and beyond). We might add wifi exposure in 2022! Even if a person has no genetic predisposition to poor immune defence and even if they are not suffering from any chronic symptoms, Dr. Price did think that the infections locked into a root filling were likely to produce some unwanted symptoms in time simply because of the ageing factor.
Your tooth or your life
In clinical practice, I have seen many people turn their cases around by getting rid of their infected teeth and getting safe replacement teeth to restore their bite and their looks. And I have also seen a smaller number of people with chronic debilitating conditions too paralysed by fear of the dentist or of losing their looks to consider removing their infected teeth. I am reminded of what Dr. Price recorded about Case No. 383. This was a young girl of 23 who was too chronically fatigued and full of aches and pains to work or have a life but she really needed to work because of economic reasons. She had the mitral murmur and rapid pulse, as Dr. Price put it, “so typical of an irritated and weakened heart.” Her appearance looked just fine but she had a family history of rheumatism and heart disease.
Dr. Price estimated she would do far better if he could remove all her dental infections. I will give him the last words on this case, “Even a toothless patient with a heart that will work even with a murmur, is infinitely better than a quantity of gold crowns or any other type of more approved dental restorations, and they incapacitating the patient. That heart can maintain life only under the most favourable conditions; and the result has abundantly justified our decision. In a few weeks’ time, this girl was back to work. In the five years that have intervened she has not lost a day because of her rheumatism or heart involvement. She gained over twenty pounds in a few months’ time and all the money in the world could not compensate her for the mistake that would have been made by a less intelligent programme.”
If you would like to discuss any of the above issues, please email the Good Health Clinic on goodhealthclinic@outlook.com or ring on 07836 552936.