WHY ARE ROOT CANALS SO BAD?
The goal of a dental root canal is to relive tooth pain and preserve your smile. During root canal treatment, inflamed or infected pulp is removed and the inside of the tooth is carefully cleaned and disinfected, then filled and sealed with a rubber-like material to preserve it, much like the ancient Egyptians preserved dead bodies by mummification. The tooth is then restored with a crown or filling for protection. The tooth is now pain free and ‘saved’, your smile is preserved, but at what risk to the rest of your body and your health?
Anatomy of a tooth
To answer that question, you need need to know a little basic anatomy about teeth. The structure of a tooth is composed of an outer layer called enamel, a second layer called dentin, and an inner portion called the pulp chamber which contains the tooth’s nerve, blood vessels and lymphatics. Dentin is not solid, but composed of tiny tubules that look like a honeycomb under a microscope. In an average sized tooth these tubules extend over three miles long. It is what can get trapped in these tubules that can be so damaging to health.
What causes a tooth to die?
What is the cascade of events that causes a tooth to die and you end up in the dentist’s chain getting a root filling? A healthy living tooth has a mechanism to clean itself out whereby fluid flows from the inside to the outside of the tooth. This is similar to fluid flowing from the inside to the outside of your body when you sweat through through your pores. As fluid flows from the inside to the outside of your tooth, it washes away a lot of the bacteria that live on the surface of that tooth. Thus fluid carries nutrients and other substances needed to keep teeth healthy. Fluid in a tooth flow through all the dentin from the pulp outwards. The enamel, though it appears hard, is actually porous enough to allow for fluid moving through and out of it. It is this fluid that is responsible for nourishing all the parts of the tooth and keeping it alive.
The rot starts from within
However, when you eat too many refined foods and sugars, your body chemistry undergoes some not such good changes which make your phosphorous level decrease. When phosphorous drops to below 3.4, you start losing minerals in the teeth and the fluid stops flowing from inside to outside and starts flowing in the opposite direction - from outside to inside. This starts the rot. Every root canal not caused by a blow to the jaw, starts with a tiny bit of dental decay. Now that the flow of fluid is reversed, it sucks bacteria sitting on the outside of your tooth into the tooth. These bacteria then march right into the inner tubules of your tooth where they will find a nice comfortable home. In this way, you can see that refined sugar plays a major role in tooth decay but it is not enough simply to clean your teeth regularly after meals as the real rot starts from inside your body and tooth, not from the outside. Sugar does not have to be in direct contact with your tooth to cause the rot.
When your dentist looks at your x-ray and sees a cavity, the pulp of your tooth is already infected with bacteria. Once the pulp is infected, it means irreversible damage has occurred and your body will have a difficult time getting rid of that bacteria. It also means your body chemistry is not as it should be because your diet is not as it should be. Given enough time, the bacteria inside the pulp will continue to multiply until the tooth eventually dies. At this point, your dentist has two choices - take it out or root fill it. As dentists are actively encouraged by their governing bodies to preserve teeth, he is more likely to recommend root filling.
Root canals - a flawed procedure
The problem for your dentist is that it is impossible to sterilise the tubules branching off from the main canals when he is performing the root canal. Various methods have been tried, including with lasers, but the actuality is that once the tooth is sealed like the burial chamber in a tomb, bacteria within the tooth are sealed in with it.
Don’t bacteria die in a sealed area of no 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, and also more virulent. Like any living creature, they pee and poop toxins. Without oxygen, the bacterial numbers build up and make a large amount of toxins.
The problem of trapped bacteria
So if bacteria can still survive without oxygen in their sealed tomb, surely they can’t escape, so where is the problem? If you look at a detailed diagram of a tooth, you will see that there is not only a main canal but also lateral accessory canals branching off from the main canal. These are akin to the secret passages in pyramid which tomb robbers used to access and plunder the secret chambers. When you chew and bite down on the tooth, the toxins move down the accessory canals and escape and get delivered throughout the body via the lymph and venous blood supply. They can set up home in any distant organs, glands and tissues, triggering disease. This process is known as ‘focal infection’ and has been known about in medicine for over a hundred years.
The Weston Price research - a tale of many rabbits
Some of the initial ground-breaking research of the last century into root canals and their effects on human health was done by dentist and nutritionist Dr Weston A. Price. Like many of the dentists of his time, Dr Price had noticed that patients with chronic diseases often got better when infected teeth were removed. Dr Price was used to placing root fillings in patients since the early 1900s but had become suspicious that they remained chronically infected. He was intellectually curious enough to look for the reasons why many of his patients suffered with chronic, debilitating conditions for which the medical profession seemed to offer no solutions.
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.
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 recover 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 with the root filling and elderly female patient led to a led to a meticulous 25 year research project during which Dr Price and his team of top doctors and scientists repeated his initial experiment hundreds of times by removing root-filled teeth from sick patients and implanting them under the skin of rabbits. Two large research volumes, still available today, outline the cases of hundreds of patients who recovered from a wide range of chronic diseases including heart, kidney, nervous system, mental, respiratory diseases and more by having root canal treated teeth removed. They also describe how Dr Price was able to reproduce those same diseases in by inserting the infected teeth or their toxins alone under the skin of rabbits.
Root canals and Pans/Pandas
There was even a case of what we would recognise today as Pans/Pandas or autoimmune brain inflammation in Volume 2 of Price’s large tome Dental Infections and Degenerative Diseases. Pans/Pandas is a condition where infection tricks the brain into attacking its own tissues. It is a case of mistaken identity or ‘brain under friendly fire.’ Case No. 458 describes a young school boy suffering from lack of coordination who couldn’t sit still or control his body movements. He would turn an uncontrollable movement into an exaggerated kick or punch to hide his embarrassment and once punched Dr. Price in the face while he was trying to take a dental X-ray. The boy’s teacher told his parents he was naughty and wicked and if he returned to school, she would leave.
Dr. Price was enlightened ahead of his time. He explained to the mother that her boy was not bad but had an infection of the cortex of the brain, probably coming from an infection in his teeth and that when his infection was removed, he would probably return to normal. Several infected teeth from the boy’s mouth were removed and cultured under the skin of rabbits. The rabbits developed nervous system disturbances, toppling over on their sides. Autopsies on the rabbits’ brains showed multiple tiny bleeds and strep-related haemorrhages which led to similar irritability and violence characteristic of a movement disorder known as Sydenham’s chorea (the precursor of the research into Pans/Pandas). Immediately after the removal of his infected teeth, the boy improved. In two week’s time, back at school, his behaviour was normal with no recurrence in the following five years he was monitored. Dr. Price saved that boy from a potential lifetime of disability and psychiatric intervention.
Buried research
However, Dr Price’s discoveries caused problems for endodontists (root canal specialists) who saw them as a threat to a lucrative and blossoming branch of dentistry. Dr Price was attacked and his discoveries were effectively buried instead of being incorporated into dental school curricula. A number of years later, retired root canal specialist Dr George Meinig opened up the debate started by Dr Price’s linking root canals to multi-system illness. Following his book Root Canal Cover-Up, he, too, was attacked. Other pioneering dental researchers like Dr Hal Huggins and Dr Boyd Haley did their own research into the pathogens and toxins generated by root canals. When Dr Boyd Haley tested teeth with root canals, he never found a tooth that wasn’t toxic to some degree.
Root canals and heart disease
Fast forward to 2024 and PCR technology, that won a Nobel Prize in Science. This technology provides the scientific proof that validates Dr Price’s focal infection theory. Using PCR technology, researchers in the last 5 years have identified a wide range of pathogens in root canal-treated teeth, including spirochetes (Lyme) and strep bacteria. One Finnish research group analysed blood clots from patients who had had strokes, cerebral aneurisms and heart attacks. These clots contained concentrations of oral dental pathogens that were 16 times greater than those found in the blood stream.
Cardiologists know that all coronary heart disease is due to inflammation in the coronary artery. But how many ask what is causing that inflammation? The migrating of pathogens and their toxic wastes from root filled teeth, as outlined above,
pass into the bloodstream, through the venous and pulmonary systems and take hold in the high pressure point of the coronary arteries. While doctors are good at ‘managing’ cardiovascular risk factors (cholesterol, blood pressure etc.), when a ‘well managed’ patient suddenly dies of a heart attack, this is just put down to ‘bad luck!’
Root canals and many systemic diseases
As well as heart conditions, the long list of documented health conditions associated with the migration of pathogenic toxins from root fillings includes:
Blood pressure/circulatory
Blood clots/strokes
Arthritis
Mental illness
Kidney/bladder disease
Respiratory conditions/asthma
Pregnancy complications
Mineral dysregulation
Anaemia
Cancers
Phlebitis
Chronic fatigue
Pneumonia/flu/infections
Autoimmune conditions
Eye conditions
Neurodegenerative diseases
Gastrointestinal conditions
Root canals and informed consent
Given that we now have scientific proof that dental infections are a major cause of blood clots, heart attacks and other conditions, shouldn’t we be putting pressure on our medical professionals to review the safety of the whole root canal procedure or, at the very least, practice informed consent before placing one in a patient’s mouth?
Informed consent is a process that is required for most medical procedures. It is where the doctor, dentist or other health professional explains a treatment before the patient agrees to it. This includes benefits, risks and alternative procedures. With root canals, this would include being told that if you have a root canal - not a poorly done one or failed root canal - just a standard textbook root canal - that you have a higher risk factor of heat disease and any other disease you happen to be predisposed to.
Supporters of the root canal procedure like to point out that if root canals were as dangerous as scientist made out, people would be dropping dead in the streets. Well, systemic chronic illness is on the increase and cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the western world!
Does everybody with a root canal get sick?
Not necessarily. Although every root filling is infected, Dr. Price found that dental infections, though potentially harmful, might not cause symptoms until the patient was subjected to other immune stresses or overloads. This makes it a ticking time bomb. Dr Price identified specific stressors on the immune system that could tip the balance of the patient’s health and trigger the collapse of the immune defences keeping the oral infection at bay. These include: physical injury, extreme anxiety, nutritional deficiency, acute and chronic infections like flu/viruses, grief, pain, hunger, pregnancy, alcohol, drugs and age. The latter catches up with us all eventually as immune function gradually deteriorates. In my case, it took 20 years of having root fillings before my immune system collapsed on the receipt of my third root filling. At which point they all had to come out for me to regain my health!
Immune overload - tipping the balance
To detect whether the patient had immune overloads great enough to burst their immune defences, Dr Price emphasised the importance of taking a thorough case history. This included any family history of degenerative diseases produced by streptococcal infections such as rheumatism, heart disease, digestive tract diseases, neurological and kidney disease.
Regarding the effect of flu on the immune defences, Dr Price conducted studies of 260 patients in five Cleveland and Columbus city hospitals during the 1918 flu epidemic. He found the incidence of serious complications such as pneumonia, heart, empyema (infected fluid surrounding the lungs) was approximately two and a third times greater in patients with dental infections. Moreover, there had been no previous history of problems from their dental infections. In pneumonia, the coughing spasms which drew air into the lungs from an infected mouth, led Dr. Price to conclude that gingival infections are a marked contributing factor to pneumonia.
Since Dr Price’s time, we have acquired Covid and 5G. What would he have made of those risk factors? A 2021 study of 308 Egyptian patients with Covid, published by the British Dental Journal, showed that the patients with poor oral health were 4.5 times as likely to suffer the dreaded cytokine storm (when the immune system goes into overdrive fighting off infections) in Covid and were nine times more likely to die from Covid than patients without oral infections.
Why don’t dentists know about root canals?
Your average dentist putting in root canals knows nothing of this research. Why not? It is the same answer as it was back in the 1930s. Root canals are lucrative business and anything different is not taught in dental schools. Why haven’t more dentists read the research? Lack of intellectual curiosity and the fact that dentists are not researchers. I must emphasise that nothing in this article is intended to imply dental malpractice. Dentists simply do what they have been taught to do in dental schools to the best of their ability. Save teeth. They do not realise that the root canal procedure is flawed.
Therefore, patients must themselves become educated in the rudiments of dental infections and how they can affect the body. No one else, except an enlightened practitioner, is going to link that root canal you had in your early twenties with the IBS or high blood pressure you have now in your late forties. You must look at the information and make an informed rather than uninformed decision about what you have in your mouth. You must also consult an informed dentist.
Your tooth or your life
I have met a number of patients suffering from chronic disease who have been reluctant to part with a root canal-treated tooth. The majority of these have been women and the major reason by far, for hanging on to a root filling, is not the cost of getting it removed or fear of the dentist, but simple vanity.
However, let’s look at the potential economic and emotional cost of leaving a dead, infected organ in your mouth. Inability to work, loss of earnings, broken relationships, loss of self esteem are some of the trade-offs I have seen in exchange for keeping your smile intact. I would remind people that there is life after extraction - very often more vibrant and rewarding. There are replacement tools for extracted teeth - well made dentures, bridges and zirconia implants. I would end off by quoting the Father of Dentistry, Dr Price. In his Preface to Dental Infections, Oral and Systemic, published in September, 2023, he describes the effects witnessed by dental infections as “a living death more horrible than any inquisitor’s rack.” A high price to pay for a dead infected tooth!
In my nutritional practice, I look at all the oral health of everyone who comes to see me. I have a network of biological dentists who I refer patients to in order to address these factors which may be impeding recovery. I like to prepare people nutritionally pre and post surgery to help obtain the best health outcomes. I have been there myself and I know what is at stake.
If you would need help with your health on any of the above issues, please get in touch with the Good Health Clinic on goodhealthclinic@outlook.com to request a free 30 minute Enquiry Call or book an appointment. Please note that an Enquiry Call is not a consultation but an exploratory call to see if this a clinical approach you wish to pursue.
To your very good health,
Suzanne Jeffery (Nutritional Medicine Consultant)
M.A.(Oxon), BSc.(NMed), PGCE, MNNA, CNHC
The Good Health Clinic at The Business Centre, 2, Cattedown Road, Plymouth PL4 0EG
Tel no: 07836 552936/ Answer phone: 01752 774755
Disclaimer:
All advice given out by Suzanne Jeffery and the Good Health Clinic is for general guidance and informational purposes only. All advice relating to other health professionals’ advice is for general guidance and information purposes only. Readers are encouraged to confirm the information provided with other sources. Patients and consumers should review the information carefully with their professional health care provider. The information is not intended to replace medical advice offered by other practitioners and physicians. Suzanne Jeffery and the Good Health Clinic will not be liable for any direct, indirect, consequential, special, exemplary or other damages arising therefrom.