By Dr. Mercola
Do you have a chronic degenerative disease? If so, have you been told, “It’s all in your head?” Well, that might not be that far from the truth… the root cause of your illness may be in your mouth.
There is a common dental procedure that nearly every dentist will tell you is completely safe, despite the fact that scientists have been warning of its dangers for more than 100 years.
Every day in the United States alone, 41,000 of these dental procedures are performed on patients who believe they are safely and permanently fixing their problem.
What is this dental procedure?
The root canal.
More than 25 million root canals are performed every year in this country.
Root-canaled teeth are essentially “dead” teeth that can become silent incubators for highly toxic anaerobic bacteria that can, under certain conditions, make their way into your bloodstream to cause a number of serious medical conditions—many not appearing until decades later.
Most of these toxic teeth feel and look fine for many years, which make their role in systemic disease even harder to trace back.
Sadly, the vast majority of dentists are oblivious to the serious potential health risks they are exposing their patients to, risks that persist for the rest of their patients’ lives.The American Dental Association claims root canals have been proven safe, but they have NO published data or actual research to substantiate this claim.
Fortunately, I had some early mentors like Dr. Tom Stone and Dr. Douglas Cook, who educated me on this issue nearly 20 years ago. Were it not for a brilliant pioneering dentist who, more than a century ago, made the connection between root-canaled teeth and disease, this underlying cause of disease may have remained hidden to this day. The dentist’s name was Weston Price—regarded by many as the greatest dentist of all time.
Weston A. Price: World’s Greatest Dentist
Most dentists would be doing an enormous service to public health if they familiarized themselves with the work of Dr. Weston Pricei. Unfortunately, his work continues to be discounted and suppressed by medical and dental professionals alike.
Dr. Price was a dentist and researcher who traveled the world to study the teeth, bones, and diets of native populations living without the “benefit” of modern food. Around the year 1900, Price had been treating persistent root canal infections and became suspicious that root-canaled teeth always remained infected, in spite of treatments. Then one day, he recommended to a woman, wheelchair bound for six years, to have her root canal tooth extracted, even though it appeared to be fine.
She agreed, so he extracted her tooth and then implanted it under the skin of a rabbit. The rabbit amazingly developed the same crippling arthritis as the woman and died from the infection 10 days later. But the woman, now free of the toxic tooth, immediately recovered from her arthritis and could now walk without even the assistance of a cane.
Price discovered that it’s mechanically impossible to sterilize a root-canaled (e.g. root-filled) tooth.
He then went on to show that many chronic degenerative diseases originate from root-filled teeth—the most frequent being heart and circulatory diseases. He actually found 16 different causative bacterial agents for these conditions. But there were also strong correlations between root-filled teeth and diseases of the joints, brain and nervous system. Dr. Price went on to write two groundbreaking books in 1922 detailing his research into the link between dental pathology and chronic illness. Unfortunately, his work was deliberately buried for 70 years, until finally one endodontist named George Meinig recognized the importance of Price’s work and sought to expose the truth.
Dr. Meinig Advances the Work of Dr. Price
Dr. Meinig, a native of Chicago, was a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II before moving to Hollywood to become a dentist for the stars. He eventually became one of the founding members of the American Association of Endodontists (root canal specialists).
In the 1990s, he spent 18 months immersed in Dr. Price’s research. In June of 1993, Dr. Meinig published the book Root Canal Cover-Up, which continues to be the most comprehensive reference on this topic today. You can order your copy directly from thePrice-Pottenger Foundationii.
What Dentists Don’t Know About the Anatomy of Your Teeth
Your teeth are made of the hardest substances in your body.
In the middle of each tooth is the pulp chamber, a soft living inner structure that houses blood vessels and nerves. Surrounding the pulp chamber is the dentin, which is made of living cells that secrete a hard mineral substance. The outermost and hardest layer of your tooth is the white enamel, which encases the dentin.
The roots of each tooth descend into your jawbone and are held in place by the periodontal ligament. In dental school, dentists are taught that each tooth has one to four major canals. However, there are accessory canals that are never mentioned. Literally miles of them!
Just as your body has large blood vessels that branch down into very small capillaries, each of your teeth has a maze of very tiny tubules that, if stretched out, would extend for three miles. Weston Price identified as many as 75 separate accessory canals in a single central incisor (front tooth). For a more detailed explanation, refer to an article by Hal Huggins, DDS, MS, on the Weston A. Price Foundation website.iii(These images are borrowed from the Huggins article.)
Microscopic organisms regularly move in and around these tubules, like gophers in underground tunnels.
When a dentist performs a root canal, he or she hollows out the tooth, then fills the hollow chamber with a substance (called guttapercha), which cuts off the tooth from its blood supply, so fluid can no longer circulate through the tooth. But the maze of tiny tubules remains. And bacteria, cut off from their food supply, hide out in these tunnels where they are remarkably safe from antibiotics and your own body’s immune defenses.
The Root Cause of Much Disease
Under the stresses of oxygen and nutrient deprivation, these formerly friendly organisms morph into stronger, more virulent anaerobes that produce a variety of potent toxins. What were once ordinary, friendly oral bacteria mutate into highly toxic pathogens lurking in the tubules of the dead tooth, just awaiting an opportunity to spread.
No amount of sterilization has been found effective in reaching these tubules—and just about every single root-canaled tooth has been found colonized by these bacteria, especially around the apex and in the periodontal ligament. Oftentimes, the infection extends down into the jawbone where it creates cavitations—areas of necrotic tissue in the jawbone itself.
Cavitations are areas of unhealed bone, often accompanied by pockets of infected tissue and gangrene. Sometimes they form after a tooth extraction (such as a wisdom tooth extraction), but they can also follow a root canal. According to Weston Price Foundation, in the records of 5,000 surgical cavitation cleanings, only two were found healed.
And all of this occurs with few, if any, accompanying symptoms. So you may have an abscessed dead tooth and not know it. This focal infection in the immediate area of the root-canaled tooth is bad enough, but the damage doesn’t stop there.
Root Canals Can Lead to Heart, Kidney, Bone, and Brain Disease
As long as your immune system remains strong, any bacteria that stray away from the infected tooth are captured and destroyed. But once your immune system is weakened by something like an accident or illness or other trauma, your immune system may be unable to keep the infection in check.
These bacteria can migrate out into surrounding tissues by hitching a ride into your blood stream, where they are transported to new locations to set up camp. The new location can be any organ or gland or tissue.
Dr. Price was able to transfer diseases harbored by humans to rabbits, by implanting fragments of root-canaled teeth, as mentioned above. He found that root canal fragments from a person who had suffered a heart attack, when implanted into a rabbit, would cause a heart attack in the rabbit within a few weeks.
He discovered he could transfer heart disease to the rabbit 100 percent of the time! Other diseases were more than 80 percent transferable by this method. Nearly every chronic degenerative disease has been linked with root canals, including:
- Heart disease
- Kidney disease
- Arthritis, joint, and rheumatic diseases
- Neurological diseases (including ALS and MS)
- Autoimmune diseases (Lupus and more)
There may also be a cancer connection. Dr. Robert Jones, a researcher of therelationship between root canals and breast cancer, found an extremely high correlation between root canals and breast cancer.iv He claims to have found the following correlations in a five-year study of 300 breast cancer cases:
- 93 percent of women with breast cancer had root canals
- 7 percent had other oral pathology
- Tumors, in the majority of cases, occurred on the same side of the body as the root canal(s) or other oral pathology
Dr. Jones claims that toxins from the bacteria in an infected tooth or jawbone are able to inhibit the proteins that suppress tumor development. A German physician reported similar findings. Dr. Josef Issels reported that, in his 40 years of treating “terminal” cancer patients, 97 percent of his cancer patients had root canals. If these physicians are correct, the cure for cancer may be as simple as having a tooth pulled, then rebuilding your immune system.