Catherine Foot says, "Not sure if this question is too general, but what are your thoughts
on dealing with root canals that do not hurt?
Many in the alternative field believe that all root canals are infected by definition
other than extracting the tooth.
Thank you."
I am a little torn on this.
Before Weston Price embarked on his journeys that led to the publication of Nutrition and
Physical Degeneration, which is an epic pioneering work in nutritional anthropology, before he
did that, he spent 25 years as the first research director for what became the American Dental
Association, researching in laboratory science and clinical science what were the causes
of tooth decay and the consequences of tooth decay.
He developed the focal infection theory that basically stated that because the dental tubules,
which are the means of nourishment inside the teeth, they're kind of like capillaries,
but they're not blood vessels.
But they're kind of like capillaries of the blood vessels in the sense that capillaries
are very thin.
They're getting into all the nooks and crannies that the larger vessels can't get into.
The dental tubules are this very convoluted, very complex means of nourishing the teeth.
Price's argument was that no matter what you do to get the infection out of the main areas
of the teeth, you are never going to get it out of the nooks and crannies of the dental
tubules.
If you basically try to get rid of the infection and then you stuff something in there and
make sure it never comes out, you create a hypoxic environment that basically causes
whatever is in there to mutate in worse possible form.
That doesn't mean that it will cause harm, but it means that it could, if it starts leaking
out of the tooth, cause harm and that there's nothing you can do to make sure that it doesn't
leak out of the teeth.
He did experiments showing that people who had chronic diseases like arthritis, if you
took out their root canal tooth, he could put it in a rabbit, like under the skin in
a rabbit and the rabbit would get the exact same problem the person had.
He wrote a two-volume series on this.
In fact, I have it here, I believe.
You can get this from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.
I don't know if this is going to come out backwards on the screen or not, but this is
Dental Infections Oral and Systemic Volume 1, Part 1; Volume 1, Part 2; Volume 2, Part
2.
That's a lot to read.
I haven't made my way all the way through.
What I did make my way all the way through was a much shorter book by George Meinig who
unfortunately is no longer alive.
George Meinig wrote a book called Root Canal Cover-Up.
In fact, I probably had that here too.
It's probably over there.
I don't see where it is in my shelf.
If I try to give Meinig's biography without looking at the book, I'm going to botch it
up.
But he was a root canal guy, an endodontist.
He was the president of some endodontal society at some point.
He was not a conspiracy theorist on the periphery.
He was not an outsider looking in on root canal.
He has tiptop credentials.
Now, the endodontists say that Price's work was discredited a long time ago and that this
is complete BS.
But the endodontists are the people who do root canals.
So, what are they going to say?
Of course they're going to say that.
What could they say, unless they are retired, except this is a bunch of BS, it was discredited
a long time ago, and no, you should not completely put us out of work?
Meinig had the credentials and he was retired when he wrote the book.
That's kind of the ideal recipe to find someone who is honest and knows what they're talking
about.
I was pretty convinced when I read Meinig's work.
Now, the problem is I have no idea to what degree modern science has adjusted to this.
Now, I can't even ask Meinig to what degree has the evolution of endodontal techniques
since you wrote the book, to what degree had they changed how we should view this, because
he's not alive anymore, and I don't know anyone who can fill his shoes.
Look, if you want a personal story on how conflicted I feel about this, I literally
have two root canals in the same teeth on each side of my mouth that were the legacy
of my veganism.
One of these on this side has been extracted using Weston Price's protocol.
His protocol was not to just to pull out the tooth, but also to remove the periodontal
ligament and the first few millimeters of bone so that healthy bone would grow in and
replace the socket so you wouldn't have a hole there that bacteria can grow in.
That's done on this side.
On this side, I have a titanium post and a root canal from my vegan days.
I don't know.
My suspicion is I wish I could give you a black and white answer.
I know that it's not that useful to have an answer that's just nothing but gray zones.
But I'm very skeptical of how good root canals are.
I'm not so terrified that I'm highly motivated to get the other one taken out even though
it probably is the last thing in my life that I should do more research on what to do about.
I'm sorry, I can't give you a better answer than that.
All I can say is yes, it is justified to be worried about the risks of root canals.
I can say this totally unambiguously.
What you should absolutely definitely not ever do is make your decisions about something
that has any potential to be a root canal situation without a dentist.
I have a friend who's a dentist and she read Rami Nagel's Cure Tooth Decay.
There was one thing that made her really angry in that, which was she got the sense that
he was giving -- I don't know if this is accurate, but this was her sense.
She got the sense that he was giving people the impression that they could use pain as
an indicator of whether their teeth were fine.
The thing is if your tooth pain goes away, that might mean that the problem causing the
tooth pain went away, or it might mean that the problem destroyed the nerve in your tooth.
Okay.
Yes, be skeptical and a little bit worried about the potential downsides of root canals.
But do not ever think that because your tooth pain went away that you can let that go free,
and if you're not going to fill that tooth with something, you're going to need to see
a dentist who is highly qualified to do something else other than a root canal with it.
That's the caveat to this.
Jennifer says, "Tooth infections are serious."
Yeah.
Look, they're serious from a dental perspective.
But the whole point of Price's work was they're serious from whole body health.
Price was a pioneer in so many things.
This is another one.
Now, there's increasing evidence that inflammation in your mouth and decay in your mouth is tied
to other diseases.
Like periodontitis is tied to heart disease for example.
Price was the pioneer of saying that the infections in your mouth are causing other diseases in
the rest of your body.