Episode 006 | Root Canals – All You Need to Know

Transcript:

Hello again and a warm welcome to episode number six of Elmar´s Tooth Talk. The missing link to total health. I am Dr Elmar Jung.

So, before we start, let me tell you What’s in it for you in this episode:

We talk about:

• How a tooth looks on the inside
• What a root canal is,
• Why a root canal treatment is done and
• How a root canal treatment is done,
• What risks and benefits come from a root canals
• What happens to a tooth once it is root treated?
• How to test a tooth for toxicity
• How teeth and the rest of the body are interconnected
• Who were the pioneers of root canal research
• How to prevent a tooth from being root treated

Case study

Peter was a 32-year old professional trader and until about two years ago was perfectly healthy.

But then his health took a nosedive.

This downward spiral got so bad that he wasn’t able to stand on his own in the shower but had to use a chair to sit on because he hadn’t got the strength to stand for an extended period of time.

Further symptoms that hit him: his short-term memory really bad, his eyesight was deteriorating, he started to develop allergies, he suffered severe stiffness in his joints and severe joint pain and most days he was unbale to work.

Sometimes his symptoms were so bad that he couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning.

He had numerous extremely costly medical tests, but no doctor could help him. So he started s on a quest to get to the root of his problems, searched the internet, asked “Dr Google” and after long days and nights of research he was about to discovered the culprit for himself.

He remembered that just before all of his symptoms and suffering began, he had had another root canal treatment.

And most likely this treatment was what pushed him over the cliff.

When he had his teeth examined, more root treated teeth and infected jaw-bone areas were found. Until before his symptoms started, his immune system was probably capable of compensating these infections. With another attack on his system caused by the latest root treatment his body just couldn’t handle this anymore and all the lingering symptoms flared up and showed themselves.

Obviously, he was happy to receive confirmation that his teeth could be the trigger for his symptoms, and he agreed to have all root treated teeth and his necrotic jawbone areas removed.

What did the treatment look like?

During his treatment which went over three consecutive days he also received high dose vitamin C infusions and a supplementation protocol to support his system.

His big a-ha effect came a few days later. Already waking up was different. He somehow felt like new-born. He got up, went to the bathroom, had a shower – and no chair needed.

Over the next few days and weeks his eyesight and many of his other symptoms started to improve. He could feel that he was really on the healing path.

All this suffering just because of some root canals and infected jawbones.

The Tooth Structure

To understand what happens when a root canal treatment is performed, it is worth to know how a tooth is build.

The tooth has two parts. One upper and one lower part. The upper part is the part that you can see, it reaches out of the gum into the mouth. This part is the crown and the other part which is stuck in the jawbone is the root.

A tooth is also built in different layers. The outer layer is the enamel. It is the hardest part of the tooth and actually the hardest part of our body. The enamel forms the crown and as it moves towards the root it gets thinner and thinner and at the neck of the tooth it becomes the root cement. Under the enamel and the root cement lies the dentine.

In the middle of the tooth lies the pulp. In the pulp we find nerves, blood vessels and lymph vessels. They reach into the pulp through the root canal from the tip of the root where they connect with their main branches.

Throughout each tooth there are miles of tiny little canals running from pulp to dentine, enamel, and cement.

Some teeth have normally only one root with one main canal such as front and canine teeth. Molar teeth, the ones you use to chew, they have two, three, four or sometimes even five roots.

Around the root lies the periodontal ligament. The periodontal ligament connects the tooth with the bone, it holds the tooth in the bone and acts as a buffer for the tooth, for example when you chew, grind or clench your teeth.

What is a root canal treatment?

A root canal treatment is an alternative to a tooth extraction. It is a non-surgical dental procedure to prevent the tooth from extraction.

Why is a root canal treatment performed?

For example, when a very deep decay has reached the pulp and the tooth cannot be kept alive a root canal is an option to keep the tooth, although dead, in the mouth. Teeth get root canalled if they constantly causing pain and the reason cannot be found.

Root canals are also performed when a tooth has already died but the patient wants to keep it.

In Italy there is or at least once was a school of thought that root canal treatments should be performed before any restorative treatment to prevent the tooth causing any further problems.

How is a root canal carried out?

First a hole is drilled into the tooth to access the pulp and the nerve canal. Then needle-style instruments or laser are used to remove nerves, blood, and lymph vessels from pulp and root canal. These tools also help to widen pulp and root canal for all infected material to be removed and the wider pulp and canal are the easier it is to later fill the tooth.

Then the pulp and the channels are rinsed and disinfected with different liquids to ensure that all infection is removed.

In case the infection is very bad an antibiotic paste is placed into the tooth and left for a few days to help reduce infection.

Once this is all ok root canal and pulp are stuffed with a root canal filler to fill the canal and seal the canal at its tip.

The most commonly used root canal filler is gutta-percha. Gutta-percha is the sap of a tree which is used due the rigid natural latex.

It was discovered that it is a natural thermoplastic.  A thermoplastic is a plastic material that becomes pliable above a specific temperature and then solidifies when cooled.

During the second half of the 19th century Gutta-percha was used for many domestic and industrial purposes. It was particularly utilised for underwater purposes including insulation for underwater cables.

The advantages to using gutta-percha in endodontics is due to its biocompatibility and inertness. However, there is more than just gutta-percha in the filler.

Gutta-percha based root canal material consists of about 20% gutta-percha, 66% zinc oxide as filler, 11% heavy metal sulphates and 3% waxes or resins.

The main disadvantages of gutta-percha however lie in its bacterial leakage.

So, the advantage of a root canal is to keep the tooth in your mouth instead of having it extracted. But what about the risks?

What are the risks of a root canal?

From a pure dental technique point of view one major risk is that the root canal instrument perforates the tooth into the bone and therefore requires extraction of the tooth if it can’t be sealed properly.

Another risk is if the instrument hasn’t been secured safely and ends up in the patient’s air tube or oesophagus breaks inside the canal.

A further risk is overfilling the canal which means the filling material is pushed beyond the tip of the root causing irritation and eventually infection in the surrounding jawbone.

But what is the biggest risk?

To realise the biggest risk of all, we have to acknowledge that a tooth is not a solid object.

A tooth is a very porous organ. There is a short video clip on YouTube “View in a tooth” where it is shown from macro into electro microscopic detail how porous a tooth really is and it shows that beside the main channel where the nerves, blood vessels and lymph are situated the tooth has more than three kilometres of small and even tinier channels.

Therefore, the question remains can a tooth with these vast numbers of tiny channels be completely cleaned and sterilised to remove all proteins and bacteria from it.

Taking into consideration that these bacteria do not require oxygen to proliferate, they are called anaerobic bacteria which can produce very harmful poisons.

What happens to a tooth after it has been root canal treated?

The tooth is dead.

What do we know from medicine? All dead tissue rots.

In a way it’s like a gangrene. What would a doctor recommend when your toe has a gangrene?

He would recommend getting the toe chopped off to stop the rest of the body being poisoned.

Bears the question, why shall we leave a dead tooth?

If a tooth becomes toxic, can this toxicity be tested?

The answer is yes there is a test that is nowadays called OroTox. Previously known as Topas or Komstar test.

It is a very simple test that only takes about 10 minutes. A small paper point is placed between the gum and the tooth in question for a minute and letting the fluid that surrounds the tooth be absorbed by the paper point.

After a minute the paper point is placed in a special solution and five minutes later you can read the toxic levels of the tooth.

Most root canal treated teeth reach quite high values.

The poison from those bacteria will leak into the bloodstream and then travel around the body.

Interconnectivity

It is important to understand that all parts of the body are interconnected.

Only a few years ago the periodontal societies confirmed that bacteria which cause gum disease can also cause problems in the heart.

It is interesting to note that mainstream medicine and dentistry are now starting to recognise the correlation between teeth and the rest of the body.

We find bacteria in root treated teeth or necrotic jawbone areas that are normally only found in the large intestine’s end part.

Furthermore, looking at the Chinese meridian system.

Yes, I know I know, for some people, mainly from the medical profession, what comes next seems a bit far-fetched. However, I can tell you from my 30 years of holistic dentistry this has many times been true and hitting the nail on the head.

What am I talking about?

The Tooth-Organ Connection

Two Germans, a doctor and a dentist, Dr Voll and Dr Kramer found an empirical connection between teeth and other parts of the body such as organs, muscles, joints and vertebrae. Other doctors and dentists contributed further to create an entire chart of these relationships.

Your front teeth, uppers and lowers, for example are connected with kidney, bladder and urogenital systems.

A female patient who had a front tooth root canal treated and also was suffering from a cyst in her ovary. Miraculously  the cyst disappeared a few weeks after she had the root canal treated tooth extracted.

A male patient despite seeing numerous specialists and taking lots of drugs was suffering from constipation and diarrhoea for more than five years.

He had a dead lower molar with an infection in his jawbone which caused a massive area of necrotic bone.

After the tooth was removed and the area cleaned his symptoms disappeared within a few days.

To give you an even better insight into the tooth organ connection have a look at www.elmarstoothtalk.com for the tooth chart which shows you the connection each tooth has with other parts of your body.

Click on any tooth and see a list of the connections that the tooth has with organs, glands, spine, muscle, joints and other relationships within the human body.

It is easily understandable that this not a one-way street. A tooth can also be affected by a suffering organ.

As a side note, once a tooth is removed it is important that the periodontal ligament is also removed and the socket where the root sat is cleaned out to ensure that no infection is left behind.

If an extraction is not done properly in that way then there is a risk of bone necrosis developing which I will talk about in one of the next podcasts.

It is about time that these connections are acknowledged by mainstream dentistry and medicine. So many patients could be helped.

As Dr Murray Vimy, Professor in Kentucky, who performed the Amalgam Mercury research on sheep and monkeys, once said “if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.

Who discovered root treated teeth can cause problems?

Get to know the Pioneer in Root canal research Weston A Price and Dr Georg Meinig.

Who was Dr. Weston Price?

To get a feel for the scope of this research, here are some details about Dr Weston Price.

Dr. Weston Price, he lived from 1870 to 1948, wasn´t just an unknown dentist who happened to conduct some obscure experiments in his rear room.

He was a well-known American dentist and scientist who was revered by both the dental and medical profession. He was known as the world´s best dentist.

His research included the relationship between nutrition, dental health, and physical health and what we will discuss today, the influence root canal treatment has on your physical health.

His research was even sponsored by the American Dental Association.

He had team of 60 of the nation’s leading scientists supporting his research. Amongst them famous people like Charles Mayo, the founder of the Mayo Clinic; Milton Rosenau, Professor for Preventive Medicine at the prestigious University of Harvard and Ludwig Hecteon, Professor for Pathology at the University of Chicago and a further 57 top class scientists and University teacher.

Dr Western Price experimented on more than 5000 animals to prove the effects of root canal treated teeth. He researched for more than 25 years and his findings are put together in two huge books containing more than 1170 pages.

Unfortunately, his work wasn´t well digested by some influential autocratic doctors who dishonourably covered-up his entire research about focal infection and it was only until Dr. George Meinig in 1993 re-discovered his incredible work and made it public in his ground breaking book “Root Canal Cover-up”.

And Who Was Dr. George Meinig?

Dr Meinig himself was a well-known dentist. They called him the dentist to the stars in Hollywood, leading the Twentieth Century Fox Studio dental office.

He was a founding member of the American Association of Endodontics, which means he was a root canal specialist. He practiced root canal when only a handful of dentists offered this treatment.

He was also a columnist for 17 years of “Nutritionally Speaking” a weekly published magazine as well as the author of “New”trition- How to AchieveOptimumHealth

Okay, now that it is evident that we are talking about two very honourable men, let´s get back to today’s topic.

What did Dr Western Price find?

Rumour has it that Dr Western Price got involved in the research of root canals after his own son died of heart failure three days after receiving a root canal filling.

Dr Price assumed that dead teeth produce or comprise infections and in order to prove his theory, he placed the extracted root canal treated tooth under the skin of a rabbit who subsequently developed exactly the same disease and died.

He did this 32 times with the same tooth into 32 different rabbits with exactly the same result. It was only on the 33rd time of implanting the tooth under the skin did the rabbit survive.

He did this with various teeth from patients with various diseases.

What he found was that it didn’t matter whether the patient was suffering from heart disease, kidney disease or a joint problem. The rabbits after a short period of time, always developed the same symptoms.

Western Price asked himself how can that be?

How can this be, he asked himself?

That is when he found out that the tooth isn’t solid, that the tooth has a very hollow structure and is permeated with these little canals where bacteria nest.

He also found out that no matter what disinfection solutions are used, they never reached into these small canals.

The discovery of Western Price was confirmed by the German Cancer doctor, Joseph Issels. He found that 97% of his cancer patients in the last 40 years of his treating cancer patients, had root canal treated teeth and he insisted that they get these teeth removed before he began their cancer treatment.

At the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland, Dr Thomas Rau, found that 98.5% of female cancer patients had one or more root canal filled tooth on the same meridian as the original breast cancer tumour. The other breast cancer patients had other dental toxin problems.

Dr Robert Kulacz DDS and Dr Thomas Levy MD stated in their introduction of their 2002 published book ‘The Roots of Disease: Connecting Dentistry and Medicine’, “it is our opinion that the evidence clearly shows that many, if not most significant diseases get their start in the dentist’s chair”.

This claim was not received at all well by the conventional dental community and led to Dr Kulasz being harassed and threatened to the degree that he had to change his name and was forced underground with his family and eventually change profession.

Dr Dawn Ewing, the Executive Director of the International Academy of Dentistry and Medicine, describes the root canal filling with an analogy.

She states “that if a surgeon took your smashed finger, cleaned out all the flesh in it and stuffed it with a straw, it would be a similarly ridiculous procedure to stuffing Gutta-percha in a dead piece of tooth bone in your jaw”.

If you want to know more about the dangers of root canal treated teeth research names such as  Bill Henderson, who lost his wife to breast cancer, Dr Hal Huggins, Dr Joseph Mercola and Dr Johann Lechner.

Why does not everyone get a problem with a root canal filling?

That is always the big question. Why this person and not the other. And it doesn’t matter what it is. One person smokes their entire life and supposedly doesn’t get any problems. Another stops smoking after a few years and later on dies of lung cancer.

One person brushes their teeth 3 times a day and still gets tooth decay whereas their neighbour hardly ever cleans his teeth, lives on junk food and has no filling at all.

It has to do with our immune system. Our immune system is capable of compensating for all sorts of stresses even such things as the bacterial overload. But often, after a severe accident or illness or massive stress for example, due to divorce or financial problems, the body’s ability to cope with it gets undermined.

I like to use an analogy to explain this to my clients.

We all come on to this world with a bucket. An empty bucket. An empty bucket we can fill with all sorts of “problem”. This bucket is our capacity to deal with things. Some obviously receive a bigger bucket than others and some fill their bucket slowly.

Imagine your “problems” become liquid once they are in the bucket.

Now over years and decades, sometimes even quicker, the bucket fills and at some point, it is full. It cannot take anything anymore. A single drop will make it overflow and cause a heart attack, a stomach ulcer, cancer or whatever.

The last “problem” that makes the bucket overflow is then identified as the cause of the dis-ease not taking into account how and why the bucket filled over all those previous years.

The real challenge is to pull the plug early enough, before it overflows, so that many ”problems” run out from the bucket, therefore creating space for other ”problems” to fill the bucket.

Back to Weston Price

Dr Weston Price found more than 20 organisms responsible for infections in teeth and these are the same organisms that are found in other parts of the body when there is an infection.

So the question you have to answer for yourself is whether it is better to have a dead or root treated tooth extracted or to live with the risk that this infected tooth can at some point in your life cause health problems elsewhere in the body?

On a positive note, there is something your dentist can do before he has to perform a root canal treatment.

If the tooth is still alive, the nerve pulp little penetrated with little bleeding appearing, and you do not suffer much pain then the dentist can use ozone, laser  and some medication in the hope that the tooth can be kept alive.

Ozone gas and laser on the pulp area in question are very beneficial because they kill bacteria and help disinfecting this area.

The best protocol however, to prevent a root canal is to maintain a healthy gut by incorporating a healthy diet and lifestyle, keep up with a good oral hygiene regime, compliment your diet with supplements and remember to have your teeth checked regularly by your dentist.

Well that’s it for this episode. Great to have you here. If you want to know even more about this topic watch “Root Cause” and you can follow a man’s journey from health to hell and back.

In the next podcast you will discover even more facts how dental materials and dental treatments can cause psychological and psychiatric symptoms and you will hear what a psychiatrist had to say about one of his patient’s full recovery. See you next time.

This is Elmar’s Tooth Talk, The missing link to total health. Until next time, Bye for now.

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