Dental Infections

Incredibly, mercury is not the worst toxin in many people's mouths. In fact, mercury will nearly always take second place when one or more root canal-treated teeth are in the mouth. With very rare exception, the technique used in performing a root canal will intro­duce bacteria from the mouth deep into the root of the tooth or allow bacteria already present to escape elimination by the immune

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system. This means that bacteria that operate normally in the oxy­gen-containing environment of the mouth are subjected to the oxygen-starved environment of the tooth root tip and the internal tooth pulp. When these oxygen-requiring bacteria are deprived of their oxygen, their metabolism undergoes a radical transformation. Enormously toxic by-products begin to be produced under these cir­cumstances. The waste products of this oxygen-deprived metabo­lism are enormously toxic. In fact, they have been demonstrated in unpublished tests to have toxic effects on some human enzymes that are many times greater than the toxic effects of Clostridium botu-linum. When one realizes that traditional scientists and doctors still consider botulinum toxin to be the most potent toxin known, the im­plications of this anaerobic oral toxicity are enormous. Viewed from a different perspective, a root canal tooth could be considered a lit­tle manufacturing plant for the low-grade and chronic production of toxins substantially more toxic than botulinum toxin. Death from a root canal rarely occurs quickly since this chronic release of the tox­ins is very small in amount, although it is continuous. However, there could hardly exist a better and more subtle way to chronically traumatize the immune system. The immune system will generally compensate for toxicity as long as it can, and then collapse rather suddenly months or even years after the root canal. Relatively good health can be maintained until this collapse, and the correlation be­tween the infected root canal tooth and the heart attack, cancer, or other degenerative disease is rarely made.

Another very significant source of dental infective toxicity comes from periodontal disease, or disease of the gums. Chronic gum dis­ease can harbor the same types of bacteria that are seen with root canals, and the same types of extremely potent anaerobic bacterial toxins can result. Scannapieco and Genco outlined the evidence supporting the association between periodontal disease and both heart and lung disease.³ Beck et al. also demonstrated that peri­odontal disease is probably a significant risk factor for both heart at­tack and stroke.⁴ Interestingly, smoking, which has long been

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recognized as a risk factor for heart attack, is also the single best way to assure the eventual development of periodontal disease. Perhaps one of the main ways that smoking causes heart disease is by causing periodontal disease with all of its infective toxicity. Aside from avoiding smoking and taking large doses of vitamin C, the regular use of a dental water irrigation device with some hydrogen peroxide added to the irrigating water is one of the best ways to maintain healthy gums.