Nexus - 0221 - New Times Magazine-pages

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The truth about root- canal fillings will make you think twice about your next dental appointment. "A new truth,” warned Weston Price, “is like a new sense. You are now able-to see things that you could not see before.” Weston Price, former Director of Research for the American Dental Association for 14 years, spent 35 years of his professional career researching the systemic diseases of the heart, kidney, uterus, nervous system and endocrine system, that resulted from toxins seeping out of root-canal-filled teeth. A certain percentage of people are sensitive to tox- ins that are manufactured within these dead teeth. Price saw many truths that even today we have a hard time seeing, for we are bogged down in 'but-we've-always-done-it-that-way' thinking. We are too habitual to adopt his sense of ‘new truth’. His observations led him far beyond the accepted remedies of that day. Incidentally, those remedies are basically the same treatments that are the foundation of today's root canal fundamentals. He researched 24 of those fundamentals and found each to be lacking. Some of the ‘lacking’ fundamentals included: X-rays revealing the presence of infec- tion; infections expressing themselves as bone absorption; a given dental infection will express itself approximately the same in all people; if pus is flowing from a tooth it is a dangerous sign; and local comfort of a treated tooth is evidence of the success of a root- filled tooth procedure. He made quite a stir in the dental community. Even with his vast experience, educa- tional background, and thousands of controlled experiments, dentists were resistant to changing their thinking about the root canal procedures that they had already been per- forming for decades. What did Price find that convinced him that people could not toler- ate root canals? First he observed that if he removed root-filled teeth from people suffering from kidney and heart disease, in most cases they would improve. In an effort to establish a relation- ship between the tooth and the disease, he inserted the root-filled teeth under the skin of rabbits. Rabbits have a similar immune system to that of humans. In fact, a normal, non- infected human tooth (as removed for orthodontic reasons) can be inserted under the skin of a rabbit for a year with practically no reaction. A thin film will form over it, but micro- scopically there are no rejection cells present. When a root-filled tooth was implanted under the skin of a rabbit, the rabbit died within less than two days, sometimes within 12 hours. If a very small fragment (as an extract of the tooth) were used, within two weeks the rabbit would lose over 20% of its body weight, and die of heart disease or kidney disease if that is what the human donor had. To further challenge this observation, he removed the fragment and transferred it to another rabbit. In two weeks he observed a duplicate performance. In one case, he reimplanted the same tooth fragment in 100 rabbits, each in succession dying from the same disease that the human had had. In most experimental cases he transferred the fragment 30 times. ~~ by Hal A. Huggins, D.D.S. Reprinted with kind permission from the March 1994 edition of Acres, USA PO Box 9547 Kansas City, MO 64133, USA; phone (816) 737 0064, {Subscription ‘rate for one ei issues: US$20,00, overseas US$23.00.] HOWE'S PAPER—THE DENTAL ASSOCIATION FIGHTS BACK As obvious as the consequences were, dentists persisted in placing root canal fillings. This, of course, caused a hot argument among dentists, and soon Percy R. Howe pub- lished a paper in the Journal of the National Dental Association rejecting Price's findings. Howe injected large amounts of the bacteria streptococcus into rabbits, and found no adverse reaction. This 1920 publication is still used as proof that root-filled teeth are not harmful to humans. In what way did Price show that Howe's paper was wrong? In looking for a reason for the difference between Howe's findings and his own, Price 30¢NEXUS THE DANGERS OF ROOT-CANAL FILLINGS ARE EXPOSED AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1994