Dental health is an extremely strong predictor of overall health. Most people are aware that there is a correlation between gum disease and heart disease. We also know that the mercury is a neurotoxin and can contribute to autoimmune disease and allergies. There is also a third way that dental issues can contribute to disease: chronic low-level infections or focal infections.
A study done by Steinman and Leonora in the 70’s showed that there was a correlation between sugar consumption in rats and the incidence of dental caries (cavities). This correlation was not because sugar was feeding bacteria whose wastes were eating holes in the teeth, but because of a reversal of the pump that transports fluid from the inside of the tooth to the outside. This pump normally moves fluid and nutrients from the pulp of the tooth, outwards through channels. It turns out that sucrose (table sugar) intake reverses this pump, which prevents the normal nourishment and mineralization of the teeth.
When the root of a tooth is drilled out and capped off, it becomes dead tissue because it is not being nourished. This becomes a problem because bacteria can move from the mouth down to the root of the tooth through the same channels that nutrients move through in a healthy tooth. When root canal teeth are extracted they usually end up growing some kind of harmful microbe, even after being sterilized.
Weston A. Price was a dentist who wrote Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, in which he described how modernized diets affect people physically. He also removed teeth which had had a root canals performed on them from a patients who had had heart attacks, and place those teeth under the skin of rabbits, the rabbits in all cases also had heart attacks. Dr Rau from the Paracelsus clinic in Switzerland has found that 95% of the patients whom he sees who have breast cancer, have low-level dental infections from root canals.
There is a correlation between specific teeth and acupuncture meridians as well. I have on three separate cases had patients who had bladder symptoms which improved after treating sub clinical infections underneath their lower central incisors.
This is a chart outlining the correlations between teeth and body systems: Tooth-Organ Relationships
Some things that you can do to improve your overall dental health include:
- Maintain a healthy diet. Weston Price originally wrote about the fact that the standard american diet and modernized foods are bad for the teeth, and Steinman and Leonora further validated it.
- If you have silver fillings, make sure to get enough greens in your diet or supplement with chlorella. Also, some companies produce thiol resins that are very specific for binding to the inorganic mercury absorbed from metal fillings.
- Brushing, flossing, and blotting, and oil pulling are all useful hygiene practices.
- I personally recommend that people don’t use chlorhexidine mouthwashes because these can disrupt the microbiome of the mouth (just like antibiotics disrupt the microbiome of the gut) and can lead to bad breath.
- If you have had a root canal, the ultimate fix is to remove it, though ozone injections into the area, found with autonomic response testing can improve the condition of the tooth.
Resources:
Steinman, RR, Leonora, J, Relationship of fluid transport through the dentin to the incidence of dental caries. J Dental Research, Vol. 50, No. 6, Nov-Dec 1971.
Price, WA, Dental Infections, Oral and Systemic, Vol. I, Penton Pub Co. Ohio, USA, 1923.
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/dentistry/root-canal-dangers/