Possible root canal needed... Advice, please!

[circular]

Sorry Katie, what is PH? It’s not in our acronym list. TIA

[KatieS]

Cir, PH= Public Health. I need to stop posting from my phone where I abbreviate too much.

[circular]

Thanks Katie. I wonder what explains the discrepancy where your dentist says you don't have any mercury under your crowns, and mine says I could.

The article this new dentist gave me to read is In Vitro Enzymatic Inhibition Associated with Asymptomatic Root Canal Treated Teeth: Results from a Sample of 25 Extracted Root Fragments. It's hardly established science as the paper makes clear enough, but for her to purchase her own CT scan for use in her dental office, I'm guessing for now that she's aware of many success stories of improved health by treating stealth dental infections (?).

Abstract Background: For almost a century there has been debate over the toxicity associated with root canal treated teeth.

Objective: is study sought to determine the level of enzymatic inhibition associated with asymp- tomatic root canal treated teeth in which there was no radiographic evidence of pathology.

Design: In vitro study.

Setting: Private dental o ce (Marble Falls, Texas, USA).

Intervention: A photo-a nity labeling technique performed by A nity Labeling Technologies (ALT) Bioscience Laboratory was used to determine the level of enzymatic inhibition of the extracted teeth.

Main outcome measures: Six commercially available enzymes that are critically important for hu- man life were tested in order to determine their percent inhibition when exposed to root fragments of the 25 extracted root canal treated teeth.
Results: e enzymes averaged 65.6% inhibition, which re ected severe toxicity on the scale devel- oped by ALT Bioscience Laboratory. Limitations of this study included the lack of a control group, the inability to ascertain if these in vitro results have signi cant clinical relevance, the inability to correlate these in vitro ndings to a patient’s clinical health status, possible contamination of the root fragments with mercury or other substances, and the absence of culturing the root fragments.

Conclusion: Root canal therapy has proved to be an e ective way of treating and retaining endodon- tically diseased teeth, but does not render the teeth sterile. ese preliminary results suggest that root canal treated teeth inhibit the action of critically important enzymes that generate cellular adenosine triphosphate.

Something weird is going on with my copy/paste and it's eliminating letters

[circular]

So maybe this is a bit too dramatic, but one might say just to throw away your dental x-rays. My new ‘biological dentist’ had a regular, conventional dental radiologist read and report on my dental CT scan. She sat me down and went through the six pages including selected images with me. Mind you I’ve had a plethora of xays in the past year or two between my regular dentist and the endodontist who did the root canal last fall. The x-rays did not show any issues. The CT scan shows an infection in the roots of a very old root canal where I have no symptoms at all. The root canal from last fall shows what’s either small infection or healing that’s not yet complete. Also, two of my four wisdom teeth extraction sites have ‘cavitations’. This is where on extraction not all the ligament got removed, so what remains becomes a barrier to the bone filling in. One ends up with a space inhabited by various organisms and necrotic bone tissue.

The recommendations are pretty hard core: Extract at least the old root canaled tooth. Do three sessions of 12 injections each of Prolozone. This is a prolotherapy type approach where the jaw area is flooded with ozone and various healing and lymph flushing thinga ma jiggers, and is reportedly quite painful. I’m not sure if there’s another step where she drills into the cavitations for direct ozone treatment? Third up is some type of cyst in my left maxillary that needs referral to ENT for eval.

Could I just go for a head replacement?

I really don’t know what I’m going to do yet. It’s a bit overwhelming, especially without any evidenced-based science behind these protocols. She did say she could treat the root canaled tooth without extracting it (presumably with ozone), but she wasn’t super positive that would be as reliable a solution as extraction. I’ve since listened to a podcast with a biological dentist in Houston who indicated he knows an endodontist who uses ozone treatments during root canals and so far it’s been successful (ie, as opposed to extraction). This leads to me wonder if maybe an ozone treatment of the old root canal would work.

Anyway, I have more questions than answers right now, except that I must say, if one wants to really know what’s going on at the imaging level (which may or may not be linked to symptoms), no x-ray is going to beat what a CT scan can show, at least extrapolating from my experience.

[circular]

I may skip the root canal and head straight to SFO to have a cocktail with Lilly

Are you two still there having drinks? I’m on my way! The dentist can do whatever she wants once i’ve passed out. I’ll leave that on a napkin so there won’t be any questions.

[slacker]

The recommendations are pretty hard core: Extract at least the old root canaled tooth. Do three sessions of 12 injections each of Prolozone. This is a prolotherapy type approach where the jaw area is flooded with ozone and various healing and lymph flushing thinga ma jiggers, and is reportedly quite painful. I’m not sure if there’s another step where she drills into the cavitations for direct ozone treatment? Third up is some type of cyst in my left maxillary that needs referral to ENT for eval.

Yikes! Major rabbit hole. A second opinion would be great, but who to get it from? Sending you kind thoughts and sympathy.

[circular]

Thanks slacker. I'll be checking around. There may be nothing particularly wrong with her recommendations, other than the pain and the cost, but I'd like to see if there are other options or opinions. I vacillate between hoping there's a simpler approach and thinking OMG I have to be aggressive with this.

While I can't tell if the pathogens in my dental spaces are the same as those that have given me years of horrible sinusitis (once debilitating but improved with MARCoNS treatments), one of the two that were cultured on my latest sinus culture is a 'gram negative non-enteric rod' called acinetobacter baumanii (large amount).Acinetobacter appears to be particularly effective at acquiring genetic material from other organisms [I have plenty of those!] and thus rapidly developing drug resistance. The WHO considers this organism to be #1 critical among bacteria for which antibiotics are needed.

Clearly in addition to eradicating the colonizations I have, I need to up my defenses somehow. The CIRS world, in cases like mine where multiple layers of colonization are uncovered, appears to be going in the direction of then testing and treating family members who could be a source of spread and reinfection. This is really getting impractical, impossible in my case for a number of reasons, and I think new solutions at the microbiome level need to be found.

While the injections might be uncomfortable to painful, I trust I would survive them, and she says she can ozonate my sinuses as well. Clearly serial nasal antibiotic spray is no longer viable. The alternative for the cavitations is oral surgery. I think conventional oral surgery for this does not use ozone, which is needed to penetrate all the small crevices to kill the pathogens (as with root canals and extractions). The dentist says that her patients who do the injections have another CT scan after four months to verify the cavitations have filled in with bone (which they have), and none of these patients have been sorry they did the injections. (I don't know how many this is.) Of course I do think there's a tendency, once one has invested a lot of money if not also pain in something, to have a hard time not seeing it as having been worthwhile.

Another unknown is whether, if my defenses against such colonizations aren't adequate, the whole cycle will just immediately start over. There's no question I have many more visits to hospitals and other health care facilities in my future (visiting family and friends and quite possibly my own procedures), which is where I most likely picked up a lot of the organisms in my sinuses.

From what I gather the wisdom tooth extraction site cavitations may not be that uncommon, but she did say most patients' CT radiology reports are about two pages while mine was six. So if anyone goes down this path, there may not be any reason to fear the kind of results I have. The most immediate takeaway is that dental x-rays do not appear able to adequately reveal dental infections. It would almost seem that endodontists are preventing this approach so they can keep making lots of money on root canals and crowns, which cost much more than extractions.

[CoachDD]

Thanks slacker. I'll be checking around.

There may be nothing particularly wrong with her recommendations, other than the pain and the cost, but I'd like to see if there are other options or opinions. I vacillate between hoping there's a simpler approach and thinking OMG I have to be aggressive with this.

Greetings Circular and others - I am new to this forum and should share here that I spent 25+ years in the Dental Industry (I call it technical, not clinical since I worked for insurance companies). I've had 3 root canals over a 10 year span and 2 have since failed. . . I am convinced, through the work of Hal Higgins and Weston Price, as well as from my experience and the insight from my current my holistic dentist, that they are a complete waste of money and frankly, dangerous to our health. I strongly believe this is the source of what sent me down the path of autoimmune issues.

I also have a low grade infection in my jaw (after cone beam xray, which was read by a dental radiologist) and like you, I'm considering my options. When my first root canaled tooth started to fail, I made the decision to extract (which was not fun since the tooth broke apart during the procedure - remember, it's a DEAD tooth!! - then I had a sinus perforation which means there is an opening between the surgical site and my sinuses!!). I had planned to get a zirconium implant since I react to many metals. Shortly thereafter, the second one failed, so it was also extracted. I now have two open spaces in my mouth for more than a year (both first molars in the upper arch - no real issue with bite or movement yet). I also have MTHFR (compound hetero) along with other gene mutation variations, so that may be coming into play. I am a strong proponent of natural remedies (kudos to those doing the coconut or sesame oil pulling). I'll update everyone on my progress - but please proceed with caution and get another opinion from a biological/holistic dentist. Best of luck!

[circular]

Coach thanks for joining in this conversation. I saw in another that your experience is in the dental industry and I almost invited you here. I’m sorry you’re going through these issues too. My takeaway so far is that if 1000 random people got a dental CT scan, a large percentage would be found to be walking around with colonizations if not outright infections (a distinction without a difference?) they don’t know about. Conventional dental medicine doesn’t seem to have a problem with it unless a painful abscess forms. Why?

At this juncture, because biological dentistry is so new to me and I’ve only seen one such dentist for these issues, I’m curious what other biological dentists would recommend. For example mine recommends extracting the old root canal tooth that’s infected. But the biological dentist from Houston I heard on the podcast said he knows an endodontist now doing root canals with ozone that so far don’t have issues. So maybe going in and retreating the old root canal tooth using ozone would take care of it and save the tooth? My dentist did say she could do something like that, but she clearly though extraction was better. For myself I need to know why it wouldn’t work to go in through the tooth and use ozone to sterilize the area and then pack it back up? I’m okay if it can’t be done, but I need to understand why.

One thing I’ll say is suddenly the stories about people’s problems with root canals are coming out of the woodwork.

Coach keep us posted on your decisions and reasoning. I’ll bet this issue will continue to resurface for years to come.

[circular]

Coach how did you get the sinus perforation, and does it heal back over by itself? That’s crazy and I’m sorry