Root Canals are No Fun – Time for a little Education

They are no fun, but honestly are not as bad as many people think. About 3 months ago, I had a filling done to a tooth.  Not long after, I started to notice that my tooth would ache whenever I had something cold. When I didn’t know was that this was the first signs of something very sinister.

Sometimes, when a filling isn’t done right, or a cavity forms somewhere, bacteria can leak into the tooth. That bacteria starts to eat at the nerve inside the tooth, and the nerve starts to die. The first sign of this is when eating or drinking something cold, and the coldness contacts that tooth. You’ll feel an ache there. If all your teeth ache, that typically means that it’s just too cold in general, but if only one does, that’s a bad sign. I thought I just needed some Sensodyne or something, so I ignored it. The pain goes away almost instantly anyway.

I was wrong in doing so. Last Saturday night, my tooth started to ache unprovoked. By evening, it was hurting so much that I couldn’t sleep. Taking some ibuprophin helped, but I needed to see a dentist.  The next day, the pain was so bad, I was literally hopping up and down, and keeling over! I kid you not! After an emergency booking with just any local dentist that was available, I found out that I needed a root canal. I was absolutely devastated, and very afraid.

Endotherapy, or more commonly known as a Root Canal Procedure, is by far the most feared procedure among patients. People usually say “I’d rather have a root canal.” to things they don’t want to do. Honestly, this is a misconception. It’s actually not that bad. It’s like getting a filling, but only a little deeper.

The problem is that it’s easy for some people, and hard for others. As you can see in the image above, the procedure involves drilling a hole in your tooth, and then yanking out the dead nerve inside so that bacteria can no longer thrive there. It’s dead anyway, there is nothing else you can do about it. They then go deeper into the actual root of your tooth, and clean out the canal (the root canal). This is the tricky part. Some people’s roots are not straight. They bend, curve, sometimes helix. Since drill tools are straight, this can be very problematic.

I didn’t want to take the risk, so I decided to go with a specialist (Endodontist). They have better tools, better techniques, and better skills than a general dentist in regards to endotherapy. If I had gone with a regular dentist, the process could potentially take more than one visit, up to four! Not fun! And there was a risk that they STILL won’t clean it out as good! With the specialist, he got the job done in one hour. ONE HOUR! It felt nothing more than getting a regular filling.

So how did the whole thing feel from beginning to end? The whole thing leading up to the endotherapy was terrible. I read up on it online, learned a lot, but at the same time, learned about several really BAD things about getting a root canal. One of which is a study done by a Dr. George Meinig and Dr. Weston Price. I basically scared myself with this. It’s not the therapy itself that scared me, but the aftermath.

They talk about what’s called Focal Infection. Basically, our teeth are tied to our body, much like any other organ. Even in Chinese medicine practices, they say that the teeth have a flow of Chi through our bodies, and when that Chi is disrupted, disease may result. They discovered that people who got root canals were more likely to get things like heart problems, cancer, liver problems, etc. Basically fatal diseases. They found this link when they extracted root canal treated teeth from patients with these diseases, and implanted these tooth bits into mice and rabbits. Within days, the test subjects would experience identical symptoms of the patients they extracted the tooth from, and ultimately die from it. They also noticed that the patients began to heal after the treated tooth was extracted from them. They believed that bacteria still harbored in the treated tooth somehow, and it spread to the rest of the body through the blood vessels of the detached root.

When they released their publication on this finding, they were immediately “covered up”. The publication was never seen again, and there is little mention of these two researchers now. Talk about conspiracy! The medical education field being funded by large pharmaceutical companies, cover-ups, everything. My tooth was about to be treated by a lie!

Recently, research has shown that there are hundreds of thousands of microscopic roots that permeate from the root canal outwards. These roots are impossible to clean out, making it possible for the tooth to get re-infected. It could be through these roots that the bacteria are harboring in.

I had to convince myself that the research done back then was in the 1930’s, and technology has improved significantly since then. They use better materials, better disinfectants, better tools, everything. But then that little bit of doubt still lingers in my mind…

The best thing to do is to prevent it from happening in the first place. So do take care of your teeth. I hope this root canal will be the first and last one I ever need to do.

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