Should I Pull My Root Canal Out?

Here is a personal story. For the past eight months, I have been suffering from eye issues that appear to be autoimmune related. This started with a potential exposure to red tide as I was sitting in a friend’s backyard in Florida. I felt a waft of air across my eyes and it felt like someone threw ground glass at my eyes. After a week of severe eye swelling, itching, burning and redness, I came home to continued and worsening symptoms including a heliotrope rash around my eyes. I tried multiple remedies and medical practitioners, including an ophthalmologist who recommended amniotic membrane grafts prepared from placental tissue. I also saw an endodontist who never asked if I had a latex allergy, which I do. I even travelled to the Klinghardt Institute in Woodinville, WA to work with an ART practitioner. This was the the third ART practitioner that recommended my root canal on tooth number 14 from six years ago be extracted. Obviously, I hesitated. This was something more extreme than I had ever anticipated.

However, our patients can be our greatest assets for learning. My patient with autoimmune-like symptoms also had a tooth that kept coming up in ART testing as an energy block. After Dr. Teplitsky at Wrigleyville Dental extracted her tooth, she found a large amount of infection. Removing the infection will allow this patient to finally heal fully. This gave me the incentive to make the phone call. I had my tooth extracted last week and had an immediate resolution of my eye problems. Gutta percha, a thermoplastic latex material derived from a tree, used in the root canal was communicating with my body’s tissues and creating an autoimmune response. My exposure to potential red tide in Florida was the last straw for my immune system. My immune system was unable to compensate any longer.

Therefore, in two different situations a tooth may test from a latent infection or adverse response to biologic dental materials. This is why I always look for the root cause when treating my patients.

Tooth Organ Meridian Chart

Each tooth is related to an acupuncture meridian which is related to various organs, tissues and glands in the body.