Dr. Mercola & Dr. Kulacz on Root Canal Dangers

Reading the document below is required. It should take roughly 10 minutes. You will be able to advance to the lesson after 10 minutes, by clicking the “NEXT LESSON” button at the bottom of the page. The Toxic Tooth| How a Root Canal Could Be Making You Sick: A Special Interview with Dr. Robert Kulacz, by Dr. Joseph Mercola DM = Dr. Joseph Mercola RK = Dr. Robert Kulacz DM: Root canals, a commonly performed procedure in most adults. Are they good, or are they bad? This is Dr. Mercola, helping you take control of your health. Joining me today is Dr. Robert Kulacz, who is a dentist, who has spent a significant portion of his professional career answering this question. This actually changed his life profoundly, and the insights he’s going to share with you today are really extraordinary. He’s also written a book. As far as I can discern, there are number of books out there, but this is the best on the subject. If you have any more questions or want to go into specific details, the book to get is The Toxic Tooth: How a Root Canal Could Be Making You Sick. Thank you for joining us today and welcome. I look forward to the conversation. RK: Thank you. DM: So, you got your training at New York University. Where did you start practicing? RK: Well, I started practicing in Brewster, New York. I was there as an associate for about six years. And then I went on my own and opened my own practice in Somers, New York. See, that was 1992. I was doing all the conventional dentistry procedures from restorative dentistry, to extractions, to root canals. I did a lot of root canals for many, many years. I also took a year-long implant course sponsored by Brookdale Hospital. It was year-long course on both surgery and restorative implant dentistry. Everything was going smoothly until one day, a patient of mine said to me, “You know, I heard from my physician that root canals may be bad. That root canals may cause or contribute to other diseases in the body.” And I said, “You’re crazy. Who is telling you this? That’s impossible.” He said, “You got to look at this information.” He gave me websites and organizations like the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT) to look at. I basically went out to explore this topic so I can come back to him and say, “Here is where you’re wrong, here’s where your physician is wrong, and here is where the ADA is right.” DM: The American Dental Association. RK: American Dental Association. I started to explore this to look at some of the topics and some of the references that he provided to me. DM: Well, before you go on, I just want to interject here and congratulate you for having the integrity and commitment to true professionalism. I would venture to say that 99.9 percent of physicians would take that response, initial response, dismiss it, and not do any follow up, but you sought to disprove him. So I want to congratulate you for that because it took a lot of courage. RK: Well, thank you. I mean, the idea in any evaluation of data is to go from the bottom, the ground up. You got to question the unquestioned assumptions and authorities. You can’t just assume what’s been told to you is correct. Now, it may be that, after looking at all of the information and data, it is correct. But until you go back and look at where these assumptions were derived, you can’t believe these assumptions. So, thank you. DM: Yeah. And it’s a good strategy for anything pretty much. And other even more controversial topics would be the effect of the vaccines, which is even more vilified than the root canals. RK: Exactly, or cholesterol. DM: Or coronary artery bypass surgery, you know, all of these interventions. Just do your own homework. RK: Do your homework. DM: Sorry, I interrupted you. I’m sorry. RK: That’s okay. So where was I? I started to research this topic, and lo and behold, I found out, oh my god, they’re right. I was wrong. I looked at Weston Price’s work, the work of Rosenthal, and others. I actually decided to go to an IAOMT meeting where I met Dr. Boyd Haley, and Dr. Boyd Haley’s lecture on root canals and how toxic they are just changed my life. I realized I was wrong. I went back to my patient. I told him, “You’re right; I was wrong.” From that day on, I changed my practice. DM: What year was that? Early ‘90s? RK: That was 1995. DM: ‘95. Now, interestingly, that’s about the same that I became aware of the toxicity of root canals too through a physician that was local to me and introduced me to Dr. Douglas Cook up in Wisconsin, who I suspect you’re familiar with. We’ve been on the same journey for a while, but you had a lot more professional interactions and negative consequences as a result of your commitment to your beliefs. Why don’t you expand on the story? RK: I changed the focus of my practice. I didn’t do root canals any longer although I don’t think that dentist should ban root canals. I mean, not everybody’s going to have a problem with a root canal, and patients certainly have the right to have one if they want one. The dentist should be able to perform one. But what should happen is that a patient should have active, informed consent. The American Dental Association states that root canals are a safe procedure. They can never cause any systemic diseases, and that simply is not true. If a patient is informed that these root canal teeth remain infected, that these bacteria can indeed travel to other sites in the body, and that these bacteria in these root canal teeth and the surrounding bone release potent toxins, well then, the patient can decide, after learning all these information, to have a root canal or not. DM: Yeah. Ultimately, they should have a choice. I mean, everyone gets the freedom of choice. They should be free to smoke, drink, or do whatever they want. They shouldn’t be mandated by some governmental regulatory agency to make that decision for them. RK: Exactly. I mean, nothing in the life is risk-free. Everything has risk. DM: Sure. RK: It’s just having an informed consent, knowing what the risks are. Having these known risks not be told to you by dentists… And dentists, they follow the ADA line. They don’t believe that root canal teeth can cause any health problems. In fact, they get quite angry if you start talking to them about it. DM: Yeah. That’s not because they thoroughly investigated and evaluated the pros and cons. They’ve just taken at face value what they’ve been taught in school and the professionals that taught them. RK: Exactly. It’s what you’ve been doing, what you’ve been taught, you’ve referred to authority, plus you’ve been this for a long time. Nobody wants to believe that what they’ve been doing, and their identity, which is a lot of times tied up in your profession, may have been wronged or flawed. I don’t blame dentists. I don’t blame them at all. I mean, this is their livelihood. This is what they do. This is what they’ve been taught. But if they open their mind to this information, I think a lot of them would do things differently. DM: Why don’t you go over and review some of the common arguments that these professionals used to justify the root canals as an effective intervention and then address your responses to those. RK: Okay. With root canals: 1) first of all, many dentists believe that they can sterilize a root canal tooth and that the act of instrumenting and irrigating the canal will eliminate all the bacteria. Well, that simply is not the case. I’ve done biopsies on every root canal tooth that I have extracted. Almost all of them have remnants of necrotic debris still in that canal. Now, further, these teeth are going to harbor bacteria. None of them are sterile. They’re not going to be sterile if they were previously infected, and that may be the main cause of the initial root canal. But even if the root cana