Laura Lee Interview with George Meinig, DDS & Dr. M. LaMarche www.lauralee.com

Laura Lee: Have you ever looked at fossil remains of dinosaurs or those of early man and noticed those rows and rows of perfect teeth still intact? Have you ever wondered why modern man can't seem to get through a lifetime with all his teeth intact, it doesn't seem fair does it? What are we doing wrong?

No doubt you've heard and we have covered in depth on this show the problems arising from mercury and silver amalgams. It's so well known in fact that 50% of the over 1,000,000 amalgams placed in teeth of Americans today are composites. A new material that doesn't contain mercury.

You probably thought that mercury was the big issue and that now you know about it you're safe in terms of what's safe in your mouth. I'm sorry, but there's more. There's much, much more. And we have tonight two gentlemen who are experts in their field in some of the newest research, actually it's old research, but it's just getting the attention today that it deserves.

And that is problems with root canals; apparently there are bacteria that can be harbored in root canals no matter how perfectly they're done. These bacteria mutate and become toxin factories, they can get out into the bloodstream and cause degenerative diseases or make them worse.

Also cavitation is a new term you're going to learn tonight and that is the space left in the jawbone when a tooth is extracted. If an infected tooth or simply a wisdom tooth that needs to come out to make space, problems can arise with dead tissue in the jawbone and you're going to learn tonight what you can do about these conditions. We have with us Dr. George Meinig, the author of Root Canal Cover-Up. It's a book that details this work from the 1920's done by Dr. Westin Price. Research that has been done recently and confirmed. He's a specialist in root canals and a dentist.

We also have with us Dr. Michael LaMarche. He's a dentist that is in practice today specializing in mercury removal. He has worked closely with Dr. Hal Huggins who's a leading researcher into mercury toxicity and silver dental amalgams and also Dr. LaMarche is one of 13 dentists selected nationwide selected for research into cavitations. And we're going to find out some very important and useful information tonight.

Welcome Dr. Meinig.

Dr. Meinig: Thank you very much, Laura.

Laura Lee: And welcome Dr. LaMarche.

Dr. LaMarche: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

Laura Lee: Thank you for all the work that you two have been doing in this. I know that people who are plagued with degenerative diseases, people who want to avoid those conditions, people whose health is delicate don't need any extra assaults on the immune system.

And this research is quite startling when you first hear about it. It begins to make more and more sense when you look into it. Let's start with you Dr. Meinig, tell us a bit about the problems with root canals, your research and why do we even have infected teeth? That's a question we'll get to - prevention - at the end of our discussion tonight, but what is a root canal, let's define some terms. What has been some of the research?

Dr. Meinig: Let me start out by saying that I am one of the 19 founding members of the root canal association, so the people out there don't get the idea that I have no background in the...

Laura Lee: Did I not mention that? I'm sorry, that was in my notes.

Dr. Meinig: And it's important for you to know that because I'm going to be saying some things critical about root canal treatment today. And the reason is that I practiced some 47 years and in all of that time I never heard about a 25-year research program that was conducted by Dr. Westin Price in the early 1900's and actually before then and it was finally published in 1923.

His work was all well documented in two volumes of 1174 pages and in 25 articles that appear in the medical and dental literature. Now what he reported and what he found with the tests which involved some 5,000 animals over the 25 year period was root canal distilled teeth, no matter how good they looked, or how free they were from symptoms, always remained infected.

Now that's a shocker, and it's one that many dentists don't want to believe because many of the things that we do as an endodontist involve large areas of bone loss at the end of a root of the tooth and when you do the root canal filling you see that bone fills in with new bone and how could that dentist and that patient ever think that there could still be infection in that tooth? And the problem is that the infection occurs in what is known as the dentin of the tooth.

The dentin involves 95% of all of the tooth substance and surprisingly, although it's almost as hard as enamel when it's cut with a drill it makes a shrill noise just like if you were cutting stone, and you would think it was a very hard solid substance. Surprisingly it's composed of little tiny tubules, and those tubules are so small that if we took our smallest front tooth and stretched it out - stretched those tubules out end to end - it would stretch out for a distance of 3 miles.

Now what happens is when you get a cavity in a tooth and the decay gets into the dentin of the tooth the bacteria that are involved in the decay process get into those tubules. I should tell you that initially those tubules carry a fluid and that that fluid carries nutriments and the nutriments in those dentin tubules keep the tooth alive and healthy.

And those nutriments come from the nerve and the blood vessels that come into the root canal of the tooth. And so fundamentally what happens when you get a deep cavity and it exposes the nerve of the tooth, those bacteria get into all of those dentin tubules and they remain in there causing infection and eventually they can escape and that's a story in itself. They can escape in what's known as the lateral canals and there toxins can actually escape directly through the root surface into what's called the peridontal membrane or ligament.

This is a hard fibrous tissue which holds the tooth in the bony socket, and when the infection gets into there it transfers easily into the bony socket and from there the bacteria and the bacterial toxins can get into the surrounding bone and the blood supply of that surrounding bone. And now this acts much like cancer cells, you know cancer cells metastasize and that means that they travel around the body in the bloodstream and they get to another tissue, gland or organ and they set up a new cancer.

Well these bacteria from infected dentin tubules also travel around and metastasize in the same way and they can get into the various tissue. Those bacteria are kind of like people, you know, if they get to like Seattle or Reno or someplace they decide that's where they're going to have their home, well the bacteria traveling around the body, they may get to the liver, the kidneys or the heart or the eyes or some other tissue and they set up an infection in that area. So this is exactly what happens and why the degenerative diseases occur from these teeth.

Laura Lee: Now why isn't the immune system not able to knock out these bacteria when they get outside the tooth? I can understand three miles of tunnels in these microtubules of an infected tooth for these bacteria to propagate in. It's hard for the immune system to get in there, but once they travel out, what's the immune system doing there? Just a slow wear and tear where they can't get rid of the infection sites so it's this constant default...?

Dr. Meinig: Well, you're right, the immune system under certain circumstances can take care of this quite adequately, but it has to be those people who have extremely good genetic backgrounds who are in good nutrition basis, are having no health problems, in their daily life.

Laura Lee: Now, who in the late 20th century can make that claim with all the assaults on our systems.

Dr. Meinig: That's right, Laura, there's not very many that can make that claim. Now if there are some people, and Dr. Price found that 258 of his patients met that requirement, he found they could stand root canals for many years without any difficulty until they had a severe accident, until they got a case of the flu, they had some severe stress to them, and now their immune system which was able to cope with these bacteria and these toxins of the bacteria now had too much to do and they could no longer cope and this person would develop a disease in their liver, their kidneys, their eyes, their brain, their whatever, just the same as a cancer metastasizing around this would happen to them in degenerative disease situation.

Laura Lee: When we come back let's talk a little bit about Dr. Price's original research. This research went on for five decades or so not being recognized. He was first doing this in the 209. It went for a long long time not really being recognized, though he was part of the establishment of his day, he did legitimate research, he wrote volumes, it's well-documented, he did the proper laboratory experiments, etc. etc.

And yet it's counter intuitive to what dentists observe, or how we thought the mouth worked, or bacteria in the immune system worked. So I'd like to know what's the original research, I know he did a lot with rabbits, it's pretty startling research, it's dramatic research. Let's talk about that and how it went on for so long and you said there was a cover-up involved. We've got more to talk about with Dr. George Meinig, the author of Root Canal Cover-up and Dr. Michael LaMarche that's going to tell us a bit about cavitations. I'm Laura Lee.

Michael, you were telling me in the break that your description of your practice in dentistry is now encompassing so much more that you now describe it as biologically compatible dentistry. Could you define that term and then we'll...

Dr. LaMarche: Yes, basically our practice has changed and to say that our focus was strictly on amalgam removal would not be correct. I think we're more focused on the nutritional aspects of an individual in conjunction with blood chemistries and also working very closely with physicians for the patient's general overall health. Certainly we are concerned with heavy metals in our patients but to say that would be our major concern and focus would...

Laura Lee: Well, I'm one of your patients and I know that you look at the system as a holistic system and that the role that dental health plays in that segues into so many other areas so I think you're the dentist of the future and that you're looking at the whole system of the person, the entire health of the person, and that interplays, yes indeed. Thank you for making that correction. And you'll also find Dr. LaMarche in Lake Stevens, Washington. Dr. Meinig, you were going to tell us about Westin Price's work in the 1920's - how he even happened onto the thought that root canals might be a stress on the immune system.

Dr. Meinig: Before I mention that I should say that all of this is really dealing with the theory of local infection. Focal infection means that you can have an infection somewhere in the body and that the bacteria that are involved may be transferred to another tissue, gland, or organ somewhere in the body and set up a whole new infection. Most of this was started by Dr. Billings in the first decade of this century and by 1914 his research had showed that 958 of all focal infections came from teeth and from tonsils.

The others came from a few other sources like infected sinuses, fingernails, toenails, appendices and so on. But what happened is that of course Dr. Price learned about all of this work and he had done a root canal filling for a woman who developed a severe arthritic condition. She was so bad that she was bedridden most of the time and her hands were so swollen with arthritis that she could hardly feed herself. And when he heard about all of this focal infection work by Billings he realized that maybe this root fill that he did that looked so fine on the X-rays was part of her problem in causing this arthritis. And so like all research programs in which researchers get involved, there's usually one that sets of the tone and this case happened to be the one that captured everybody's imagination.

There were a lot of others, but this one did, and the reason was that he finally convinced her that she should have that tooth removed and she came into his office, had the tooth removed aseptically incidentally, because if he contaminates the tooth when he's taking it out with the saliva and other things then that's a problem of introducing other bacteria into the situation.

Laura Lee: Also couldn't do a proper lab test on it.

Dr. Meinig: So he did that and he secured a laboratory animal and in this case it was a rabbit and he put a little local anesthetic under the skin of the back of the rabbit. He made a small buttonhole incision into the skin of the rabbit and he put that extracted root canal filled tooth into that incision. He put a couple of little stitches in there to hold the tooth, to keep it from popping out again and he returned the animal to a spacious cage that had plenty of good food and awaited development.

Well it didn't take long, two days later that rabbit developed the same arthritis in its limbs that the patient had and in ten days it passed away from the infection from that root filled tooth. Well now this was somewhat of a confirmation for Dr. Price that people who had root canal filled teeth and had illnesses that the medical profession was having difficulty in solving - that maybe these root filled teeth were causing those problems, and so whenever he had people who were going from doctor to doctor and not finding out what was wrong with them, he would then advise them to have any root filled teeth out and he would implant the tooth under the skin of the rabbit or they used numbers of other animals, but rabbits proved to be a little more dramatic, but the same thing happened whether it was a dog or a rat or a chipmunk or whatever they used, these same diseases would occur.

Well the surprising thing was when the patient with a heart condition came in and had a root filled tooth and wasn't getting anywhere with his treatment and they took that root filled tooth and implanted it under the skin of a rabbit, by golly, that rabbit got a heart condition and usually passed away within a few days.

If the person had kidney trouble, well the rabbit got kidney trouble. And if the person had trouble with their eyes, well the rabbit got trouble with the eyes. As a matter of fact the eyes reacted so severely that even minor problems with the patient's eyes would cause the rabbit to go blindusually in two to three days. And so there were a lot of different situations and almost any disease that you might think of they eventually transferred from a patient through the root filled tooth into another laboratory animal.

Laura Lee: So what's the theory with the focal infection? Why is it there's the connection with the infected tooth and that problem area in another part of the body?

Dr. Meinig: Well, the reason that this is a focal infection is because the infection came from the tooth and traveled from the tooth to the heart or the kidneys or the lungs or some area of the body and it set up a new infection.

Laura Lee: Right, but certain bacteria that is human transferred to an animal, say rabbit, that same bacteria will not just accidentally go attack the liver, it will attack the eyes.

Dr. Meinig: Yes.

Laura Lee: It's destined for that one organ. How do you explain that?

Dr. Meinig: Price I'm sure was not able to explain that either, it was a big surprise to them to think that almost always the same disease occurred. Sometimes it wasn't exactly the same, but it was usually the same tissue. But most of the time it was actually the same disease and what he did in order to prove these things in those days - he realized he might insert his own thinking into what was happening and so what he did very often was to repeat experiments because they didn't know double-blind business, but he did know enough about it, so what he did was he transferred...

Laura Lee: We'll get the rest of this when we come back with DR, George Meinig and Dr. Michael LaMarche. And you thought it was just mercury in your mouth that was a problem. I'm Laura Lee, we'll be right back on the Laura Lee Show.

And we are back, hi. Dr. George Meinig and Dr. Michael LaMarche are with us in studio tonight. The topic, root canals and the problem with bacteria that get trapped inside the microtubules of the tooth, of an infected tooth, can migrate throughout the body, they can infect an organ, gland or tissue, they can damage the heart, kidneys, joints, eyes, brain. They can even endanger pregnant women. These infections were first discovered by a 25 year root canal research program carried out by the American Dental Association. Dr. Meinig says this research was secretly covered up. It's been re-examined and redone recently and here's the story. Let's start taking some phone calls from Martin up first from Portland, Oregon. Hi, Martin.

Martin: Hello, Laura Lee. Yeah this is kind of a personal topic for me, about 15 years ago I heard a report from the University of Texas Medical School at Waco. They had a 6ve-year study where they demonstrated that 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C per day would prevent periodontal disease.

Well then shortly thereafter my cat came down with distemper so I cured him over a period of ten days using 500 mg. of vitamin C per day. And about two years after that I was diagnosed by my dentist whom I had been going to for a long time, with pretty serious periodontal disease. And he X-rayed my whole mouth upper and lower, showed me all the pockets and everything I had and he sectioned my teeth of into two upper and three lower and did the scraping on the first section lower, the worst part first.

Well I was so frightened and saw that there was going to be such a tremendous amount of expense to me that I immediately started taking 15,000 mg per day for the next four months. He x-rayed my teeth at the end of the third month and he said "You know something's happening here, the number of pockets you have and the size of those pockets is rapidly diminishing" 90 he wanted to re-X-ray just to verify this, so he did and it showed that some of the smaller pockets had completely gone away and the larger pockets were reduced by less than half their previous size only three months before.

And he was amazed and he asked me what I had been doing, and I said I had simply been taking 15,000 mg of vitamin C every day - 5,000 with each meal. And other than that I hadn't changed my diet or done anything else. Does your guest have any experience using vitamin C for therapy?

Laura Lee: Well, they are looking into nutrition and the impact it has on health overall. Dr. Meinig...

Dr. Meinig: Well a third of my practice is actually periodontal disease. You said that I was a specialist in endodontics but I preferred to do all of dentistry and about a third of practice was periodontal disease. I never had any patient do 15,000 mg of vitamin C, I got many of them on vitamin C, but not that much, and your discovery is a very interesting one and I'm going to advise a few people to try that and let's see what happens with them. I can't say that I've had experience to that extent with anybody.

Laura Lee: I would say that you'd want to get the plaque and everything else scraped off your teeth and give yourself a head start. Don't do it instead of.

Dr. Meinig: That's right. Absolutely it's important that you get all of the deposits removed, otherwise.... Incidentally those infections from periodontal pockets are as serious as root canal filled teeth are, so it's very important that you know that.

Martin: Well, just recently I had had a relapse where one of my front teeth has been pressed back partly out of the jawbone as far as support is concerned and developed a pretty serious periodontal pocket because I used an infected dental floss, well I hadn't used a brand new one, I used one I used a couple of days previous and apparently the food had become contaminated and it infected the lower gum, down the root line below the gum.

And I developed a pretty serious pus pocket down there which it took about three days to clean out physically, but then I merely started taking high doses of vitamin C and within about 2 weeks the gums are completely cleared up and developed a more reddish color and the tooth was much firmer in the gum than it had been before. Also, ginkgo can have some of the same effect as far as helping a person of middle age or older to develop much stronger teeth, you know as far as being rooted in the jawbone and help their gums .

Laura Lee: Thanks for that story, we appreciate that Martin. Also, let's go back to the research that Dr. Westin Price had done you were saying you were going to explain another aspect of it.

This was an interview from the Laura Lee Show on radio that has been edited of news and commercials. For a complete listing of over 600 interviews on cassette as well as selected videos and books, write to Laura Lee, P.O. Box 3010, Bellevue, Washington 98009, or call the hotline at 1-800-243-1438 for the newest listings

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