NO!! Teeth are not, in general,
connected with any systemic diseases with one exception. Read this
whole article for the complete scoop.
In 1900, the British physician William
Hunter wrote an article in the British Medical Journal
entitled "Oral Sepsis as a Cause of Disease". The article accused
"conservative dentistry" (the preservation of the dentition by dental
treatment) as the cause of a huge number of systemic diseases including
arthritis, neuritis, myalgia, nephritis, osteomyelitis, endocarditis,
brain abscess, skin abscess, pneumonia, asthma, anemia, indigestion,
gastritis, pancreatitis, colitis, diabetes, emphysema, goiter,
thyroiditis, Hodgkin’s disease, obscure fever (fever of unknown origin),
and nervous diseases of all kinds. Hunter believed that the repair
of teeth with gold crowns created "A perfect gold trap of sepsis of
which the patient is the proud owner and no persuasion will induce him
to part with it, for it cost him much money and it covers his black and
decayed teeth." Hunter was not propounding anything especially
new. The theory that "bad teeth" were the underlying cause of
numerous systemic diseases had been well established long before Hunter
wrote his famous paper.
The history of blaming teeth for human
disease has a very long history going back to Hippocrates who is said to
have reported the cure of arthritis after the removal of a tooth.
Today, such diseases as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, lupus,
multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease are mistakenly blamed on
"bad" teeth.
Hunter's theories were later codified by
Weston A. Price, D.D.S. (1870-1948).
Price studied primitive cultures and concluded that "modern
civilization" was the cause of ill health and that people living in
primitive conditions were actually healthier than modern people.
His examination of the primitive cultures in question were quite
superficial, and his conclusions were simplistic ignoring such
statistics as their short life expectancy, high rates of infant
mortality, endemic diseases, and malnutrition. Price also
performed poorly designed studies that led him to conclude that teeth
treated with root canal therapy leaked bacteria or bacterial toxins into
the body, causing all sorts of dreaded diseases including those
attributed by Hunter to the theory of Oral Sepsis.
Research studies performed in
the 1930s and 1940s and those conducted in later years showed no
relationship between the presence of endodontically treated teeth and
the presence of illness. Instead, researchers found that people
with root canal fillings were no more likely to be ill than people
without them.
The technical name for the theory that
encouraged souls in previous eras to blame systemic diseases on the
presence of bad teeth is the "theory of anachoresis" (pronounced
"ana-co-ree-sis"), or the "theory of focal infection". According
to this theory, an infection in or around a tooth (the "focus of
infection") could theoretically be carried by the bloodstream to other
parts of the body. Originally, the hypothesis that a bad tooth
could cause cancer or other systemic diseases was based on ancient
holistic theories of medicine and "proven" by anecdotal evidence (the
occasional case that seemed to confirm the theory). In the early
1800s, Benjamin Rush, an American physician and signer of the
Declaration of Independence, is said to have observed the cure of a case
of arthritis of the hip by tooth extraction.
The theory of focal infection probably reached its
apotheosis in the 1920's, between the two world wars, when huge numbers
of people were subjected to full mouth extraction of all their teeth, as
well as removal of various "unnecessary" organs in order to cure every
imaginable disease. One example of "research" in this area is on
display in this excerpt from an essay on Victorian insane asylums in
England, many of which were still in operation as late as the 1980's.
Here, the emphasis was on curing madness:
| "Attempts at cures were often more desperate than
well-advised. One of the asylums of my city had the
best-equipped operating theater of its time, where an
enthusiastic psychiatrist partially eviscerated his patients
and also removed all their teeth, on the theory that madness
was caused by a chronic but undetected and subclinical
infection (called “focal sepsis”) in the organs that he
removed." (Click
here
to read this excellent--and long--essay by Theodore
Dalrymple.) |
Most of the applications of the
theory of focal infection were disproved with the emerging science
of the 1930's and 1940's. The reasons for the demise of the
theory are as follows:
-
Science was never
able to prove that the theory of focal infection was actually valid.
Numerous instances of anecdotal evidence (the occasional case that
seemed to confirm the theory) had been used for centuries to prove
the theory of focal infection, but very few scientifically
controlled experiments were carried out. In the limited
number that were, the theory's advocates were never able to prove
any linkage between teeth and systemic disease. As a result,
they remained wedded to anecdotal proof. It is now generally
accepted among the scientific community that anecdotal evidence is
not a valid approach in scientific research.
-
When the offending
tooth, teeth or organ was removed, patients rarely were cured of
their disease, as promised by the proponents of the theory of focal
infection. This eliminated much of the credibility of the
theory.
-
Sometimes, the
disease would actually be exacerbated (made worse) by the removal of
the supposed focus of infection.
-
Improvement in dental
care greatly reduced the incidence of widespread dental disease in
the general population reducing the popularity of blaming bad teeth
for systemic disease.
-
The advent of
antibiotics largely eliminated much of the mortality associated with
dental infections. This, along with improved overall dental health
in the general population eliminated much of the anger that many
people once directed toward their diseased teeth and reduced the
previously widespread desire to have them all extracted and replaced
with dentures.
-
The list of diseases
that were supposedly caused by bad teeth kept shrinking as the
true
causes of these diseases were discovered over the course of time.
The unfavorable
reaction to the "orgy" of dental extractions and tonsillectomies
that were advocated by the proponents of the theory eventually
undermined the trust of the population. From approximately the
end of the nineteenth century up until shortly after WWII, millions
of perfectly healthy people lost their perfectly healthy teeth due
to the theory that early extraction would prevent numerous diseases
later in life, and also because it was extremely lucrative for the
surgeons who extracted the teeth, and the dentists who made the
dentures.
 Growing
up in the 1950's, I once asked my grandmother, already quite old at
the time, why she had false teeth. (The image to the right is
of my grandparents in their nineties.) She told me that they
were all extracted when she was 16 because of "pyorrhea".
Pyorrhea is another term for gum disease, and knowing what I know
today, I realize that sixteen year old kids don't lose their teeth
to gum disease. My grandmother was another innocent victim of
the ignorance of nineteenth and early twentieth century medical
quackery!
The theory of focal infection is kept
alive today by the American legal tort system (lawyers using junk
science to turn a profit), the holistic health movement, and even by a
relatively small number of dentists who rely on these debunked theories
to sell holistic (spa) dentistry to wealthy patrons. Dentists
selling these services generally are true believers. "The patient's ills
can be cured if the offending teeth are extracted and replaced with
implants, or if their amalgam fillings are all removed and replaced with
composites or crowns." This belief is, however based on the
debunked theories of Hunter and Price, and not on scientific evidence.
The holistic movement has tried to update the concept of
anachoresis by renaming it. In the mid 1970's, the term "cavitational
osteopathosis" ("CO") was coined. In the 1980's it was renamed
"neuralgia inducing cavitational osteonecrosis"
("NICO"). The new names have not changed the
concept underlying the theory; and the science underlying the theory
remains the same as it was in the early 20th century.
This is not to say that there is NO
validity to the theory of anachoresis. Bacteria from an infection
any place in the body CAN be carried by the blood or lymphatic system to
distant parts of the body where they can form another infection. The
symptoms of this sort of anachoresis are, however, quite specific and do
not resemble any disease entity except a straight forward organic
infection. They include infections of the heart (sub-acute
bacterial endocarditis), especially in persons who have had a history of
rheumatic fever or heart murmur, and on rare occasions, infections of
implanted appliances such as artificial joints. There is NO
indication that there is a correlation between the teeth and any other
disease entity for which the cause is otherwise unknown.
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