Interviewer: Talking with Dr. Hal Huggins, today. You're speaking at the Health Freedom Expo about root canals and toxicity. First of all talk about what root canals are and why people need them.
Dr. Hal Huggins: That's a good question. I know what a root canal is, but why people need them, that part I'm not sure I can answer, due to the studies that I have done for the last 15 years. From 1962 on until 20 to 30 years later, I did a very good job of doing root canals. I am in hopes that after this length of time, Saint Peter has developed Alzheimer's, so that maybe he will forget that I did that.
What is a root canal? A root canal is where you take a tooth and you drill a hole in the center of it. You go in and there's a chamber, the pulp chamber. That's where the nerves and the blood vessels are. You take a thing like a little rat tail file and you go up and down and clean out the canal and then fill it up with wax. There are all kinds of things that tell about sterilization of the canal and some of these things go against the basic principles of physics. For instance, if you heat wax it expands, when it cools it contracts. When you push it down it's like bread dough. You used to make bread didn't you?
Interviewer: Uh huh.
Dr. Hal Huggins: No, maybe not. You push bread dough down and you let go it springs back. What you do is heat up this wax. You put it in the canal and take a hot instrument that's been on a flame and shove it down in there into. You push the wax as far as you can and hope it doesn't go through the end. But, you can't see the end so you don't know whether it did or not until you x-ray afterwards. But, when you let go it springs back and when it cools it shrinks leaving 36% shrinkage around the wax. That's quite enough space for bacteria to get up into.
The bacteria--you've got an infected tooth or you probably wouldn't be doing a root canal. The bacteria come up here and then what makes the sterilization difficult is that there are tubules that go out from the canal to the outer portion of the tooth which is called the periodontal ligament, which you can probably see on this slide because it says periodontal ligament. Well, if you tie all of these tubes together it turns out to be three and a half miles long just in a single front tooth. That's a long direction to go to think you can sterilize, but this is what you're taught in dental school.
When we get into DNA we begin to find a few other things. Some of my research, I'm sorry to admit, was rather on the slow side. What we did, was we took out a root canal tooth because we were finding that the root canal tooth seemed to be an initiating or at least a contributing factor to a lot of the diseases of 'unknown origin', 'unknown etiology'. In other words, where is it coming from? If we take these teeth out and examine the root, the bottom third down here, we found a whole lot of bacteria. These are kind of dangerous bacteria. Then a year or two later, I decided if the bacteria are really coming through those tubules to the periodontal ligament what does the ligament contain. We would cut off the ligament and test that. We found more bacteria in the ligament. Now, you can't get to that to sterilize it without taking the tooth out.
Then about 10 years later, I got the idea, what do you suppose is going on in the bone outside of the tooth? We take the tooth out and then you have to use a dental bur to cut out the ligament. A lot of dentists will just try to scrap it out with a little instrument that scraps and what that does is push the bacteria into the bone, into the blood stream. If you do that people get a whole lot sicker. All right, so we take the tooth out, take a bur, cut out the periodontal ligament and let it bleed for a little bit and then take the blood sample there. We found a whole lot more bacteria. Sterilizing the tooth is something that is not only impossible, but it can't be done.
What we do now is that then we found, now blood chemistry is my primary field, so what I do is look at the blood chemistry before and after these procedures to see what's happening in the immune system. I have a Post-Doc Masters that emphasized immunology. We look at the immune system. We look at the endocrine system. We look at cardiovascular. We look at all these systems to see if things got better or worse. In taking the tooth out sometimes some of the blood chemistries that I follow would go down and four months later they would come back and approach where they are supposed to be. Ok, this is nice, but then we found if we take the tooth out, cut out the ligament, let it bleed for five minutes; you don't need a transfusion. You may be losing a teaspoon of blood, so that's not real dangerous, but it's real safe. What it does is to flush the bacteria out of the bone. Then we found changes in six days instead of four months.
Where is the real problem with a root canal? It's around the tooth in the surrounding bone. Our research now is trying to see how far into the bone the bacteria infection goes, but it's at least a quarter of an inch, which in the mouth is a quarter of a mile; a long distance in the mouth.