crown vs. extraction

[mama-to-mase]

hi!

i had a root canal done on a top tooth almost 2 years ago. i didn't get it filled and it has started to chip away. sometimes when eating i will get a little chunk of tooth in there, yuck!

the dentist says i need crown. i asked him if i could just get the tooth extracted because yikes inusrance would cover $450 but i would have to pay the other $500, and he laughed at me! he told me that choosing extraction was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. he said that teeth are very important and that not wanting to save them was crazy. he told me that if i did pull the tooth then the teeth surrounding it would cave in and i would have more problems and to not let anyone tell me that crowns/root canals were bad because there haven't been any studies done that prove they are.

so should i just go ahead and get a crown? oh and yeah, i will find a new dentist.

so are crowns safe? is he right, is wanting to extract the tooth a stupid idea?

i am going to try and read through the other threads for some help later, its hard to do right now with a toddler tugging at my shirt.

thanks!

[monstermama]

Paul Pritchford says

That it is better to have an extraction than a root canal, but I don't know about crowns. I had an extraction for a broken tooth where the root had died and I had no trouble. It wasn't a big deal and I'm terrified of dental work. I took my star of bethlehem and rescue remedy and some homeos and I didn't need any pain medicine. It was a relief to finally have it gone, and my health improved tremendously. My surgeon took the ligament out too, which is where carries can form (not sure that is the right word though). My holistic dentist recommended to have the peridontal ligament removed. I would much prefer an extraction to a lot of work, unless it is in the front, of course. (I had a missing tooth right next to the front one for 3 months. That was AWFUL). Paul Pritchford wrote the book, "Healing With Whole Foods". I don't have the latest addition, but in his other books the dental info is just great!

Good luck.
Jeanne

[aisraeltax]

i just went through a root canal. that one was covered by ins. (less $250) and now they want to put a crown on it which is going to cost an additional $1300. im livid about it.
i think the ongoing wisdom is that if there is an opposing tooth, to try to save it.
oh..my rc did NOT hurt. i know thats hard to believe. and i was bf'ing right afterward.
there was another mama on this forum that helped me soo much when i was trying to figure out what to do..she's a dentist. ill try to find her info. for you and pm her to look here.

[mama-to-mase]

thanks!

[JaneS]

There's been plenty of study of the dangers of root canals:

http://www.price-pottenger.org/Articles/Rootcanal.htm

In spite of the thousands of experiments conducted on 5,000 animals, and in spite of the thoroughness and excellence of his root canal research, all of Price's 25 years of scientific efforts were so well covered up that there is hardly a dentist alive today who has ever heard about his discoveries.

The gist of the research and of the thousands of animal studies is this: That root-canal-filled teeth always remain infected no matter how good they might look or how good they might feel.

Dr. Price suspected that bacterial infection accompanied many degenerative illnesses. In the beginning, he didn't know what bacteria were involved or just how they contributed to so many disease conditions. But he did recall that in medical practice doctors made cultures from the infection site, grew the organism present in a culture medium and then injected the bacteria into an animal to see if they could reproduce the disease and thereby prove it was the cause of the illness.

Dr. Price suspected that these infections arose from the teeth. He decided to implant an extracted root-filled tooth under the skin of an animal. He felt that if bacteria were present and carrying illness, their presence in a tooth might offer the same kind of proof physicians found when they injected the bacterial culture to produce disease in an animal. That is exactly what took place. He found that by implanting the root-filled tooth, the disease of the patient was transferred to animals. Whatever disease the patient had, the animal with the extracted tooth under its skin developed the same disease as the patient.

In other words, if the patient had heart disease, the animal developed heart disease. If he had kidney trouble, disease of the kidney was transferred to the animal. If he had a problem in his joints, the animals' joints became similarly involved. The principle held true for the whole spectrum of human ailments. Whatever the disease, the animal would develop that of the patient.