Many people have had root filled teeth for a number of years without experiencing an obvious health problem. Dr. Price found a severe stressful occurrence could so overcharge the patient’s immune system activity that they now developed a degenerative disease. The two foremost stress factors proved to be the FLU and PREGNANCY.
During the flu epidemic of 1918, Dr.Price studied 260 influenza patients in five different hospitals. This study was exceedingly difficult because so many were seriously ill, questioning and x-ray examinations were often not possible. Patients were divided into two groups: those having dental infections, and those free from oral problem.
Realizing that under the circumstances numbers of infected teeth must have missed, the percentage of individuals developing serious complications, including pneumonia,emphysema,carditis, severe neutritis, and severe rheumatism, who also had dental infections, numbered around 72 percent, while the percentage of those seemingly free of oral problems but who developed such serious illnesses was only 32 percent.
Among those we considered not susceptible to illness, the percentage of men and women is quite evenly divided. As susceptibility increases, this changes from 50-50 to 93 percent of females having strong inheritance factors and only seven percent for males. Dr. Price’s studies indicate the most important factors accounting for why these figures so drastically change are the stresses involved in motherhood and lactation.
Certainly physical injuries, extreme anxiety, exposure, nutrition, hunger, exhaustion, acute and chronic infections, alcohol and drugs all contribute singly or collectively to break a person’s otherwise well-working immune system. The presence of focal infection, as we have seen, compounds and magnifies every facet of ill health.
Dr. Price found that many new and expectant mothers developed acute rheumatism during the period of gestation or lactation. A typical case is that of a young woman of 22 years who had a physique and physical reserve well above average. She decided to undertake the responsibilities of motherhood, and the birth of a baby that was unusually robust followed.
When people suffer a severe auto accident, fall, or suffer some other injury, their immune systems are called upon to work at peak performance in order to achieve a speedy recovery. Those people with root canal fillings are generally found to have a healing rate slower than expected. Quite often, the extra stress an injury places on their defense systems allows the organisms to get out of hand and attack some other organ or tussue.
New and expectant mothers having infected teeth frequently developed acute rheumatism. Inoculations from such patients into rabbits produced multiple illnesses in the rabbits. Injury: Those who suffered accidents or injuries and had mouth infections were generally found to have slower than expected healing rates. We all know people who no sooner get over one illness when they get another.
