The Founder Who Turned Against Root Canals

An Essay on George Meinig, Weston Price’s Buried Research, and the Dead Teeth in Your Mouth

A woman had been confined to a wheelchair for six years with severe arthritis. Her joints were swollen, deformed. She could not walk. Her doctors had no answers.

Her dentist, Weston Price, suspected her root-canalled tooth. The X-rays showed nothing wrong with it. No visible infection. No symptoms in the tooth itself. He extracted it anyway.

Then he did something no one had tried before. He washed the tooth and surgically implanted it under the skin of a rabbit. Within two days, the rabbit developed the same crippling arthritis. In ten days, the rabbit was dead.¹

The woman recovered. She walked without a cane. She returned to fine needlework.²

Price repeated this experiment hundreds of times. He implanted root-canalled teeth from patients with heart disease into rabbits — the rabbits developed heart disease. Kidney patients — kidney disease in the rabbits. Eye infections, stomach ulcers, rheumatism, lung problems, bladder infections, ovarian diseases — the rabbits developed whatever the patient had.¹ ³

To rule out the possibility that any foreign object implanted under the skin would cause illness, Price also implanted healthy teeth extracted for orthodontic reasons, impacted wisdom teeth, and sterilized coins. Nothing happened. The rabbits remained perfectly healthy.¹ He ran these controls a hundred times.⁴

This research was not conducted in a garage. Price led a 60-person research team operating under the auspices of the American Dental Association’s Research Institute. His advisory board included Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Frank Billings (who coined the term “focal infection”), and Milton Rosenau, the Harvard professor of preventive medicine.⁵ The research produced 1,174 pages of data, published in two volumes in 1923, with photographs, charts, and the results of experiments on over 5,000 animals.⁵

Those 1,174 pages were then buried for seventy years.

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How the Research Disappeared

The burial was not accidental. It was driven by two forces — a flawed counter-experiment and a professional overcorrection — and the result suited an industry that had no interest in the answer Price had found.

In the years following Price’s publications, a dentist named Percy Howe injected streptococcus bacteria taken from a normal, infection-free mouth into rabbits. None became sick. This study was seized upon by opponents of the focal infection theory to discredit Price’s work.⁸ The logic was circular: Howe used ordinary oral bacteria, not the mutated anaerobic organisms that Price had specifically demonstrated were trapped inside root-canalled teeth. Price had shown that bacteria sealed inside the oxygen-deprived environment of a dead tooth undergo polymorphic changes — becoming smaller, losing their need for oxygen, and producing toxins of far greater virulence than their original aerobic forms.⁶ ⁷ Howe tested something Price never claimed, then used the negative result to dismiss what Price had documented across thousands of experiments.

The second factor was collateral damage from Price’s own findings. Some dentists, reading the research too hastily, began extracting teeth indiscriminately, promising cures for every ailment. When wholesale tooth removal failed to produce miracles in every case, the entire focal infection theory was further discredited.⁸ The profession overcorrected. Rather than refine the understanding of which teeth were problematic, under what conditions, and why some patients recovered after extraction while others did not, dentistry rejected the premise altogether. Price himself had been careful to note that not all root canals produced illness — roughly 25–30% of patients appeared to tolerate them — and that outcomes depended heavily on the patient’s immune capacity.¹⁸ These nuances were discarded along with the research.

S. Hale Shakman’s doctoral dissertation, Medicine’s Grandest Fraud, documented the suppression in detail. The dismissal of Price’s work — and the parallel work of Edward Rosenow on elective localization of bacteria — was built on flawed calculations and professional politics, not sound science.³ Yet for decades, modern dentistry relied on this dismissal to assure dentists, dental students, and the public that root canals were safe.

By the mid-twentieth century, root canal therapy was established practice, the American Association of Endodontists was growing rapidly, and Price’s two volumes sat unread in the archives of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

The Man Who Read the Books

George Meinig was one of 19 dentists who founded the American Association of Endodontists. He practiced root canal therapy at a time when few dentists performed the procedure and few dental schools taught it. He and his colleagues taught practicing dentists how to save infected teeth rather than extract them. Their pitch was effective: “How could you, as dentists, ever learn how to save teeth by taking them out?”⁹

Meinig went on to manage the Twentieth Century Fox Studio dental office. He received fellowships from the American College of Dentists and the International College of Applied Nutrition. He spent 17 years writing a weekly nutrition column for the Ojai Valley News. In May 1993, at the AAE’s 50th anniversary meeting, Meinig was honoured as one of only four surviving founding members of the organization.⁹ ¹⁰

That same year, he published a book telling people not to get root canals.

The path from founder to dissident began when Dr. Hal Huggins obtained Price’s two original research volumes and alerted the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation to their significance. The Foundation, recognizing the need for someone with both the technical background and the ability to translate research for a general audience, asked Meinig to review the material.¹⁰

Meinig read the table of contents and could not believe the magnitude of what Price had undertaken. He was, in his own words, “terribly disturbed and shaken” that he had never heard anything about these findings. He started reading immediately and could not put the books down. As he continued, he became “flabbergasted that our profession and the public had been cut off from learning about the basic and serious problems involved in this subject.”¹⁰

He was reading the evidence that the specialty he helped build was leaving dead, infected organs inside people’s bodies.

The weight of this was not lost on him. Meinig knew that publishing these findings would put him at odds with the profession he had served for 47 years. His dental colleagues — particularly those who knew him and were familiar with his background — would, as he predicted, think he had lost his mind. He asked himself whether his ability to translate technical material into readable language was enough, and whether making this information public would bring only unrest.¹⁰

But he kept returning to the numbers. Millions of people were ill with degenerative diseases for which the medical profession had no answers. The root canal research shed direct light on a potential cause. To Meinig, further delay was intolerable. If the profession would not investigate, the public needed the information to make their own decisions.¹⁰

He also knew that he was not easily dismissed. His credentials — founding member of the AAE, Fellow of the American College of Dentists, 47 years of practice, the Fox Studios appointment — made him precisely the kind of insider whose testimony carried weight. As he put it: who else but someone with this kind of background could appraise this serious research?⁵

What Happens Inside a Dead Tooth

A living tooth is not a static mineral peg. It is a complex organ with its own blood supply, nerve pathways, and immune function. The dentin — the hard tissue that makes up the bulk of each tooth — is not solid. It is laced with millions of microscopic tubules that radiate from the pulp chamber outward. If the dentinal tubules from a single tooth were placed end to end, they would extend approximately three miles.¹¹ ¹² ¹³

In a healthy tooth, nutrient-rich fluid flows outward through these tubules, from the pulp toward the surface. This pressurized flow is part of the tooth’s self-cleaning mechanism — an invisible toothbrush that keeps the internal structure clear of debris and bacterial invasion.¹⁴ The odontoblast cells lining the pulp chamber act as pumps, pushing microscopic droplets of this fluid through the tubule network.¹⁵

A root canal procedure kills this system. The dentist drills into the tooth, removes the pulp — the nerve, blood vessels, and connective tissue — and attempts to sterilize the hollow chamber. The canal is then packed with gutta-percha, a rubbery filling material, and sealed.¹²

The three miles of dentinal tubules remain untouched. No instrument can reach them. No disinfectant can penetrate their full length.¹¹ ¹³ Price tried soaking extracted infected teeth in powerful disinfectants, thoroughly killing all surface bacteria, then implanted them in animals. Infections still occurred.¹⁶ The bacteria inside the tubules survived every sterilization protocol available.

With the blood supply removed, the pressurized outward fluid flow that kept bacteria out of the tubules ceases. The environment inside the sealed tooth shifts from aerobic to anaerobic. Bacteria trapped in the tubules do not die. They mutate — becoming smaller, able to thrive without oxygen, and producing toxins of far greater potency than their original forms.⁶ ⁷ Price found that when he filtered out the bacteria from extracts of root-canalled teeth, leaving only the toxins, the remaining liquid was more lethal to rabbits than when the bacteria were present.¹⁷

The tooth is now a sealed container of necrotic tissue producing a continuous supply of toxic metabolic waste. The body attempts to wall off the threat. Sometimes this appears on an X-ray as a radiolucent area around the root tip.⁸ But the toxins produced inside the tooth migrate outward — through the dentinal tubules, through the cementum (the root’s outer covering), through lateral accessory canals, and into the surrounding jawbone and bloodstream.⁶ ¹²

Price demonstrated this directly. He cemented small steel tubes into root canals of extracted teeth and pumped dyed water through them under pressure. The coloured water traveled through the dentin tubules and seeped through the entire cementum — the root’s supposedly impervious outer layer.⁶

The filling material itself compounds the problem. Gutta-percha shrinks as it cools and sets. Price tested this with a packing device he invented that exerted several hundred pounds of pressure — far more than could be achieved in a patient’s mouth. After the material cooled, he submerged the exposed end in blue ink dye. In every single test, the gutta-percha leaked. The ink flowed into the gaps between the filling material and the canal walls.¹⁸ Modern research confirms the problem: one study found bacteria leaked out of 80% of teeth filled with gutta-percha regardless of which sealer was used, and another detected bacteria in 84% of gutta-percha-filled teeth after just 72 hours.¹⁹

There is no sealing material that solves this. The pastes used alongside gutta-percha contain their own toxic components: formaldehyde, ammonia, bismuth oxide, and compounds whose own safety data sheets warn against allowing them to reach sewage or ground water.²⁶ These materials are placed directly into the interior of a tooth that sits in the jawbone, millimetres from the bloodstream. And the filling materials themselves, whether gutta-percha, Resilon, or the calcium oxide-based Biocalex, all produce teeth that test highly toxic on enzyme inhibition assays upon extraction. The surrounding bone consistently shows chronic osteomyelitis — inflamed, infected bone.¹⁹

Dentistry is one of the only healing professions that routinely leaves a dead organ inside the body and assumes the body will tolerate it indefinitely.²⁰ Every surgeon knows what happens when dead biological tissue is left inside a surgical wound. It becomes infected. It spreads bacteria to other locations. The dental profession operates under an exemption from this principle that no other branch of medicine would accept.

The Thirty Rabbits

One of Price’s most striking experiments involved a single tooth from a patient who had died of a heart attack. Price extracted the tooth, crushed it into powder, and injected a minuscule amount — one millionth of a gram — into a rabbit. The rabbit developed heart disease and died.²¹

Price then retrieved the tooth from the first rabbit, cleaned and washed it, and implanted it in a second rabbit. That rabbit died too. He continued this process through 30 rabbits in succession. The expectation was that the toxic content of the tooth would gradually deplete with each implantation. Instead, all 30 rabbits died within approximately six days, except for one exceptionally large and aggressive male that survived to day ten.⁴

Even more remarkable: Price took infected teeth that had killed multiple rabbits, placed them in boiling water for one hour, then implanted them in new rabbits. The rabbits still became ill and died — in 22 days rather than six, but they died. He escalated to hospital autoclave temperatures at 30 pounds and 60 pounds of pressure for one hour, and even 300 pounds of pressure for two hours. The autoclaved teeth, when implanted, still caused weight loss, blood changes, and death in the rabbits — in 35 days.⁴

Whatever was inside those teeth was not ordinary infection. It was something that survived conditions that destroy all known pathogens. Under a terrain framework, this makes sense: the issue is not primarily the bacteria but the accumulated toxic metabolic waste products and breakdown compounds produced by anaerobic putrefaction within the sealed tubule network. These chemical toxins are not alive, and boiling or autoclaving does not neutralize them.

The 30-Billion-Dollar Industry

Each year in the United States alone, more than 30 million root canals are performed. That represents a 30-billion-dollar industry.¹⁷ The American Association of Endodontists — the organization Meinig helped found — now has thousands of members. The AAE’s official position is that there is no valid scientific evidence linking root canal-treated teeth to systemic disease.²² The AAE has no scientific article that effectively refutes the work of Weston Price and Edward Rosenow, though it claims otherwise.³

Cross-sectional studies from multiple countries paint a different picture. Periapical infection — infection at the root tip, indicating failure — was found in 50.8% of root canal-treated teeth in Scotland, 61% in Germany, nearly 68% in Turkey, 52% in Denmark, 64.5% in Spain, and 39–51% in Canada and the United States.²² These numbers are based on standard 2D X-rays, which means the actual infection rates are higher, since 2D imaging misses pathology that 3D imaging reveals. In the German study, only 14% of examined root canal-treated teeth met currently accepted standards for adequate filling.²²

The most recent long-term studies of root canal success rates over five- and ten-year periods report overall success rates of 30–40%.¹⁷ During Price’s era, the rate of root canals showing no observable side effects was 25%.¹⁷ The procedure works best for teeth that are minimally infected — the very teeth that would have been easiest to heal through nutritional intervention and that arguably did not need root canals in the first place. The badly decayed teeth that most need saving are the ones where the procedure most reliably fails.¹⁷

Root canals present a structural catch-22 that no amount of improved technique resolves. The problem is not inadequate disinfection protocols or inferior filling materials. The problem is the anatomy of the tooth itself: three miles of microscopic tubules that no instrument will ever reach, no chemical will ever sterilize, and no filling material will ever seal.

Modern Tools, Same Findings

Thomas Levy, a board-certified cardiologist, came to the root canal question through an unlikely path. While practicing cardiology in Colorado Springs, he met Dr. Hal Huggins — the same dentist who had first brought Price’s research back to light. At Huggins’ clinic, Levy saw patients with degenerative diseases improving and abnormal laboratory tests normalizing after programs of dental revision, to a degree he had not believed possible regardless of the treatment given.²³

Levy’s own research led him to conclude that focal infections from root canal-treated teeth reliably promote increased oxidative stress through the continuous release of pathogens and toxins into the body. The pathogens encounter the high-pressure arterial system first in the coronary arteries. Once seeded there, they consume local vitamin C, initiating focal scurvy and a chronic inflammatory response that never resolves until the infectious source is removed.²³

Levy himself became a case study. Despite good baseline health, his C-reactive protein levels — a strong indicator of chronic inflammation and a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease — remained stubbornly elevated for years. He could not determine the source. He even took 100 grams of intravenous vitamin C daily for a week, which barely moved the number. Then he experienced the sudden onset of chest tightness and shortness of breath while running after a dog. He was a cardiologist. He had seen this presentation countless times in his own patients. He had a root canal-treated tooth extracted and the infected bone around it cleaned. His health improved rapidly. A subsequent cardiac CT scan showed a 40–50% narrowing in his most important coronary artery — an area he suspected had been critically narrowed before the extraction.²³

One case from Levy’s clinical experience is particularly instructive. A friend with aggressive coronary artery disease had undergone seven angioplasties and stent placements in four years. Despite an extraordinary supplement regimen — including nine grams daily of liposome-encapsulated vitamin C — his disease continued to progress. Levy’s dentist found one root canal-treated tooth. He extracted it and cleaned the infected bone in the socket. The man never had another episode of chest pain. A cardiac CT scan years later showed that much of the arterial narrowing documented on earlier angiograms had resolved.²³

Levy’s work also brings a critical piece of modern evidence: 3D cone beam computed tomography. Standard two-dimensional dental X-rays — the kind used in every dental office — routinely fail to detect infection around root-canalled teeth. The periapical lesions hide in front of or behind the root, or sit a few millimetres from the radiographic apex, invisible on a flat image. When researchers compared the two technologies on the same set of 46 root canal-treated teeth, 2D X-rays detected infection in 70% of them. The 3D scans found infection in 91%.²²

That gap — the 21% of teeth that look clean on standard X-rays but show active pathology on 3D imaging — represents millions of people who have been told their root canals are fine.

Australian dentist Robert Gammal, who spent decades removing root canals and documenting the results, described a pattern that echoes Price’s findings from a century earlier: patients returning a week after extraction to report that symptoms they had suffered for years had disappeared within days. Breast lumps resolving — so frequently that Gammal lost count.²⁴ Multiple sclerosis symptoms vanishing after the removal of a single dead tooth. A 32-year-old man diagnosed with MS had one root-canalled tooth extracted and recovered completely.²⁴ A woman with two large brain lesions visible on MRI had a dead tooth and a bridge removed; three months later, a follow-up MRI was clear. Her neurologist declared her free of MS and did not want to know what she had done.²⁴

German cancer specialist Professor Max Daunderer reported that when MS patients had amalgam fillings removed but refused extraction of root-canalled teeth and treatment of infected jawbone, the cure rate was 16%. When patients accepted full treatment — amalgam removal, root canal extraction, and cleaning of the alveolar bone — the cure rate rose to 86%.²⁴

One published case study describes a 16-year remission of rheumatoid arthritis following extraction of root canal-treated teeth that appeared clinically healthy. The only clue was that the patient could reproducibly trigger severe arthritis attacks by applying heavy pressure to those specific teeth. After extraction, a layer of pus was found covering the root tips of teeth that looked perfectly normal. The rheumatoid factor became negative. The patient remained symptom-free for 16 years.²⁴

A Man Who Couldn’t Unknow

George Meinig published Root Canal Cover-Up in June 1993. The response, he reported, was immediate. His phone rang constantly with people recounting how illnesses had started shortly after root canal procedures, and how those illnesses resolved when the teeth were extracted.²⁵

The dental profession’s reaction was predictable. Meinig had anticipated it. He knew that most dentists and endodontists would reject his message — the same way the profession had rejected Price’s findings seventy years earlier. He noted that many important advances in medicine have come about only after public pressure was applied, and he was not optimistic that the profession would voluntarily re-examine its most profitable procedure.¹⁰

Meinig was no outsider throwing stones. He had taught root canal therapy to practicing dentists. He had helped build the professional organization that credentialed root canal specialists. He had been honoured by that organization for his contributions. His credentials were not just adequate — they were the very credentials the profession most respected.

He spent his remaining years trying to undo what he had helped build — lecturing, writing, appearing on radio and television, and urging the public to examine Price’s research and make their own decisions.¹⁰ He did this knowing that the procedure he was warning against was being performed 24 million times a year in the United States at the time he wrote, a number that has since grown to over 30 million.⁹ ¹⁷

The research is publicly available. It was never refuted — it was abandoned. When one of the founding members of the endodontic specialty finally read it, he reached the same conclusion that Weston Price had reached seventy years earlier.

The 1,174 pages are still there. They say what they say.

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References

1. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Bion Publishing, 1993/1998. Chapter 1.

2. Price, W.A. Dental Infections Oral and Systemic, Volume I. Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1923. As cited in Meinig, Chapter 1, and Fife, B. Oil Pulling Therapy.

3. Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth: How a Root Canal Could Be Making You Sick. MedFox Publishing, 2014. Chapter on Price’s research.

4. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 21, “The 30 Rabbits Study.”

5. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 2, “Alarming Cover-up of Vital Root Canal Research Discovered.”

6. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 3, “The Bacteria and Other Microorganisms That are Involved in Dental Infections.”

7. Breiner, M.A. Whole-Body Dentistry. Quantum Health Press, 2012. Root canal chapters.

8. Arnett, B.J. Wholeistic Dentistry. Beaver’s Pond Press, 2011. Chapter on focal infection theory.

9. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Preface.

10. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 2 and About the Author.

11. Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth. Chapter 2, anatomy of the tooth and dentinal tubules.

12. Breiner, M.A. Whole-Body Dentistry. Chapter 18, anatomy and root canal discussion.

13. Fife, B. Oil Pulling Therapy. Chapter on root canals.

14. Artemis, N. Holistic Dental Care. Chapter on tooth anatomy, dentinal fluid flow, and odontoblasts.

15. Nagel, R. Cure Tooth Decay. Chapters on dentinal tubules and Steinman’s research.

16. Fife, B. Oil Pulling Therapy. Discussion of Price’s disinfection experiments.

17. Nagel, R. Cure Tooth Decay. Section on root canals, citing Meinig.

18. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 9, “Root Canal Fillings Getting Better but Still a Problem.”

19. Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth. Chapter 3, citing Shashidhar et al. (2011) and Shantiaee et al. (2011).

20. Lawrence, S.A. Holistic Dental Care: Your Mind, Body, and Spirit Guide. Rowman & Littlefield.

21. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 16; Breiner, Whole-Body Dentistry, root canal chapters.

22. Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth. Chapters on failure rates and 3D imaging, citing Lofthag-Hansen et al. (2007).

23. Levy, T.E. The Toxic Tooth. Chapter 8, “Experience with Root Canal Treatment.”

24. Yoho, R. Judas Dentistry. Chapter 4, citing Dr. Robert Gammal’s clinical accounts and published case study of RA remission.

25. Meinig, G.E. Root Canal Cover-Up. Chapter 25, “Conclusions.”

26. Munro-Hall, G. Toxic Dentistry Exposed. Section on root-canal-filling material contents and toxicity.