yesterday, while searching for something completely unrelated on the net, i came across this truly scary web page. It referred to a book called Root Canal Cover-Up, by george meinig, which says that root canals are hazardous to your health. apparently, when doing a root canal, it's impossible to eradicate all the bacteria in your teeth, because there are little microtubules in your dentin where they can hide out in. normally, this is not a problem, since your tooth's pulp carries blood and oxygen in and can keep them under control. but a root canal removes the pulp, and now you have all these bacteria reproducing in an anaerobic environment, then all the toxins build up and leak into your body, and eventually the bad bacteria might even travel to other parts of your body, like your kidney or liver or heart, and cause horrible diseases. so i'm reading this web page, and i'm like, ohmygawd, i have TWO ROOT CANALS!

On the bright side, my teeth weren't horribly infected before the procedure--i just fell on my face and my teeth broke the fall, that's all--so maybe there's not a big bacteria problem there after all.

but what really bothers me is, how do you know who to believe? here the dental establishment is saying, root canals are perfectly safe, and then there's random book which i find referred to on the web page of some weirdo new age holistic shaman person (no offense) who swears that after she removed her root-canaled tooth a butterfly came and did a little dance to bless her newfound recovered health. i mean please, you probably just washed your hair in herbal essence that day and if there were bees around they'd be trying to get pollen off of you, too.

last year, i came across this book called 1421: the year the chinese discovered america (by gavin menzies). the author writes for like a thousand pages about how he's amassed these mountains of evidence that chinese ships actually sailed around the entire planet and left colonies everywhere they went, but due to an unfortunate change in government, the world colonization project was axed, stranding everyone in distant corners of the globe. anyway, it all seemed plausible... until i came back to my room and my roommate Jonathan made me see the light. Plus, I looked up the reviews, which all said that mr. menzies had a gear loose. really, i should've been very suspicious when i got to the part where it says that the Squamish of British Columbia had some loanwords from Chinese, such as tsil (wet), chin (wood), and etsu (grandmother). that's just wrong in so many ways.

my point is, a guy writes a book where half the stuff is just plain wrong, and most people won't know enough to know that. i cringe just thinking of some kid looking up mr. menzies web site and reporting to their class that tsil means wet in Chinese, just like in Squamish. but here i am knowing almost nothing about root canals, and how am i supposed to know if this root canal book is trustworthy? the difference is that this isn't romantic historical hypothesis, it actually has to do with your health. why would people want to make up stories about root canals? of course, i haven't actually read the book, only some web sites about it, but you know what i mean.

ooh, blogger has this new comment function, so you can add your own thoughts, too.