Root Canals

Aajonus described the area around a root canal tooth as a site of nerve detoxification, not infection in the bacterial sense. When amalgam fillings were placed in a tooth, the mercury and thallium in those fillings were absorbed into the nerve. That nerve then carried those heavy metals along its full length, from the tooth base up to the brain. Over time, the brain and nervous system attempted to discharge those accumulated metals. The primary discharge routes from the brain were the gums, tongue, and salivary glands, with the eyes and sinuses serving as secondary routes.

When toxic metals moved down through the nerve toward the gum, they caused damage to the dentine at the site. Bacteria then appeared to consume the damaged dentine cells, functioning as what he called janitors of the body. This process produced pus, which he described as the byproduct of white blood cells that had consumed toxic material. The pus itself was not dangerous, but he recommended spitting it out rather than swallowing it because of its toxic content.

He explained that abscesses around a root canal tooth were a continuation of this nerve detoxification process. The body was not rejecting the tooth; it was attempting to expel the toxins that had been deposited in the nerve by years of contact with amalgam or other toxic dental materials. The abscess would express through holes in the gum tissue along the side of the tooth, not necessarily from the tooth itself. He had personally observed many people going through this process without losing the tooth involved.

One of his most consistently repeated points was that the tooth with a root canal was not the problem. The nerve that had been stopped at the outside of that tooth, and which was still attempting to detoxify the mercury and thallium absorbed from the amalgam filling, was the source of ongoing difficulty. That nerve did not stop at the tooth; it extended upward through the jaw and into the brain. Stopping or removing the tooth did not stop the nerve's detoxification process; it only removed one exit point.

He described the nerve as potentially being poisoned from the base of the tooth all the way to the brain. The detoxification would usually express through the gums, but could also exit through the face or the eyes. This was why people with root canal-related symptoms sometimes experienced reddened eyes, neck and shoulder soreness and stiffness, and generalized fatigue that could last for years if the detoxification process was ongoing and the body was not getting adequate nutrients to keep pace with it.

Aajonus described having had up to five root canals at a time in his own mouth. He reported that this did not produce the systemic disease outcomes that Price and Meinig attributed to root canal teeth. He said he had several root canals, some naturally made by his own body and some performed dentally.

He also described a specific instance in which he allowed a dying tooth to proceed through natural nerve death without dental intervention. He let the nerve die on its own, then pulled the dried, hardened nerve out himself without drilling. His reasoning was that this approach allowed him to keep using the tooth until it naturally decided to be eliminated, and he retained the tooth far longer than dentists had expected. He expressed a preference for keeping his own bone, even if dead, over any dental prosthesis, saying directly: "I prefer my own bone, dead or not, to any dental prosthesis."

He acknowledged having only one bridge among his teeth at the time of certain workshops, and described multiple fillings still in place, but stated that his teeth remained rooted in his system. His fantasy, which he described with some seriousness, was that teeth could potentially regrow, citing a reported case of a ninety-year-old man in Thailand who had grown a full new set of teeth sixty years after losing all of his original teeth. He acknowledged he had not witnessed such regrowth personally but had encountered accounts of it in published interviews.

When a correspondent raised the work of Price and Meinig, specifically the recommendation that simply pulling a root canal tooth was not enough and that the dentist should use a slow-speed burr to remove one millimeter of the bony socket along with the periodontal ligament, Aajonus rejected the recommendation directly. He said he had had up to five root canals at a time without experiencing the symptoms those researchers claimed would follow.

His specific objection to the socket-scraping protocol was that surgery and the chemicals involved in that procedure would distract the body from its other healing priorities for up to five years. He described the claim that removal and scraping into the root socket corrected systemic disease as "basically false." His reasoning was that the underlying cause was not the dead tooth material or bacteria in the dentinal tubules, but the toxic metals in the nerve system, which the surgical procedure did not address and could not address.

He acknowledged that the correspondent had correctly intuited that bacteria were eating dead tooth material rather than being the primary cause of damage, but he took issue with the proposed solution. He said that alternative dentists had a tendency to overstate the importance of their interventions.

Aajonus did not argue against all tooth extraction. He identified specific conditions under which extraction was appropriate. The primary condition was when the tooth had naturally, completely released from the nerve and bone on its own. When that natural release had occurred, extraction was the correct action. He added that if the tooth was that loose, a person could pull it out themselves.

He described his own experience of having a large molar extracted in Tijuana by a dentist who performed exactly the procedure he specified. He described the instrument used: a blade-edged tool shaped to fit around the tooth, inserted into the gum and rotated to cut the membrane away from the tooth before the tooth was pulled. He requested that the procedure be done in three stages with rest intervals between each stage, without anesthesia, and the dentist complied. He described having had whole cloves placed in the area several hours before for some pain management, and he pulled the nerve in that tooth using a specific technique after the extraction.

He also described a case in which he personally tied kite string around a loose tooth and pulled it out himself when he was unable to reach his dentist.

He said that if a tooth was dead, as dentists sometimes claimed, no root canal was necessary because the root was already dead and drying or had already dried. If there was a cavity in a dead tooth that could be reached without removing the crown, the cavity could be filled. If the cavity was under the cap and therefore not exposed to digestive acids, he said it would not get worse and recommended leaving the tooth alone and letting it eventually fall out on its own.

Aajonus included a caveat in his book "We Want to Live" that he quoted in correspondence when asked about it directly. He wrote that root canals sometimes result in large deep abscesses that affect the entire body, producing general fatigue, neck and shoulder soreness and stiffness, and reddened eyes. He described having seen very debilitating conditions resulting from the body trying to dissolve and remove nerve and bone toxicity around teeth. He stated that even on a healthy diet, the toxicity around the teeth could require more nutrients than most people were able to eat. Therefore, if persistent infection occurred, it might be preferable to have a root canal tooth extracted.

This was not a contradiction of his general position but an acknowledgment that the body's capacity to manage the detoxification process had limits. If the ongoing detoxification was producing fatigue that continued for years and the person could not sustain the nutritional intake required to keep pace with it, extraction became the more viable option. He did not remove this caveat from his framework; he acknowledged it when correspondents raised it directly.

For those going through active detoxification around a root canal tooth, Aajonus recommended specific nutritional strategies. He advised sipping raw milk often and eating raw cheese with a little raw butter every hour. He explained that the minerals in dairy would bind with the toxins being eliminated through the gums, reducing the damage those toxins caused to the dentine.

He also recommended brushing once daily with a mixture of one teaspoon of vinegar, one teaspoon of clay, and one teaspoon of coconut cream. He described a similar formula in workshop transcripts as a combination of clay, coconut cream, and vinegar that dissolved plaque instantly and also whitened teeth.

He stated that on the Primal Diet, the body had enough nutrients to handle decay and tissue degeneration around a root canal tooth, and that in people eating this way he had not seen tooth loss from abscesses in the way it occurred in people on conventional diets. He said the pus from abscesses in people on the Primal Diet expressed through the side of the gum tissue rather than from around the tooth itself, and none of those people had lost a tooth from the process.

He also said that if the body wanted to extract a tooth, it would do so on its own as long as the person was eating the Primal Diet. His recommendation in most cases was to let that natural process occur rather than forcing extraction.

For tooth pain associated with root canal detoxification or dental work, Aajonus consistently recommended his Pain Formula from "We Want to Live," combined with bee pollen and cheese. He described tooth pain as among the worst pain a person could experience and acknowledged the difficulty of managing it without pharmaceutical intervention.

He used heat rather than cold for dental pain and consistently warned against ice packs, saying he would never use them for longer than two minutes on anything because they restricted and sometimes completely blocked nutrient flow to the area. He used a small glass jar filled with hot water held against the face and described sleeping with it next to the painful area to soften hardened material and allow toxins to drain down the gums rather than form a boil.

For acute dental pain, he described placing whole cloves against the area for several hours before dental procedures, noting that clove oil was never raw and had caused him gum ruptures in the past, whereas whole cloves provided some numbing effect without the same damage.

He described a substance called biocalyx or bioflex, a calcium-based powder that dentists could pack into a cavity or against an exposed nerve to absorb excess moisture, reduce swelling, and stop pain. He explained that the calcium dried out the surface of the nerve, and that even with an infected nerve, placing this substance and then a filling over it could resolve the pain. He attributed many cases of lasting dental pain to dentists placing fillings directly on top of exposed nerves without first applying this calcium buffer.

He advocated strongly against novocaine, epinephrine, xylocaine, and all dental numbing agents, saying they solidified the gums and bone, stopped circulation into the bone, hardened the entire mouth, and were likely to produce tumors in the mouth over time. He said that a brief pain from the drill bit hitting a nerve would resolve in fifteen to thirty seconds, whereas the swelling caused by numbing agents would make a toothache last days or weeks instead of a split second.

A specific case discussed across multiple correspondence threads involved a person who had developed deep pockets around two teeth that had porcelain crowns from root canals. The teeth were eroding underneath the porcelain crowns, with debris lodging in the cracked areas. The dentist had recommended extraction.

Aajonus acknowledged that the porcelain crowns created a complication in the detoxification process. The body was attempting to dissolve and remove nerve and bone toxicity around the teeth with a porcelain crown already in place on top of the eroding tooth and root, and underneath each crown was a stump of a tooth without enamel.

He recommended composite fillings or crowns rather than extractions as a general principle, noting that if the body wanted to extract the tooth it would do so on its own. He acknowledged he did not know exactly how much of the person's fatigue was caused by oral detoxification without examining them directly. He offered to assess that when he saw them in person.

In correspondence and book passages, he had recommended gold-reinforced crowns for bridges and crowns over ceramic or porcelain alone, noting that gold-reinforced crowns had lasted thirty years in some patients he had observed. He warned that porcelain-only crowns required severe grinding of the tooth to a small post, and that this post could break within one to five years, at which point the person would need either a root canal or an artificial tooth drilled and screwed into the jawbone.

Aajonus described abscesses as a cleansing of heavy metals that had accumulated in the nerves, with the toxic material moving outward to the side of the tooth through the gum tissue. He described the process as the nerve trying to dump toxic content, producing holes in the gum tissue with pus expressing through them. He said this was not dangerous and was not a bacterial infection in the conventional sense.

He described abscesses around root canal teeth specifically as resulting from the nerve that had been stopped at the outside of the tooth still attempting to detox mercury and thallium absorbed from the amalgam filling that had preceded the root canal. The bacteria present were consuming the toxic byproduct and the damaged tissue, not initiating the damage.

He described having many abscesses himself over the years and said the outcome in his own case and in cases he had observed in people on the Primal Diet was that the material expressed through the gum and the tooth was retained. He stated that even people with severe damage did not lose teeth from this process when eating the Primal Diet.

Aajonus was asked directly how the body naturally makes a root canal. He described this as the body's own process of nerve death, in which the nerve dried out and hardened on its own without dental intervention. He distinguished between allowing this natural process to proceed and having a dentist perform the procedure with a drill. His preference in his own teeth was to allow the natural process to occur, and he described pulling the dried hardened nerve out himself rather than having it drilled out.

He said the body could do its own root canal and limited repairs, and that his recommendation in cases where a dentist declared a nerve dead was to wait and allow the body to complete that process on its own rather than proceeding with the dental procedure.

For cavities in teeth that had undergone root canals, Aajonus had specific preferences. He did not allow X-rays in his own dental care and did not use anesthetic. He instructed his preferred dentists, whom he accessed in Mexico and the Philippines because he found American dentistry too restrictive under ADA regulations, to scrape only the softest tissue from any cavity without drilling, so that when composite filling material was glued in, the adhesive did not contact healthy tubule tissue. He acknowledged that fillings placed this way might pop out once every two to three years, but said this was preferable to the epoxy contacting healthy tooth structure.

He specifically recommended against amalgam fillings, describing them as containing large quantities of toxic mercury and as the initiating source of much of the nerve toxicity he described. He recommended porcelain or ceramic inlays as the best filling material. For crowns and bridges, he recommended gold-reinforced construction over ceramic or porcelain alone, citing durability and the fact that gold-reinforced crowns preserved more of the original tooth structure.

For a tooth that was dead and had a cavity under a cap that could not be reached without removing the crown, he advised leaving it entirely alone, reasoning that no digestive acids could reach it either, so it would not deteriorate further.