Root Cause Documentary Banned From Netflix

Just in case you need another reason to hate Root Canals, a rising chorus of medical doctors and dentists are saying that they can actually cause everything from Emphysema to breast cancer and impotence. My dental hygienist told me that’s why “new dentistry” is moving away from the practice.

A friend of mine directs the Tufts Dental School of medicine. Dr. David Leader believes that the documentary is based on outdated, old science.

The party line among dentists seems to be that unless the ADA or American Dental Association comments on something, it really doesn’t mean anything. I asked my student dentist at Tufts about the thesis of root canals being harmful to one’s general health shortly after this documentary came out. Shortly after that, the American Dental Association did pressure Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to remove the documentary.

The American Dental Association wrote in a letter that the reason they wanted the movie pulled is that it was spreading misinformation to the public. Harvard here in Boston is another of the dental establishment praising the FAANG companies for removing the video.

All of this seems suspect to me for a number of reasons. The ADA represents the financial interests of dentists who spent their education dollars and most of their careers trained to do one thing. So there’s a kind of inertia there that would be very costly to change. Also, Harvard has thrown out a number of intelligent people in the name of materialist, short-term gains – like Larry Summers, and, well, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ!

Dr. Leader didn’t want to debate the matter further, but his initial argument against the practice seems to be, “well, we’d have to pull out all of your teeth to fix the problem.” Granted, nobody wants to have all of our teeth pulled. But this would only seem to highlight the importance of maintaining good dental health so that teeth don’t degenerate to such a point where all your teeth need to be pulled. In other words, your teeth may very well be causing your heart attacks by dumping a never-ending stream of toxicity into the rest of your body; but what do you do with it? Certainly don’t pull out all the teeth. But just because modern dentistry hasn’t come up with a good solution to the problem doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist.

I’m not a dentist, but there sure are quite a few of them in the documentary.

I was recently dismayed by my primary care physician at Mass General Hospital, who, when I asked him to try to come up with a comprehensive plan that included my dental work, responded, “If you can find a doctor who is an expert in everything, you should hire him.” In other words, consult the dentist for the dental work; the surgeons for surgery, etc.

What seems to be the major issue from an institutional standpoint seems to me to be the same kind of problem you find across industries, and across politics: chronic compartmentalism. The expert in X focuses only on X, and the expert in Y focuses only in Y. In Hollywood, screenwriters only write words; lyricists only do lyrics. And there’s very little cooperation.

Perhaps the documentary is a warning that, if nothing else, all medical disciplines need to do a better job of working together so that, for instance, your dentist isn’t poisoning your heart. Perhaps the problem is that the proper medical establishment doesn’t respect Dentistry as the legitimate medical field it needs to be considered, which is why you kind of have the dentists living in their own world.

Perhaps the bar for dentists in terms of medical training needs to be a little higher, closer to – say – the training necessary to become a heart surgeon. Because so many people can open a dental practice; just look at the “corporate dentistry” places which are universally condemned by dentist themselves as profit machines. I had a very bad experience with Gentle Dental, which isn’t so gentle, turns out, especially on your wallet.

The bottom line here? Treat dentistry like the rest of medicine, because it is medicine. It shouldn’t be as easy to set up a dental practice as it is to start a McDonald’s franchise. The bar needs to be raised for dentists, and frankly, my gut says root canals need to go.

Drilling needs to be regarded as nothing short of surgery, and treated with the same high standards, safegards, and training. That’s what it really is, isn’t it? So – maybe instead of trying to tell patients in commercials that they shouldn’t be scared to go to the dentist, perhaps the dental world needs to prove that they’re really competent to do what they do. How do you choose a good dentist? It’s really rather arbitrary; the ADA basically stands behind them all.

All of this developing as I was just starting to get over Steve Martin riding a motorcycle in Little Shop of Horrors. I told Alan Menken in an email about this, and he didn’t comment.