New research is linking gum disease with a higher risk of cancer, especially cancers of the kidneys, pancreas and blood.
The study of nearly 50,000 men who have been followed for an average of 18 years suggests that gum disease by itself may help to cause cancer. Or it may simply be that a person prone to gum disease is also prone to cancer.
One theory is that infections in the mouth cause chronic inflammation throughout the body that may increase a person's risk of cancer overall, or at specific sites in the body.
The same team reported last year that men with periodontal disease had a significantly higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer, one of the most fatal tumours.
I don't like reading that.
Ages ago, I came across a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, DDS.
Dr. Weston A. Price (1870-1948), a Cleveland dentist, has been called the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition." In his search for the causes of dental decay and physical degeneration that he observed in his dental practice, he turned from test tubes and microscopes to unstudied evidence among human beings. Dr. Price sought the factors responsible for fine teeth among the people who had them- the isolated "primitives." The world became his laboratory. As he traveled, his findings led him to the belief that dental caries and deformed dental arches resulting in crowded, crooked teeth and unattractive appearance were merely a sign of physical degeneration, resulting from what he had suspected-nutritional deficiencies.
Now this is where this gum disease news fits in:
Dr. Price suspected that bacterial infection accompanied many degenerative illnesses. In the beginning, he didn't know what bacteria were involved or just how they contributed to so many disease conditions. But he did recall that in medical practice doctors made cultures from the infection site, grew the organism present in a culture medium and then injected the bacteria into an animal to see if they could reproduce the disease and thereby prove it was the cause of the illness.
Dr. Price suspected that these infections arose from the teeth. He decided to implant an extracted root-filled tooth under the skin of an animal. He felt that if bacteria were present and carrying illness, their presence in a tooth might offer the same kind of proof physicians found when they injected the bacterial culture to produce disease in an animal. That is exactly what took place. He found that by implanting the root-filled tooth, the disease of the patient was transferred to animals. Whatever disease the patient had, the animal with the extracted tooth under its skin developed the same disease as the patient.
In other words, if the patient had heart disease, the animal developed heart disease. If he had kidney trouble, disease of the kidney was transferred to the animal. If he had a problem in his joints, the animals' joints became similarly involved. The principle held true for the whole spectrum of human ailments. Whatever the disease, the animal would develop that of the patient.
Emphasis added by me.
Shocking, isn't it? A dentist went beyond the purview of his primary education, seeking the overall cause of the dental disease he was seeing and discovered things that only today are being confirmed by the medical establishment.
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