Originally Posted by Bryanna

Angels31,

You are not "dense" at all! Just like many other people, you were unaware and uninformed of the chronic infection in your root canaled teeth and how that infection can travel to your sinus and beyond. Your dentists are not intentionally trying to harm you. Their education teaches them about the trapped bacteria inside of root canaled teeth, however, it also teaches them to do whatever they can to "retain" teeth and to only extract teeth when either the infection has become very severe and/or the patient has become ill. The systemic connection between our teeth and our health is much less emphasized in their education compared to the restorative measures to retain teeth. I hope I have explained that clearly.

The antibiotics are decreasing the inflammation just enough to reduce some of the symptoms and that is why you feel a little better when you take them. However, they cannot cure this infection and there are systemic consequences to taking multiple prescriptions of them.

The panoramic xray is a 2 dimensional xray that shows the entire mouth in a single xray. However, the teeth, jaw bone, sinus, etc are multi dimensional making the panoramic view limited for certain diagnostic purposes. A 3 dimensional xray is more diagnostic for finding pathology but it has to expose the areas of concern to be helpful. Remember, the infection inside of the dentin tubules of tooth #15 will not be picked up radio-graphically. So if the oral surgeon says he thinks he sees an infection with #15 ..... this means that the bacteria has proliferated beyond the dentin tubules and is now large enough to be picked up on the xray.

The area of extracted tooth #14 may show "normal" on an xray even if the graft were infected. The infection has to be more pronounced than the graft material to be picked up radio-graphically.

Regarding the MRI.... I'm sorry it was incomplete. The script for the procedure had to specifically say what needed to be viewed.

Extracting tooth #15 would be removing at least one known source of the infection. However, it is imperative that the oral surgeon thoroughly debride the bone of all diseased tissue and bone and not place a graft if the bone is not healthy enough to receive it.

I know this is all very difficult to understand. It is up to you to open up the conversation with your oral surgeon about your health concerns pertaining to .... residual infection in the site of #14 possibly infecting the graft ... unhealthy #15 adding to the infection .... and the sinus infection. You may also consider buying the book <Toxic Teeth by Dr Kulacz and Dr Levy> to help you become better informed so you can communicate more effectively with your oral surgeon and dentist.

I am attaching a diagram of the anatomy of a tooth to show you the dentin tubules. This will give you a clearer picture of how nerve tissue gets trapped inside of these canals and why the tooth becomes so ill.

Bryanna