Hi, My husband is having surgery in 1.5 days to have all the teeth (26) left removed and dentures. He works in an underground mine and is constantly getting sinus infections. Within 48 hours of getting a sinus infection, he ends up with 1 or more absessed teeth. The dentist is calling the removal of all of his teeth "medically necessary" and we need to do this ASAP. He also commented that my husband has very large teeth. Dentist suspects the work environment (dust, dirty water) and the changing of pressures from going from surface to underground/vice versa is contributing to his condition, on top of the sinus infections.

His blood pressure is through the roof (148/114). He's battling a sinus infection that turned into bronchitis last week on top of 2 absessed teeth, so the family doctor gave him an antibiotic and told him to resume the lisinopril (BP med) for a few weeks after dental surgery. We suspect that is due to the infections and pain. He took lisinopril 20mg 3 years ago for his hypertension that occured to the stress of my mother's passing and his BP improved enough to go off of the meds (1 yr later) once things settled down and a nutritionist emproved his diet. We are trying to get our health insurance involved to help pay for this because we only have a $1000 allowence on our dental insurance and the dentist calling it "medically necessary". The bill is going to be over $10,000. We are working to establish this as a chronic issue and show that this will greatly improve his health (reduced infections and BP, etc) in hopes that our medical insurance will help cover this huge bill.

Can you please provide your opinion and possibably direct me towards any study findings that I can additionally use to further my case in getting the health insurance to help cover this? He's had other teeth extracted (molar teeth/wisdom teeth) already and they all have extremely long roots and some are curved like fishing hooks. He had one root canal 2 months ago and it failed within a week, so we had the tooth pulled last month. He works 28 days straight before he gets 14 days off. I know his work schedule is definitely no help to these infections because he waits until he's off of work to seek help. All research I've seen says absessed teeth can cause death. He's in bad shape and scared.

Thanks, Amy