Further, once the tooth was removed the patient's arthritis improved dramatically. This clearly suggested that the presence of the infected tooth was a causative agent for both that patient's and the rabbit's - arthritis. That thought kept prying on his mind, haunting him each time a patient consulted him for relief from some severe debilitating disease for which the medical profession could find no answer. Then one day while treating a woman who had been confined to a wheelchair for six years from severe arthritis, he recalled how bacterial cultures were taken from patients who were ill and then inoculated into animals in an effort to reproduce the disease and test the effectiveness of drugs on the disease. He told her he was going to find out what it was about this root filled tooth that was responsible for her suffering.
All dentists know that sometimes arthritis and other illnesses clear up if bad teeth are extracted.
However, in this case, all of her teeth appeared in satisfactory condition and the one containing this rootcanal filling showed no evidence or symptoms of infection. Besides, it looked normal on x-ray pictures. Immediately after Dr. Price extracted the tooth he dismissed the patient and embedded her tooth under the skin of a rabbit. She could then walk without a cane and could even do fine needlework again. In the years that followed, he repeated this procedure many hundreds of times.