I am a forty-nine year old male doctor who was in great health. In February 2001 I went for a routine dental visit, I had no symptoms, it was a check up. X-ray films suggested that an older root canal procedure needed to be redone. An endodontist agreed, the appointment was scheduled and they performed. I had no problems with the procedure and felt fine after it was completed. Within two days I started to have problems. My blood pressure increased over 20 points both systolic and diastolic. I had been taking it for years after swimming in the morning and it had been in the 117 / 75 range. I rationalized that it was due to the stress of the procedure and that I would drop back down. It improved slightly for a while but then started to climb again. Within two days of the procedure I developed right and left shoulder pain. This continued and increased over the next eight months. It affected my ability to abduct my arm – it reminded me of an earlier injury to my shoulder that I had in my early twenties (this happened to be the same time that I had the original root canal done but did not make an impression until now). The reflex for the tooth, according to the tooth chart, showed that it referred to the shoulders. Within a few days my resting pulse and my working pulse and my exercising pulse increased by about ten beats per minute. This did not improve. My recovery pulse after exercising was also much less efficient. I swim six days a week and am very in tune with my split times for different parts of my workouts. After the root canal my times slowed down over one second per length. If I swam for lengths, 100 yards, I was about five seconds slower. If I swam 20 laps with the same effort as before I was almost 30 seconds slower (with a higher pulse). As a doctor, I measure different peoples grip strength, before the root canal it averaged 220 pounds, within two days if dropped to 160 pounds. It slowly returned to 180 pounds. Shortly after the root canal I developed a chronic athlete’s foot problem over my foot reflexology point for the shoulder. Within a few months I was starting to feel some brain fog (I am 49 years old!). I have always played a great game of ping pong but found myself losing in ping pong games to people that could never give me a strong game before. I started to notice skin texture differences, waking more at night and other little things. After reading several books on root canal problems, I knew that I had to remove the tooth, which had continued to feel non-symptomatic. I knew from the books that in addition to extracting the tooth they would have to grind out the adjacent bone. My dentist extracted the tooth. Within two days my grip returned to 220 pounds, 85% of my shoulder pain was gone, my foot infection was gone, brain fog was gone, pulses returned to normal. After a week, I was swimming best times ever for twenty lengths of the pool (I was a conference champ in college for swimming – it was now faster). All of my problems were gone with the exception of the blood pressure, it is improving slower that I would like; it is getting closer to older readings. Samples of my tooth have been sent to a lab to check for levels of infection. I am glad that I removed the root canal tooth, I now wish that I did not wait eight months. An irony was that the day after my tooth was extracted; I had a full day of patients scheduled. My first visit was with a new patient whose chief complaint was pain all over her body (many others had diagnosed it as fibromyalgia). I asked her how long she had this problem and she said something I had never heard, she said it had started June 14th of the previous year. I asked her what happened on the day before it started, and she said that she had gotten a “root canal.” ( I have never known it to have had that sudden of an onset). I have come to respect what can happen to a person if they have a focal infection in their body. Thank You !