I say: don't bother. This is still a long way off as far as I'm concerned, and if your family cares about their kids' teeth, it's still WAY easier to prevent disease in the first place (good diet, brushing and flossing, etc.) than try to replace them through such exotic means.
Invest in fluoride, not test tubes full of baby teeth!
As a dentist, you expect me to say thatt your conspiracy theories are bunk; they are.
However, even logically speaking, there's lots that dentists do that isn't simply "drill out decay, fill with something, collect MONEY."
All manner of hygine/periodontal procedures would be unaffected by this inoculation. People still want teeth moved around, want them a different shape, color. Existing dentist have enough crap in peoples' mouths to replace their entire working lives.
Read any dental literature; the most excitement is reserved for procedures that have nothing to do with caries control: implants, new ceramics for crowns/veneers, new bleach techniques, etc.
So, please, no more ADA conspiracy theories; no matter what's out there in terms of prevention, there is a huge gap between what people could do for themselves to prevent decay and how they decide to abuse their bodies.
FWIW, in my practice, when a patient comes to me with that story, it's usually some combination of poor dentistry and/or too much dentistry being performed. I've seen patients who were going to be going to the dentist a lot for the rest of their lives to replace fillings that, when you look at the pre-operative radiographs, probably never needed restorations in the first place.
If the tooth grows back pure white it would more likely put a lot of money in the pockets of the tooth whitening companies than put them out of business. It's probably going to be a lot less painful and expensive to just whiten the other teeth. I know this can be a problem with porcelain caps on broken teeth. They are so much whiter than the other teeth that it makes your teeth look really bad. So dentists use a combined strategy of whitening the other teeth and staining the cap untill they're about equal.
You really don't want that. The only white part of teeth is enamel. Enamel is a lot like glass: it's very hard, but also very brittle. It doesn't make a very good restorative material. To have a mouth full of enamel with no dentin (the layer of tooth beneath enamel) is to have a mouth full of broken teeth. Many people reading this post have probably experienced a tooth with a filling mysteriously breaking after 15-20 years... it's because when the filling was placed, the dentin support for the cusp that broke was probably removed, leaving only beautiful white enamel behind.
>I wonder how this "treatment" copes with teeth that have been root canal filled.
Saw this on the news last night - they said that it will repair root canals.
About the only thing it won't do is regrow a tooth that's been removed - it needs cells to start with.
Sounds pie-in-the-sky at the moment to me. It may be that there is some viable periodontal ligament around necrotic teeth, but there's simply no living tooth-producing tissue in them (odontoblasts). Odontoblasts are found at the pulp-dentin border, which is pretty much removed during cleaning and shaping of the canal space. What they're saying, then, is that they can either bring cells back from the dead (odontoblasts not filed away during root canal therapy), or, using ultrasound only, induce random connective tissue or bone cells into not only reverting to an earlier cell type, but then having it turn into an odontoblast, and then having that odontoblast lay down dentin not on in the quantity they want, but in the direction they want.
Not bloody likely. I can tell you from experience that teeth with root canals are different animals when it comes to resstoration, fracture susceptibility, extraction, etc.
If you want to be cynical, consider that if dentistry advances to the point where you go in for a one-time futuristic tooth-sealing procedure once you have all your permanent adult teeth, and then never need dental treatment for the rest of your life (barring accidents like getting a tooth knocked out), there won't be very much business left for dentists -- and I doubt dentists would want that to happen.
I'll feed at least one anti-dental troll on this thread, even though it's awfully late. Dentists by and large do operate for profit, but people always find inventive ways to screw up their teeth, decay or no. Traumatic fractures, erosion, attrition through grinding, orthodontic issues, color issues, periodontal issues... the list goes on. Most of this thread has been devoted to, basically, people whining about a disease that's already preventable (dental caries), but we do a lot more than drill and fill.
There's an interesting problem that comes with trying to convince Americans to get out of their cars: They fail to factor in the cost of the roads they drive.
Highways cost many many millions of dollars to construct; if users paid for what they were driving on, they would run the calculations differently. Think how much lower your tax liability could be if, on your commute, the city/county/state/federal government didn't need to pay for x stop signs, traffic lights, curbs, stripes, Botts dots, reflectors, patrols, landscaping, pothole repair, litter cleanup, bridges, continuous widening projects, and so on.
You also fail to take into account that some cars break sometimes. Perhaps your particular car has had absolutely no trouble. Congrats. But timing belts, transmissions, tires, stereos, etc., can all fail, many times unpredictably. You have presented the absolute best case scenario for car ownership, not the most realistic.
Please let me know, BTW, if you're still driving a Crown Vic once gas hits $18/gallon!
Tooth decay declined substantially in prevalence and severity when Hong Kong children consumed less fluoride...
Most of the references seem to indicate that there was also a vigorous public health campaign (through schools or other venues) to increase the amount of topical fluoride the teeth were exposed to, through education about brushing, rinsing programs, etc. I would caution anyone reading this not to think "fluoride is bad." The jury is about about systemic (swallowed) fluoride, I agree, but fluoride applied to the surface of the teeth is universally considered good by all rational scientists, as far as I can see.
Another interesting side note is that it is becoming harder to track where people get fluoride in their diet. A couple of the studies cited were conducted in more modern times, where people eat less locally-grown and prepared foods, and people drink massively more bottled products shipped in from who-knows-where than we did 50 years ago. The place your can of Coke was manufactured may use fluoridated water, the designer water you drink might come from a municipal water supply that's fluoridated. Your individual town's water fluoridation program has less impact on you if you use a lot of these products; i.e., you may be getting more or less fluoride than you think you are.
Ever since that day I've been told that my teeth would shift to some terrible degree and that I need to get that taken care of as soon as possible by every dentist I've ever been to see. Bullshit. My teeth are just as straight today as they were then or so close to being straight that I can't tell the difference and nor can my wife or kids. It's total bullshit.
What should a dentist tell you? If he doesn't tell you about this possibility (no it's not a certainty), you could not only damage other probably decay-free teeth beyond repair or need lots of very expensive orthodontic treatment to re-create the space if you decide to restore the area by replacing the missing tooth.
If he doesn't tell you about the possibilty of tooth movement, he is then wide open for lawsuit. "The dentist never told me my teeth would move, and now I've damaged decay-free teeth beyond repair and need lots of very expensive orthodontic treatment." There goes ten days of productivity in the office and $10,000 dealing with that crap.
How many patients have you treated for post-extraction mesial drift/tilt? How many sets of radiographs have you reviewed where you've seen this phenomenon? I have personally seen hundreds. You were fortunate your teeth didn't move; it doesn't mean your dentist is a crook.
That's why there is sodium flouride in toothpaste. The flouride ion attaches to the free hydrogen ions that are making our saliva acidic.
Not really. It's so that the fluoride gets incorporated into the inorganic matrix of the enamel, replacing calcium ions, so that the matrix turns from hydroxyapatite to fluoroapatite, which dissolves at a much lower pH.
No matter what, your mouth will undergo an excursion into low pH after every single event during which you take in calories, be that a meal, a snack, a single grape, whatever. An interesting side note is that people with lots of cavities will actually see their pH drop lower from the same amount of sugar than someone with no cavities.
I forget from school, but I think the pH at which you start pulling out calcium is somewhere around 5.5.
You will *never* brush well enough that you have no bacteria. It's not a reasonable goal. The proper goal is to limit access to fermentable carbohydrates throughout the day (that's how the lactic acid gets produced), and hopefully tip the bacterial balance in your mouth away from cavity-causing and/or perodontitis-causing species.
Uhhhm, yes, the _crackers_ that crack viruses deserve no respect. Uhhhm, yes, the crackers that expose mal/spyware deserve no respect. Yes, the crackers that crack commercial drivers to find out how hardware should be programmed deserve no respect. Etc, to infinity.
So, they are using a cheaper, lower quality lens and expecting people to pay 350 pounds for it? That's about US$630! Am I missing something? Is the ceramic lens harder/more scratch resistant? You could buy a 7 or 8 megapixel camera for that kind of money.
Not in England, you couldn't! I've lived here about a year, and one of the items with an immense price difference is little consumer electronics items like this. It's not uncommon for me to find something like a digital camera in a store that costs the same in pounds as it does in US dollars, even though a pound is worth about $1.80. So what is £350 here might be $350 in the States... for the exact same item!
Following the "Check Price" link from Steve's Digicams, it looks like you can get the camera for $400 in the USA, or £350 here.
I'm truly ashamed for people who think that hydrogen fuel cells will solve all of the world's fossil fuel problems. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells will make for extremely low exhaust cars, longer laptop battery life, etc, but they won't solve the fossil fuel crisis.
Good article in Scientific American either this month or last. Addresses the total energy costs of fuel cells and a "hydrogen economy" in general.
However, I don't *want* to stream iTunes (AirTunes... whatever). I want to stream whatever would be coming out of my audio port. I want to sit on my couch, put in a DVD, and watch and hear a movie without wires everywhere.
Can *any* device do this without a TV? I found this DVD player, but it's not what I'm looking for, either.
Okay, so there actually was a quote in the article: "Schools are being promised million-dollar systems when a system costing $10,000 would make more sense."
This is TWO orders of magnitude, and it is not printed as fact, but is merely a quotation, and even the quotation doesn't say that this exact thing ever happened.
To say "several orders of mangitude" implies at LEAST one thousand times more expensive. here's a bunch of definitions.
So, let's say the kiddies got a computer worth $1,000. By our submitter's logic, I could buy that computer for $1, or else it cost the kidz $1,000,000.
I imagine our submitter meant to say several TIMES more expensive, but "orders of magnitude" sounded more dramatic somehow.
Tighen up the rhetoric, people. English is an easily abused language.
On the subject of teeth: Dental care is good enough lately that people don't lose enough teeth to make room in the jaw for the rear molars, the "wisdom" teeth that come in later.
AFAIK, problems with arch length and wisdom teeth are more to do with being a racial mutt than anything else. Racially pure folks tend not to have as much trouble. From my Orthodontics text:
Primitive human populations in which malocclusion is less frequent than in modern groups are characterized by genetic isolation and uniformity. If everyone in a group carried the same genetic information for tooth size and jaw size, there would be no possibility of a child inheriting discordant characteristics....The United States, reflecting its role as a "genetic melting pot," should have one of the world's highest rates of malocclusion -- which it does. -
Proffit - Contemporary Orthodontics, 3rd Ed.
Third molars aren't the spare tires of the mouth... tooth movement after loss or extraction of teeth is highly unpredictable, and when someone *does* lose a first or second molar, dentists don't sit back and watch the teeth behind slide into perfect occlusion; they tend to tip forward and cause all manner of periodontal and bite problems.
IIAD (American working in England, actually), and I don't see this stuff coming into anyone's mouth for many years to come.
The hurdles here are the same as hurdles for growing ANY tissue from stem cells. You don't just turn stem cells loose and tell them to become teeth. There is a hugely complex interaction of intra- and inter-cellular communication that goes on that tells a given cell whether to become part of the pulp, whether to start secreting enamel matrix, becoming an odontoblast, etc. If this were just five years off, we'd only be five years off from growing *hands*, etc.
Even if we could grow *a* tooth, we would have to grow the *right* tooth, especially in the "esthetic zone". How do we make sure that it *looks* like a central incisor with 11mm of enamel showing above the gingiva? How do we make the color right? Do we just grow something that is sort of tooth-like and put a crown on it automatically? Do we grow it in vitro and implant it in a surgical site? Do we grow it in situ? If so, how do we maintain the delicate balance of cellular influences in a mouth where someone ostensibly couldn't even keep their natural teeth in order?
I think that this is waaaaaay off in the distance. Their five year estimate is pie-in-the-sky pulled-out-of-their-ass.
In addition... yeah, they've grown teeth in rats, but in their intestines, IIRC (intentionally in the intestines, but it's still a far cry from functioning dentition in the mouth).
Slashdot Mirror
$13 is Coors Light territory (shudder). I buy Sierra Nevada Pale Ale cases for $26.
I say: don't bother. This is still a long way off as far as I'm concerned, and if your family cares about their kids' teeth, it's still WAY easier to prevent disease in the first place (good diet, brushing and flossing, etc.) than try to replace them through such exotic means.
Invest in fluoride, not test tubes full of baby teeth!
Bacteria evolve very quickly. That wouldn't work forever. It would probably stop working within a year, if not a few weeks.
That presupposes the bacteria are alive to reproduce and evolve. If they are not on the teeth, they are not evolving.
As a dentist, you expect me to say thatt your conspiracy theories are bunk; they are.
However, even logically speaking, there's lots that dentists do that isn't simply "drill out decay, fill with something, collect MONEY."
All manner of hygine/periodontal procedures would be unaffected by this inoculation. People still want teeth moved around, want them a different shape, color. Existing dentist have enough crap in peoples' mouths to replace their entire working lives.
Read any dental literature; the most excitement is reserved for procedures that have nothing to do with caries control: implants, new ceramics for crowns/veneers, new bleach techniques, etc.
So, please, no more ADA conspiracy theories; no matter what's out there in terms of prevention, there is a huge gap between what people could do for themselves to prevent decay and how they decide to abuse their bodies.
FWIW, in my practice, when a patient comes to me with that story, it's usually some combination of poor dentistry and/or too much dentistry being performed. I've seen patients who were going to be going to the dentist a lot for the rest of their lives to replace fillings that, when you look at the pre-operative radiographs, probably never needed restorations in the first place.
I promise you, it's not genetic.
You really don't want that. The only white part of teeth is enamel. Enamel is a lot like glass: it's very hard, but also very brittle. It doesn't make a very good restorative material. To have a mouth full of enamel with no dentin (the layer of tooth beneath enamel) is to have a mouth full of broken teeth. Many people reading this post have probably experienced a tooth with a filling mysteriously breaking after 15-20 years
Saw this on the news last night - they said that it will repair root canals.
About the only thing it won't do is regrow a tooth that's been removed - it needs cells to start with.
Sounds pie-in-the-sky at the moment to me. It may be that there is some viable periodontal ligament around necrotic teeth, but there's simply no living tooth-producing tissue in them (odontoblasts). Odontoblasts are found at the pulp-dentin border, which is pretty much removed during cleaning and shaping of the canal space. What they're saying, then, is that they can either bring cells back from the dead (odontoblasts not filed away during root canal therapy), or, using ultrasound only, induce random connective tissue or bone cells into not only reverting to an earlier cell type, but then having it turn into an odontoblast, and then having that odontoblast lay down dentin not on in the quantity they want, but in the direction they want.
Not bloody likely. I can tell you from experience that teeth with root canals are different animals when it comes to resstoration, fracture susceptibility, extraction, etc.
I'll feed at least one anti-dental troll on this thread, even though it's awfully late. Dentists by and large do operate for profit, but people always find inventive ways to screw up their teeth, decay or no. Traumatic fractures, erosion, attrition through grinding, orthodontic issues, color issues, periodontal issues
-a non-profit dentist
There's an interesting problem that comes with trying to convince Americans to get out of their cars: They fail to factor in the cost of the roads they drive.
Highways cost many many millions of dollars to construct; if users paid for what they were driving on, they would run the calculations differently. Think how much lower your tax liability could be if, on your commute, the city/county/state/federal government didn't need to pay for x stop signs, traffic lights, curbs, stripes, Botts dots, reflectors, patrols, landscaping, pothole repair, litter cleanup, bridges, continuous widening projects, and so on.
You also fail to take into account that some cars break sometimes. Perhaps your particular car has had absolutely no trouble. Congrats. But timing belts, transmissions, tires, stereos, etc., can all fail, many times unpredictably. You have presented the absolute best case scenario for car ownership, not the most realistic.
Please let me know, BTW, if you're still driving a Crown Vic once gas hits $18/gallon!
Tooth decay declined substantially in prevalence and severity when Hong Kong children consumed less fluoride ...
Most of the references seem to indicate that there was also a vigorous public health campaign (through schools or other venues) to increase the amount of topical fluoride the teeth were exposed to, through education about brushing, rinsing programs, etc. I would caution anyone reading this not to think "fluoride is bad." The jury is about about systemic (swallowed) fluoride, I agree, but fluoride applied to the surface of the teeth is universally considered good by all rational scientists, as far as I can see.
Another interesting side note is that it is becoming harder to track where people get fluoride in their diet. A couple of the studies cited were conducted in more modern times, where people eat less locally-grown and prepared foods, and people drink massively more bottled products shipped in from who-knows-where than we did 50 years ago. The place your can of Coke was manufactured may use fluoridated water, the designer water you drink might come from a municipal water supply that's fluoridated. Your individual town's water fluoridation program has less impact on you if you use a lot of these products; i.e., you may be getting more or less fluoride than you think you are.
Oops. It's hydroxide getting replaced, not calcium.
What should a dentist tell you? If he doesn't tell you about this possibility (no it's not a certainty), you could not only damage other probably decay-free teeth beyond repair or need lots of very expensive orthodontic treatment to re-create the space if you decide to restore the area by replacing the missing tooth.
If he doesn't tell you about the possibilty of tooth movement, he is then wide open for lawsuit. "The dentist never told me my teeth would move, and now I've damaged decay-free teeth beyond repair and need lots of very expensive orthodontic treatment." There goes ten days of productivity in the office and $10,000 dealing with that crap.
How many patients have you treated for post-extraction mesial drift/tilt? How many sets of radiographs have you reviewed where you've seen this phenomenon? I have personally seen hundreds. You were fortunate your teeth didn't move; it doesn't mean your dentist is a crook.
Fluoride may protect your teeth, but it also robs your teeth of bone density by removing calcium.
Fluoride is problematic if swallowed, for still-developing teeth and bone. No such thing as too much topical fluoride, though.
Not really. It's so that the fluoride gets incorporated into the inorganic matrix of the enamel, replacing calcium ions, so that the matrix turns from hydroxyapatite to fluoroapatite, which dissolves at a much lower pH.
No matter what, your mouth will undergo an excursion into low pH after every single event during which you take in calories, be that a meal, a snack, a single grape, whatever. An interesting side note is that people with lots of cavities will actually see their pH drop lower from the same amount of sugar than someone with no cavities.
I forget from school, but I think the pH at which you start pulling out calcium is somewhere around 5.5.
You will *never* brush well enough that you have no bacteria. It's not a reasonable goal. The proper goal is to limit access to fermentable carbohydrates throughout the day (that's how the lactic acid gets produced), and hopefully tip the bacterial balance in your mouth away from cavity-causing and/or perodontitis-causing species.
In other words, gimme the finger, I want the whole hand.
I wouldn't eat at Wendy's today, if I were you.
Uhhhm, yes, the _crackers_ that crack viruses deserve no respect. Uhhhm, yes, the crackers that expose mal/spyware deserve no respect. Yes, the crackers that crack commercial drivers to find out how hardware should be programmed deserve no respect. Etc, to infinity.
Please, let's leave race out of this.
Is it me, or is the link to the Microsoft Anti-Spyware fishy? I got all sorts of security warnings from Firefox, and it comes up as an https:// page.
But if I go there from the Microsoft home page proper, it's a non-secure URL.
wtf?
So, they are using a cheaper, lower quality lens and expecting people to pay 350 pounds for it? That's about US$630! Am I missing something? Is the ceramic lens harder/more scratch resistant? You could buy a 7 or 8 megapixel camera for that kind of money.
... for the exact same item!
Not in England, you couldn't! I've lived here about a year, and one of the items with an immense price difference is little consumer electronics items like this. It's not uncommon for me to find something like a digital camera in a store that costs the same in pounds as it does in US dollars, even though a pound is worth about $1.80. So what is £350 here might be $350 in the States
Following the "Check Price" link from Steve's Digicams, it looks like you can get the camera for $400 in the USA, or £350 here.
This argument presupposes, of course, that a car is required for survival (it's not, BTW). I'd call it more of a "usage fee" than a tax.
I'm truly ashamed for people who think that hydrogen fuel cells will solve all of the world's fossil fuel problems. Sure, hydrogen fuel cells will make for extremely low exhaust cars, longer laptop battery life, etc, but they won't solve the fossil fuel crisis.
Good article in Scientific American either this month or last. Addresses the total energy costs of fuel cells and a "hydrogen economy" in general.
I guess it was May.
Apple: You are SOOOO close on this.
... whatever). I want to stream whatever would be coming out of my audio port. I want to sit on my couch, put in a DVD, and watch and hear a movie without wires everywhere.
However, I don't *want* to stream iTunes (AirTunes
Can *any* device do this without a TV? I found this DVD player, but it's not what I'm looking for, either.
Okay, so there actually was a quote in the article: "Schools are being promised million-dollar systems when a system costing $10,000 would make more sense."
This is TWO orders of magnitude, and it is not printed as fact, but is merely a quotation, and even the quotation doesn't say that this exact thing ever happened.
To say "several orders of mangitude" implies at LEAST one thousand times more expensive. here's a bunch of definitions.
So, let's say the kiddies got a computer worth $1,000. By our submitter's logic, I could buy that computer for $1, or else it cost the kidz $1,000,000.
I imagine our submitter meant to say several TIMES more expensive, but "orders of magnitude" sounded more dramatic somehow.
Tighen up the rhetoric, people. English is an easily abused language.
On the subject of teeth: Dental care is good enough lately that people don't lose enough teeth to make room in the jaw for the rear molars, the "wisdom" teeth that come in later.
AFAIK, problems with arch length and wisdom teeth are more to do with being a racial mutt than anything else. Racially pure folks tend not to have as much trouble. From my Orthodontics text:
Third molars aren't the spare tires of the mouthIIAD (American working in England, actually), and I don't see this stuff coming into anyone's mouth for many years to come.
... yeah, they've grown teeth in rats, but in their intestines, IIRC (intentionally in the intestines, but it's still a far cry from functioning dentition in the mouth).
The hurdles here are the same as hurdles for growing ANY tissue from stem cells. You don't just turn stem cells loose and tell them to become teeth. There is a hugely complex interaction of intra- and inter-cellular communication that goes on that tells a given cell whether to become part of the pulp, whether to start secreting enamel matrix, becoming an odontoblast, etc. If this were just five years off, we'd only be five years off from growing *hands*, etc.
Even if we could grow *a* tooth, we would have to grow the *right* tooth, especially in the "esthetic zone". How do we make sure that it *looks* like a central incisor with 11mm of enamel showing above the gingiva? How do we make the color right? Do we just grow something that is sort of tooth-like and put a crown on it automatically? Do we grow it in vitro and implant it in a surgical site? Do we grow it in situ? If so, how do we maintain the delicate balance of cellular influences in a mouth where someone ostensibly couldn't even keep their natural teeth in order?
I think that this is waaaaaay off in the distance. Their five year estimate is pie-in-the-sky pulled-out-of-their-ass.
In addition