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'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

bbc.com

101–110 of 223 posts

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#101
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery tech - it's the next big thing that never was.

Battery tech is improving by about 20% every 2 years. Batteries that cost about $1000-1200 in 2009-10 are expected to cost now around $200-300 this year. We have been getting incremental improvements in price and capacity but most people don't notice.

We don't notice because the Facebook app's battery usage grows faster than 20% every two years.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#103
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. I can appreciate this example, though in the specific context of teleportation, there'll probably be a few decades tacked on to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising from the question of whether or not the person arriving out of the other end is in fact the s…

You say that now, but when you step up to the machine with the knowledge that you are about to cease to exist, while somewhere else a perfect copy of you gets to go about living your life, I bet you change your mind.

Exactly. What if there's a bug and when your "copy" is created at destination original is not destroyed? Would you agree to be killed, should your copy agree instead? Even worse, what if there's an anomaly in transporting data, original is destroyed and copy emerges disfigured, dead or something in between? Teleportation scares the shit out of me.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#104

Q: does this sort of labor destroying innovation ever get blocked by lobbying groups?

It would appear in this specific case, you would still need a qualified professional to insert the drug soaked 'sponge' and cover the hole. So if this makes it to market it would just be the latest and greatest new tool for dentists to repair tooth decay.

As far as lobbyists blocking innovation to protect their industries 'status quo.' Yes I imagine it happens quite a bit. For example there is a strong lobby to keep tax forms and processes complicated and unfriendly to normal people so that companies whose bread and butter is helping you fill out your taxes each year can stay in business.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#105
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Europe and Japan doesn't fluoridate their water and they don't have notably worse dental outcomes. It really has to do with toothbrushing and diet. Water fluoridation is just a way to get to the people who refuse to brush their teeth.

I think genetics have a part too. My grandmother was deported to Siberia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu... ) for 20 years where they have 200 grams of bread a day at best and never brushed her teeth in her life and never had a tooth filling or missing tooth before her retirement, and I have half my teeth missing and I am only 30 years old. Fuck my life.

Yeah, there is undoubtedly a genetic side to it. My teeth decay rapidly -- as an under-two toddler, I had to undergo full anesthesia for a dental rehabilitation. Though neither my siblings nor my parents have very bad teeth, I've always been the exception (I guess I got just the right mutation). My pediatric dentist was always expressing astonishment at how quickly my teeth decay.

You know how dentists say "Hey, I can tell you drink a ton of soda, you need to stop"? I would get told this every time I'd go in for a cleaning, despite not drinking any soda and very little fruit juice/other sugary drinks for many years, 90%+ water only.

Fast forward 20-something years, and 2 of my daughters have had to undergo a dental rehab similar to mine at very young ages (though not quite as young as me), despite the stringent dental regimen my wife enforces to prevent this fate. There's no doubt that they got my bad teeth genes.

We're talking young kids here, ages 2-3 at the time of the operation (I was 18 mos. when I went down). They don't eat an inordinate amount of sugar, and as I stated above, my wife is very thorough with their dental hygiene. The water is fluoridated where we live. A lot of kids this age surely have much worse diets and much worse dental hygiene, but their teeth seem to be problem-free for many years.

Personally, I've had tons of fillings, 7-ish root canals, two teeth fully extracted because they were past saving, and several that badly need work and I'm not even 30 yet. Pretty much the only people living with worse teeth are opiate addicts.

I hope I win the lottery some day so I can get a mouth full of implants and be done with it. I hear the going rate for this is about $75,000.

A lot of people refuse to believe that genetics play any role, but that's absolutely not consistent with my experience, nor the opinion of most of the dentists I've had.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that now, but when you step up to the machine with the knowledge that you are about to cease to exist, while somewhere else a perfect copy of you gets to go about living your life, I bet you change your mind.

I think it depends on implementation. I wake up every morning and I'm pretty sure I'm still me. I go in elevators and each time the doors open I'm still me. So, what sort of transportation experience would change that? Admittedly, the closes to teleportation I've ever felt was my first trip on a cruise ship. I went to sleep in one city, and when I opened my eyes I was suddenly in a city hundred miles away. It was mag…

Well, sleep and cruise ships don't destroy and copy your body. Teleportation would be equivalent to being killed the way I see it, until we get a better understanding of conscience at least.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#108
post #3

This is insanely cool, and I imagine there is no need for me to explain how useful this would be in comparison to the current dental approaches today. But is this technology ever going to be available to consumers? I remember reading about similar advancements almost three years ago and haven't heard anything related until now. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think we won't see this in practice for a Very Long Time™.

> Prof Sharpe said a new treatment could be available soon: "I don't think it's massively long term, it's quite low-hanging fruit in regenerative medicine and hopeful in a three-to-five year period this would be commercially available."

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#109

Q: does this sort of labor destroying innovation ever get blocked by lobbying groups?

I remember hearing about laparoscopic surgery and ultrasonic treatments for gallbladder and kidney stones while growing up. My dad was a surgeon and that was a large part of his "business", but he was really excited about the advances. However, the earlier surgery of opening up someone's abdomen often meant days of stress about your patient lying in the hospital and potential complications. It was a job where you were often working on people who first met you when they seemed relatively healthy, but with some pains, and were quickly getting worse. "Rounds", where you toured every patient in the hospital to check on their recovery, was a part of every day of the year, and it was nominally unpaid (though the time and attention was included in the "package" of treatment).

At things like holiday period cocktail parties I definitely heard, especially spouses, talk about how those changes would be dangerous since the surgeon wouldn't have a full picture of what was going on in the abdomen, etc. (Sometimes it's safer not to wear a seatbelt, too!)

Anyway, I think that at the same time that gallstones and kidney stones became less labor intensive there were so many new things than needed general surgeons than there was no impact on labor.

--

Back to your question, there seem to be stories about curing caries as a phenomenon somewhat frequently, and they've appeared regularly for decades.

Is this, instead, like developing a good cross-platform IMAP client? Anything that is good enough to replace the large email providers' own apps and web portals gets aquihired. Clearly the programmers must have been skilled enough to handle a large number of arcane edge cases and understood users well, so they'd be great people to have work for them. Plus, there's less likelihood that they continue to keep IMAP access normalized, and then also happen to provide a really effective and easy drop in encryption service.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#110
post #3

This is insanely cool, and I imagine there is no need for me to explain how useful this would be in comparison to the current dental approaches today. But is this technology ever going to be available to consumers? I remember reading about similar advancements almost three years ago and haven't heard anything related until now. Maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think we won't see this in practice for a Very Long Time™.

I actually find these articles depressing because it seems like nothing like this ever ultimately comes to fruition. I'm guessing these "breakthroughs" have always been just around the corner. I recall having a conversation with my dentist almost 20 years ago about things that were up and coming that were about to make our lives a lot easier in terms of saving and strengthening and building tooth enamel but none of w…

It's funny. I often have the same reaction as you. Yet last summer I went to the dentist to have an old filling replaced with a crown. They took a 3D scan of my teeth and used that scan to mill a crown on site in about an hour. It fit perfectly and I could scarcely distinguish it from the rest of my real teeth.

20 years ago, all of this would sound like science fiction to me.

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