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'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

bbc.com

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Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#211

Post by contra64 »

adrianN wrote: post #116
raquo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your body slowly replaces itself. I'm reasonably sure that when you die you have replaced almost all of its atoms at least once.

Eventually, the constituent atoms themselves perform a complete cycle (at the slowest rates) every ~7 years. Some substances (e.g. water) cycle much faster, obviously.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1189358...

Which tells us that sentient consciousness and identity is mostly about the continuity of a signal across only some cells (nerves), and mostly rides on top of standing waves supported by those special cellular processes, at frequencies of oscillation faster than the underlying polarized/ionic chemical processes.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#212

Post by ptaipale »

splawn wrote: post #200
ptaipale wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety is good, but it's not a dichotomy of "absolutely no safety" or "safety trumps all other things". It seems to me that the safety aspect is currently very strong, on the expense of long time-to-market and high barrier of entry to market.

.....but we are talking about healthcare. Safety should trump all other things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

If safety absolutely trumps all other things, then there can be no trials of anything (because by definition, a trial is there to experiment and find out about possible safety issues) and there would be no development of new medicines at all.

That would not mean staying where we are, it would mean starting to slowly go backwards in the tools available for health care (because e.g. some antibiotics are slowly becoming inefficient and new ones should be developed - and currently the world is not doing enough of that.)

See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095020/

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#213

Post by tommorris »

chiph wrote: post #179
ptaipale wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when we're discussing medical care, the mandatory regulatory approvals are a significant cause of delay and cost. E.g. FDA approvals in the U.S. They are a barrier to entry, and they are a measure to ensure safety of new cures. It's a tough balance.

Based on the history of drugs like Thalidomide, I'll pick safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History

The flipside of that is the response to the AIDS crisis. If it hadn't been for activists from groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation screaming, shouting and making a big stink about the need for a response from the FDA, the federal government more generally, and the pharmaceutical industry, there'd be a whole lot of people who wouldn't be alive today.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/27/how-to-survive-a-plagu...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/ray-filar/silen...

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#214

Post by sethrin »

eganist wrote: post #84
astrodust wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot of time to turn a laboratory discovery into a reliably working prototype, then longer still for the industry to agree on standards and branding, and even longer to ramp up mass-manufacturing and get the distribution chain working. We could discover teleportation tomorrow morning and it would be twenty years before teleporters were common-place. Everything takes time to be fully realized. If you want to…

> 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…

Teleportation would violate Relativity, so the good news is that the dilemma in question is actually impossible.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#215

Post by dethswatch »

adrianN wrote: post #118
stplsd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think your oral microbiome is also important. I've heard about experimental treatments which replace the cavity causing bacteria with other strains that don't produce acids.

I read about that in the 90's- did anything become of it?

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#217

Post by zzzzz99997 »

splawn wrote: post #200
ptaipale wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety is good, but it's not a dichotomy of "absolutely no safety" or "safety trumps all other things". It seems to me that the safety aspect is currently very strong, on the expense of long time-to-market and high barrier of entry to market.

.....but we are talking about healthcare. Safety should trump all other things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

..no. Treating sick people and improving the health of our species should trump all other things.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#218

Post by CM30 »

neverminder wrote: post #103
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #91

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.

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.

Take full advantage of it?

I mean, cloning things has its advantages too. Could be a good idea for some people to deliberate screw up the process and drastically cut down on their daily workload. Or perhaps as a way for the less ethical to not kill or work alongside their accidental copies, but ship 'em off to join the army or something.

Teleportation going wrong can be just as exciting as prospect as it working out fine. Cloning has a lot of useful applications as well.

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#219

Post by awqrre »

majewsky wrote: post #206
awqrre wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably talking about the low radiation bite-wing digital x-rays... But some type of dental X-rays have orders of magnitude more radiations, like the Panoramic X-rays (those are very common in dental offices) or the much worst Cone-beam computed tomography (3D). I agree that there probably isn't much risk but they give them out like candies.

I checked Wikipedia for the different types, and apparently I had a panoramic X-ray made last year. A quick googling finds [1] which puts the maximum dose for X-rays at 0.17 mSv. Wikipedia [2] puts the average background radiation around the world at 3 mSv per year, or 0.082 mSv per day. So while 170 mSv is indeed "orders of magnitude more radiation" than an X-ray of a single tooth, it's still roughly in the order of…

Next time you go to the dentist, try to ask the person taking the x-rays what radiation setting they used or how much radiations you will be getting from the x-rays... in my experience, they don't know... Also ask them why they cover your torso with lead but not your brain...

Also, I think that you confused some units and you forgot to include link #2 ...

Re: 'Tooth repair drug' may replace fillings

#220

Post by splawn »

ptaipale wrote: post #212
splawn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.....but we are talking about healthcare. Safety should trump all other things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

If safety absolutely trumps all other things, then there can be no trials of anything (because by definition, a trial is there to experiment and find out about possible safety issues) and there would be no development of new medicines at all. That would not mean staying where we are, it would mean starting to slowly go backwards in the tools available for health care (because e.g. some antibiotics are slowly becoming…

that is disingenuous... as you said "a trial is there to experiment and find out about possible safety issues". You have to test drugs before you can feed them to everyone safely.... but you obviously already knew that and just wanted to be contrarian.
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