When I see old human skeletons always wonder how they kept their teeth so good. Without toothpaste, toothbrush or floss. What are we doing wrong?
How many old skeletons do you see? Are they a representative sample?
Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
61–70 of 168 posts
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#62I'm going to take this moment to rant at dentists! Going to the doctor they get the excuse that they rarely do anything that could possibly hurt. Dentists on the other hand are practically doing minor surgery every time you visit them. I know many of you will never have had any bad experiences at the dentist but I've had tons and what's extremely frustrating is many of them are preventable but dentists seem to have a…
I don't actually agree with your examples but I wanted to add one of my own.
I went to a dentist complaining of sensitive teeth. He identified the problem as small cavities caused by chewing in my sleep, drilled them out, and added fillings.
A few months later those fillings fell out and I went to another dentist to get them replaced.
"You've had large holes drilled on top of your teeth so I'll have to replace them, but these fillings were totally unneccesary. If you get sensitivity like that again, just use a sensitive toothpaste. With your chewing you'll lose these fillings after about a year, and each time we'll need to drill out a little more, until by the time you are 40 you'll lose the teeth"
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#63It always struck me as funny that if you want to get into Medicine you can either do the normal MD course that covers 95% of the body (obviously, you may be able to specialize much later on) OR you can do the other 5% as a Dentist (and again, you may chose to specialize later). Teeth suck, I'm hanging out for "I can't believe they're not teeth" implants so I can stop worrying about the damn things.
I have an "I can't believe it's not a tooth" implant, after I lost a front tooth when I crashed a tiny motorcycle.
They drilled a hole in my jaw, beefed it up with a "cadaver bone" from a pig, threaded a titanium bolt into the hole, and then threaded a tooth-lookalike into the titanium bolt.
The installation is a bit... industrial, but you'd never know it wasn't a real tooth. It cost £3,000 though.
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#64It has always amazed me that teeth have such a high failure rate when they contain 0 moving parts. There's also no biological or chemical processes that need to happen. They're literally just an inanimate object that you use for biting. How can they be so unreliable??
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#65I had to get my front molars and wisdom teeth removed to make room in my jaw (got braces, all good) Saw the x-ray of my wisdoms. The tops were facing my front teeth, ie 90 degrees rotated
I have the same issue with my wisdoms. Seems to be a common thing. Weird. Was it painful to remove wisdoms?
I had all four wisdom teeth extracted in the same procedure under local anaesthetic, back in the medieval days of 1980s British NHS dentistry. The four deep injections were significantly more painful than the extractions and in fact led me to avoid dentistry in general.
However, many years later, I experienced excruciating tooth pain due to air pressure change [1] while flying to the US and then while subsequently driving through Yosemite. The pain was so bad at one point I had to stop driving and the prospect of the flight home was not fun. The cavity was exacerbated by my avoidance of dentistry following the wisdom teeth. The dental injection when I got home was nothing compared to the prior tooth pain so I started properly going to the dentist again. A root canal procedure several years later involved injections that were virtually pain free so I now don't stress about the prospect of an injection at all (except perhaps for the few seconds when the dentist is about to insert the needle).
For me, the change is due to 1) improvements in procedures and 2) a general lessening in personal squeamishness as I've got older. Any injection at all when I was younger had the potential to make me faint but now I can even watch the needle during a blood test or similar. YMMV.
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#66It has always amazed me that teeth have such a high failure rate when they contain 0 moving parts. There's also no biological or chemical processes that need to happen. They're literally just an inanimate object that you use for biting. How can they be so unreliable??
Teeth themselves maybe, but that's kind of like saying a drill bit is inanimate without moving parts.
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#67It has always amazed me that teeth have such a high failure rate when they contain 0 moving parts. There's also no biological or chemical processes that need to happen. They're literally just an inanimate object that you use for biting. How can they be so unreliable??
Teeth themselves maybe, but that's kind of like saying a drill bit is inanimate without moving parts.
But it's not the jaw that fails... it's the teeth, or the tooth-jaw interface. Neither of which have any moving parts!
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#68It has always amazed me that teeth have such a high failure rate when they contain 0 moving parts. There's also no biological or chemical processes that need to happen. They're literally just an inanimate object that you use for biting. How can they be so unreliable??
Teeth aren't inanimate. They contain a living core and support a distinct microbiome, not all member species of which are innocuous.
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#69This is interesting. Teeth are of pretermined shape and size to fit the jaw, or the jaw the teeth "assume" will be there. The jaw's shape and size is determined by what/how you eat. For humans with a "traditional" diet, that assumption is correct. For us, it isn't.
This is very specific to humans though, and the specific problem of "overcrowded" mouths. But teeth have other issues, and in other species too. For many animals, teeth are the thing that fails at old age effectively capping lifespan.
Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?
#70Stephan Guyenet had a series of blog posts called "Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization" on dental health. As I remember, as usual, decline in dental health was linked to moving away from traditional diets. The problem with teeth "overcrowding" was linked, basically, to not chewing enough of tough foods. People that ate plenty of tough foods as part of their diets had better developed jaws and space enough for all t…
How about people who chew on gum all day?