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Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

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Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#91

Post by freeflight »

greggman wrote: post #48

I'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…

Sounds like a combination of you just getting unlucky and having very low pain tolerance.

Personally I don't mind it hurting a bit sometimes, for smaller stuff I usually even opt out of the local anesthetics because I don't like running around with a mouth that feels like it's full of cotton.

Those are medical procedures after all, they are not supposed to make you feel amazing (at least during the process) they are supposed to "fix you", as such the process can be quite uncomfortable like many other medical procedures.

If pain is your issue you should try looking for dentists offering less-conventional methods, like hypnosis or electric anesthesia. But I doubt there's anything anybody could ever do to make a visit to the dentist "comfortable" for you, short of full anesthesia so you don't even notice what's happening.

I guess I got lucky because I don't really mind, never did. As kid I would hate going to the haircutter, but I loved visiting the dentist because of all the cool tools he had. Being weird sometimes has its advantages ;)

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#92

Post by nickjj »

synicalx wrote: post #25

It 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.

Having an implant takes a lot more maintenance than regular teeth and no one really knows the long-long term results (modern implants haven't been around long enough).

While an implant may offer a much better quality of life vs having a severely poor tooth (or none at all), don't be fooled into thinking you just get one and then you're set for life.

They are considered an excellent option in a lot of cases, but you should never sacrifice your real teeth. You trade in worrying about cavities (real teeth) to worrying about a bunch of implant specific problems. All of which are waaaaaay scarier than cavities.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#93

Post by freeflight »

hycaria wrote: post #75
greggman wrote: post #48

I'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…

>Lukewarm water please. Cold helps vasoconstriction. Warm equals vasodilatation equals more bleeding, and increasing the bloodflow makes it easier for the bacteria that will eventually come through microlesions to go around etc. Things are in a specific way for a reason most of the time. > It felt like she was taking an ice pick and stabbing my gums. Yes because that's where calculus accumulates. It's not a pleasant…

> It's not a pleasant feeling but it's not an unbearable pain either in my experience.

Indeed, the way worse version of that is having your gum bags cleaned out, it's literally scrapping everything out between your gums and your teeth, one of the more painful things I went trough in my life.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#94

Post by jspash »

I remember talking to an army recruiter at school when I was about 14 - not to recruit us, but to show how "cool" a career in the military could be, in case book-lernin didn't work out. Anyhow, the one thing I remember him saying is in boot camp they were made to chew every bite of food 50 times. The drill sergeant would count and punish anyone who swallowed before they got to fifty.

Fast-forward 30 years and I STILL continue to chew my food an inordinate number of times because of that one interaction. However, I've never been able to verify whether or not he was pulling my leg. I don't have a particularly large jaw, but I have noticed (anecdotally, of course) that I have fewer stomach issues than my peers who tend to chew-chew-gulp everything.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#95

Post by anon1253 »

tominous wrote: post #76

The standard approach to orthodontics is to extract teeth to make room and then move the remaining teeth into place. There is an alternative approach which involves enlarging the jaw, either through expanders, surgery or a combination of both. Unfortunately this is an area where the patient or parent often has to make the decision because specialists only know about what they do. As a related example, I asked a denti…

There's a larger truth hidden in here: experts disagree. It was one of the things that took me by surprise when building Machine Learning systems, but it makes sense if you think about it. For all but the most trivial matters, it's the job of the expert to exercise personal judgement. It's why they're experts, not because they have a solid understanding of the "knowns", but because they have developed methods and intuitions about the "unknowns". Ask 10 different experts a complex question in their field of interest, and you'll likely get widely varying answers. My guess is that it also played a role in the early expert systems AI bust (AI winter). There are interesting papers published about this as well, e.g. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832007... the money shot is in this chart http://imgur.com/a/shaii but you'll see similar distributions everywhere where expert judgement is warranted.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#96

Post by RyanMcGreal »

Sidenote: I recently finished reading The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, in which he addresses this issue (among many others). The book is absolutely fantastic, an engaging, highly-readable page-turner packed with insights and epiphanies about how we can think about contemporary challenges from an evolutionary perspective.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#97

Post by emddudley »

fractallyte wrote: post #55
greggman wrote: post #48

I'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…

Sounds like you have some gum recession ('sensitive teeth'). Brushing vigorously can erode gums, exposing the sensitive parts of teeth. It's very important to brush gently (but thoroughly); not back and forth, rather up and down. Flossing isn't particularly good for gums, either, so best to do it sparingly.

Excuse me? Flossing is critical for gum health.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#98

Post by RyanMcGreal »

sattoshi wrote: post #86
skummetmaelk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, too much of anything is bad for you. Chewing gum all day leads to many other (severe) issues.

Don't chew all day = have one set of problems Chew all day = another set of problems We can't win, can we?

For many human movements, the relation between intensity and injury is a u-curve with high risk at extremely low intensity (atrophy) and extremely high intensity (overuse/repetitive strain), and low risk at moderate intensity.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#99

Post by smilelogicortho »

guilhas wrote: post #3

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?

Pre-industrial skeletal remains are often seen with more teeth than we might expect.

Here are the ways you lose a tooth: 1. Trauma, like a hit to the face, that knocks a tooth out. 2. Abrasion on the biting surfaces that wears teeth down to a stub over a lifetime. 3. An infectious disease that destroys the teeth (cavities). 4. An infectious disease that destroys the supporting bone around the teeth (periodontal disease).

What we are doing wrong: 1. Not wearing mouthguards to play sports/drive cars (think about hockey players who are missing teeth). 2. Living longer means more wear (also the position of the teeth changed in a softer, post-industrial diet). 3. Fermentable carbohydrates are eaten more frequently throughout the day. Bacteria that cause cavities, like streptococcus mutans, ferment carbohydrates into lactic acid, dissolve the underlying surface of the tooth, and invade deeper into the tooth. 4. Periodontal disease typically starts to take its toll in the third decade of life. We live longer than our ancestors.

Re: Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up?

#100

Post by smilelogicortho »

mrob wrote: post #23
guilhas wrote: post #3

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?

There's evidence that cleaning with toothpaste is no better than cleaning with water alone (keyword for search "dentifrice": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27513809 There's evidence that plant root fiber toothbrushes are at least as good as nylon bristle toothbrushes (keywords for search "miswak", "chewing stick"), eg: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15643758 (in my personal experience they work just fine, b…

While it is true that plaque can be removed with or without toothpaste, that fact is a little misleading in isolation.

The benefit of toothpaste is the topical application of fluoride. When applied topically in concentrations greater than 1000ppm, fluoride replaces a molecule in hydroxyapatite and creates fluorapatite. Fluorapatite is much more resistant to dissolution by acid. That is important because cavity-causing-bacteria in plaque gain entry into a tooth by bathing the tooth in lactic acid.

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