dental floss

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #64- Tusca Loosa

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Just as a caveat emptor, the following story took place outside Tuscaloosa, AL, and it’s about a loose tooth. Since a tusk is basically an elephant’s tooth grown extra large, should you be skeptical here: (tusca-loosa, ha!ha!)? There are photos taken from a helicopter of the ensuing mess, seen above, but still, I get that nagging feeling, somehow, like my leg is being pulled. In this case it wasn’t a leg being pulled, it was a loose tooth undergoing this treatment.

You often see stories about dangerous driving on YouTube and other online sites. Scary, especially when you see similar things right on the roads you drive every day. It’s always the other guy’s fault. In this story, there isn’t much guesswork about who was at fault, though, because the only person directly involved ended up with the evidence in his shirt pocket.

A truck driver who must have hated going to the dentist was tooling down the highway outside of Tuscaloosa (See what I mean? You pause a bit at the name.) Seems he had a loose tooth (probably many, and he probably wasn’t a flosser) that was causing him some discomfort, and since he wasn’t doing anything which required his attention, he jiggled it and pulled it out, with both hands, letting go of the steering wheel of his rig to do that. He promptly lost control, the truck jack-knifed, and it ended up in the ditch. The effort to extract his truck caused a traffic jam that lasted from Sunday night until the following morning. How the driver had the presence of mind to slip the tooth into his pocket, I can’t explain. Maybe he thought the tooth fairy would slip him a few dollars for his effort.

So, my advice: see your dentist regularly, brush, floss, and if the unlikely happens and you’re driving along and one of your teeth feels loose, pull over into a safe spot, get out your cell phone, and call your dentist’s office. And don’t tell her or him that you’re from Tusca Loosa.

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1001 UsesFor Dental Floss #58- Sugar Really Is Bad For You, In So Many Ways

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I recently came across this article in Medscape, a well-respected medical journal which is easy to access online. The contents of the article should make you worry. If you think about the processed and commercially-available restaurant food you may occasionally (or often) eat or take your kids to, you should be aware that sugar is an ingredient in very many of these foods, sometimes even surprisingly so.

It used to be that salt added to foods, and fat, whether saturated or unsaturated, was seen as the villain “eating away” at your health, and this has been promoted by the food industry and used as an excuse to cover up the role of added sugar, in all its many forms, in affecting nutrition and health. As it turns out, sugar is, according to research findings coming out more and more, a major cause of obesity and a contributor to, among other conditions, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. It should be a cause for concern. Just as tobacco was once defended by the companies who produced products such as cigarettes and cigars, industry involved in the use of sugar in its many forms and disguises are now fighting to retain their hold on its use in food production, denying its deleterious effects. Something to think about.

From a dentist’s point of view, sugar is well-known as a cause of tooth decay when combined with poor oral hygiene, because it feeds mouth bacteria, which produce acids. These acids at first etch tooth enamel (by dissolving its calcium-containing crystals), and in later stages eat away at its structure, making cavities (holes) in the tooth surface. Now, sugar is being linked to other disease processes.

Flossing is important, but let’s not forget that our teeth are part of our body. It’s all one, and it’s all that you’re got, really. Take care of it.

This is important reading.The original article can be found at: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/

 

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Sugar Is the New Tobacco, so Let’s Treat It That Way
Aseem Malhotra, MBChB, MRCP

I was recently asked to speak at the UK parliamentary “Sugar Summit.” This event was convened by Rend Platings, a mother so disturbed by England’s chief medical officer’s revelation that, as a result of obesity, today’s generation of parents may be the first to outlive their children, that she launched a campaign, Sugarwise, to help consumers identify foods with added sugar.[1]

Keith Vaz, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Diabetes, chaired the event, whose audience was made up of a number of representatives from such high-profile UK retailers as Tesco, Caffè Nero, and the Jamie Oliver Group, as well as such influential stakeholders as the UK Department of Health, Public Health England, the British Soft Drinks Association, and the Food and Drink Federation.[2]

I began by welcoming the UK government announcement of an introduction of a 20% tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in 2017. I similarly welcome the recent statement calls by the World Health Organization (WHO) to tax sugary drinks by at least 20% in order to curb the global epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. We mustn’t forget that the substantial decline in tobacco consumption in the past three decades, which was the single most important factor driving a decrease in cardiovascular mortality during that period, only happened after legislative measures that targeted the affordability, availability, and acceptability of smoking.[3]

Health Effects

Oxford researchers have estimated that a 15% reduction in sugar consumption through such a tax would prevent 180,000 people in the UK from becoming obese within a year and a larger number from becoming overweight.[4] But the scientific evidence reveals that the positive health benefits for the whole population of such a tax goes beyond a mere reduction in calories:
• An econometric analysis of 175 countries (considered the highest quality of study with the exception of randomized controlled trials) revealed that for every additional 150 sugar calories available for consumption, there was an 11-fold increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the population. This is compared with 150 calories from another source such as fat or protein and independent of body mass index (BMI) and physical activity levels.[5]
• The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the US population between 1988 and 2012 increased by 25% in both obese and normal-weight populations,[6] which goes to show that type 2 diabetes is not a condition related purely to obesity.
• A high-quality prospective cohort study revealed a trebling in cardiovascular mortality among US adults who consumed more than 25% of calories from added sugar versus those who consumed less than 10%, with consistent findings across physical activity levels and BMI.[7]
• The positive health effects of reducing sugar intake appear to be quite rapid. In a study of 43 Latino and African American children with metabolic syndrome, keeping total calories and calories from carbohydrate identical, a reduction from a mean of 28% of calories from added sugar to 10% significantly reduced triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and fasting insulin within just 10 days.[8]

How Much Sugar Is Safe?

So, how much sugar do we need? For the purpose of health, the optimum consumption is zero. Added sugar has no biological requirement and is, therefore, not by any definition a “nutrient.” It is the fructose component (sucrose is 50% glucose and 50% fructose) that fulfils four criteria that justify its regulation: toxicity, unavoidability, the potential for abuse, and its negative impact on society.[9]
How much sugar is safe? The consumption of just small amounts of free sugar, which includes all added sugar and sugar present in fruit juice, syrups and honey, on a daily basis, has a deleterious impact on the most common noncommunicable disease globally: tooth decay. Treatment of dental disease is responsible for 5%-10% of health expenditures in industrialized countries, and in the UK, tooth decay is the number-one cause of chronic pain and hospital admission in young children.[10,11]
As pointed out by researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, there is a powerful argument that the WHO should recommend a maximum limit of sugar consumption to make up no more than 3% of daily calories (about three teaspoons).[12] The average UK and US citizen, however, consumes at least four to seven times that amount.[13,14] This is perhaps not surprising when one acknowledges that it has been almost impossible for the consumer to avoid sugar, as it is so prevalent in the food environment and much of it is hidden. In the United States, almost half of all sugar consumption comes from foods one wouldn’t normally associate as having added sugar, such as ketchup, salad dressings, and bread. A third of sugar consumption comes from sugary drinks, and a sixth from foods that people normally perceive as junk, such as chocolates, cookies, and ice cream.[14]
In the United States, there isn’t any reference dietary intake for sugar on food labels. In Europe, the labelling exists but doesn’t differentiate between children and adults. One can of regular cola contains nine teaspoons of added sugar, which is triple the 2009 upper limit intake suggested by the US Department of Agriculture for an 8-year-old child. The UK Guideline Daily Amount label describes these nine teaspoons of sugar as 39% of the guideline daily amount. On the basis of this false reassurance, it would be understandable for parents to believe that it is safe for their child to drink two and a half cans per day.[15]

The food industry often argues that the public should have a “personal responsibility” when choosing what foods to eat, which deflects blame from their own culpability in the obesity epidemic to the consumer. The truth is that the public lacks knowledge because of confusing food labels, and the public lacks choice because sugar is added to approximately 80% of processed foods.

Big Tobacco, Big Sugar

The fact that it took 50 years before the first links between smoking and lung cancer were published in the British Medical Journal and before effective regulation was introduced is testament to how Big Tobacco was able to defend its practices. Key to the strategy was denial, planting doubt, confusing the public, buying the loyalty of scientists, and giving ammunition to political allies.[16]

The similarities between Big Tobacco and the sugar industry are disturbing. As a recent publication in JAMA Internal Medicine showed, the sugar industry paid three influential Harvard scientists to downplay sugar’s role in heart disease and to shift the blame to fat.[17] Last year, the New York Times exposed that the Coca-Cola Company paid millions of dollars to fund research that downplayed the role of sugary drinks in obesity and push lack of exercise as the main factor.[18] And, according to one former UK shadow health minister, the incorrect advocacy of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, and high-sugar diet by “morally corrupt scientists and politicians who allowed themselves to be manipulated by food suppliers” is to blame for global obesity.[19]
The recent calls by the WHO to tax sugary drinks are very welcome news for health campaigners. The public health messaging, however, has to be more clear. There is nothing wrong with the occasional treat, but sugar has no place as part of a “healthy balanced diet.” Similar to smoking, any further regulatory measures to reduce sugar consumption, such as banning of sugary drink advertising and dissociating sugary drinks with sporting events, will have a further impact on improving population health within a short time. The science is more than sufficient; the case against sugar is overwhelming. Sugar is the new tobacco, so let’s start treating it that way.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/871064

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #57- The Dental Nurse Who Became An Alligator Catcher- A Story With Teeth.

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Image copyright by Christy Kroboth, 2017. One of her catches (on a golf course).

Not exactly dental floss-related, but a fun story anyway. I came across this story of a dental assistant who decided to give up her career to become a full-time alligator catcher. Alligators of course have a lot more teeth than your (or my) average dental patient, and they’re a lot sharper and dangerous, so there’s part of the challenge. When Christy Kroboth started training as an alligator catcher she was the only woman in her class, but – she’s apretty tough and determined woman. She wanted to show that she could jump on an animal much bigger than her, and tape its jaws tightly shut before it had a chance to do her any damage.

She first started to catch alligators as a side employment to her main job, which was as a dental assistant, but her reputation grew to the point that demand made her take this on as full-time work. She’s a real animal lover, and remembers how she got to be that way- her mom used to stop the car at the side of the road to help ducks and turtles cross, and took in stray cats, dogs, and any other animal that needed a home.

In southern Texas, where Christy lives, there are a lot of communities where large man-made lakes and ponds are a sure attraction for alligators who live in the region to move in, but surprisingly, only one person has been killed by an alligator in the last 100 years. (So she claims, anyway.) People are of course afraid that their children and pets will be attacked and eaten,but she pooh-poohs this just a “superstition”, that they’re not the monsters they’re made out to be.

Alligators, being reptiles, have been around for millions of years, and have become an important part of the ecosystem, maintaining the fine balance of aquatic life. Apparently, they’re quite shy (when have you ever seen an alligator on a celebrity reality show?) and are fairly benign.

With a special licence and a permit, having taken a course which includes both a theoretical and a practical part (in other words, catching the beast with your bare hands).
She was the only girl in the class and also the youngest. The trainer told them: “OK, you’ve all passed the paperwork, now let’s go do this hands-on.”
Having never even touched an alligator before, for a split second she thought, “I can’t do this.” She called my mom, who said, as most loving moms would,”Come home right now, don’t do it!”
But this yound lady had something to prove, to herself, her mother, and especially to the “big ol’ country boys”. In her words, she ran out to the pond, got the alligator, taped him up and ended up passing the test. It was one of the happiest moments of her life and that adrenaline rush lasted the whole day.

Considering the the average alligator weighs almost 800 pounds (360 kilgrams) and is over 13 feet (4 meters) long, you can imagine the guts it takes to do this work. And she loves her job. She didn’t say, though, if she ever tried to floss an alligator’s teeth, and if she would ever try to use floss to tie one up. Somehow, I think, the answer to both these questions would be “no”.

This story was first reported by BBC Magazine. You will find the original article at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38641709

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #56- Is Flossing Really Useless?

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Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente recently wrote an article following up on the Associated Press’s dismissal of flossing as a useful adjunct to oral health, expressing, I guess, relief that finally she could ignore the advice she receives every time she goes to her dentist’s office. She seems to hate doing the flossing, and resents having an “expert” tell her what to do. Her article in the Globe and Mail, declaring the absolute uselessness of dental floss is, however, wrong on her part. What she says is a misreading of a misreading. The original article by the Associated Press claimed that flossing is useless, as evidenced by a lack of good scientific data supporting the practice, which simply means that a large enough double-blind study hasn’t been done, which I and the American Dental Association acknowledge. This is, however, mainly because the corporations who manufacture floss and toothbrushes and toothpaste and mouth rinse haven’t found it sufficiently important to finance such a study (no one else will because it’s not a matter of public health being threatened enough, like AIDS or Zika virus or Ebola do, which really, and rightly, scare people. Dental decay and gum disease, although very prevalent (dental caries affects more people in the world than any other infection), it doesn’t kill anyone (or hardly anyone, because it can, but rarely in the West), and their effects are slow and limited, for the most part, to the teeth, not the rest of the body. So who cares, right?

Luckily, there are journalists who are more thoughtful. Global News reporter Andrew Russell gives a much more balanced and nuanced picture of this subject.

It’s a little scary to see this issue turned into a controversy by people who dislike doing it, and so feel gratified, if not liberated, by what seems to be a reason for them to stop flossing. It’s more distressing, though, when those who shape public opinion in the news media misreport and misrepresent issues, and then pass them along to other reporters who, in a grotesque sort of broken telephone, blather on about issues which are then presented in a simplistic and distorted fashion to an audience who are unfamiliar with them and accept that whoever is doing the writing must be an “expert” on it. So the “experts” are deciding who the “experts” are, without really vetting the value of the information or disinformation they’re passing on. This doesn’t just apply to this small issue of flossing, but also to more important subjects which make the headlines of our newspapers and the ticker tape display on our news channels. Distressing.

Please continue to floss. It really is good for you.

 

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #55- The Story of Gulliver’s Floss

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So, it seems that the Associated Press did a deep review of scientific papers studying flossing and found that, amazingly, FLOSSING IS USELESS! Sure, and Dewey won the presidency against Truman in the 1948 U.S. Presidential Election- they got that one right too. No one could be more surprised than me at this revelation, but sceptic that I am, I don’t believe it. In my heart (and experience) I know that flossing prevents both decay between teeth and gum disease, and I plan to go through all the articles cited investigating this. Give me a couple of months, though. There’s a lot to read.

While you’re waiting, though, here is another tall tale inspired by a comment by Chuck H., a Facebook friend of mine.

Many years ago, a man named Lemuel Gulliver travelled from one place to another, meeting all sorts of strange creatures. The best-known of these were the Liliputians, who appeared to be fully-formed humans, except they were very, very small. How small were they? Very, very small. Very, very, very, small. Minute. When Gulliver landed on Lilliput after a gale sank his ship, taking everyone but him to the bottom of the sea, he was exhausted from swimming, fighting the currents, and outpacing the sharks and other sea creatures bent on eating him. He fell asleep on the shore, and when he woke up later, he found himself surrounded by a horde of the tiny inhabitants of the island, who, being cautious about the possible danger from such a huge creature, had lashed him with rope, so that he couldn’t move a finger.

Gulliver, though, was, among many other things, a surgeon and dentist, and he mistook the ropes, which were pretty thin and fashioned from silk, for dental floss. Not having much else to do, Gulliver began to speak, describing his work and the terrible scourges he fought every day, dental decay and gum disease. Not being someone who surfed the net, which was not to be invented for several more centuries, he hadn’t read the Associated Press article on the futility of flossing, so he proceeded to preach on the value of the practice. Gulliver was such a good orator that the creatures of the island were soon convinced. By night, a few would sneak close to him and cut off a length or two of the silk lines and floss their teeth, and amazingly, within a few days they felt better, and had much better breath. This so impressed their friends that the practice spread across the island, and very soon, all of Lilliput had great oral hygiene. Because they used up the silk binding Gulliver, he was quickly able to free himself and soon took short walks across Lilliput. The tiny people of the island hailed Gulliver and wanted to make him their king. But Gulliver was a modest man. He didn’t want power. He just wanted to go forth to other lands, extolling the virtues of good oral hygiene habits far and wide. And this is why Jonathan Swift’s book about him is called Gulliver’s Travels, and not Gulliver’s Floss.

If you liked this story, go read the real Guliiver’s Travels, a satirical novel published in 1726 by Irishman Jonathan Swift, now available free online. It’s in the public domain. And continue to floss. It really does help. I’ve seen it happening.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #54- Can Good Oral Hygiene Damage Your Body? Really?

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Probably not.
Years ago, when I was a beginner dentist, I didn’t know much, but then a lot of others were in the same boat. At one time, the teeth were considered a focus of infection, a place which harboured bacteria just waiting to set forth and infect the rest of the body. Boy, did dentists feel maligned, something like weathermen who were blamed for every storm and cold font, tornado, and drought, just for being around.
There was then an orthodoxy surrounding dental treatment for patients who had various sorts of heart defects, such as damaged or defective heart valves, a history of heart valve replacement, a history of rheumatic fever, or other heart-related problems. All such individuals were given penicillin (or, if they were allergic to that, another antibiotic) for two days before treatment and then for a day after the procedure, because it was felt that bacteria such as Streptococcus mutans or Streptococcus viridans lodged in the gums and around teeth would get pushed into the blood and then travel to and colonize these damaged, sensitive surfaces of the heart. A few years later, the regimen (developed by the American Heart Foundation) got simpler and involved just a single dose of penicillin (or other as above) an hour before the dental treatment started.
More recently, realizing that people with these problems could seed their hearts with bacteria just by brushing (and flossing), it became clear that it was a fool’s errand to try to prevent these effects except where there were powerful reasons to try to do so: recent heart valve surgery (within the last year) or certain serious and complex developmental defects involving the heart, or a heart transplant. Unfortunately, it was not a good idea to have these patients on a continuous dose of antibiotics either. The free and easy way in which antibiotics were being used was becoming a danger in itself, because strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria were arising due to their overuse.
So, at the time, there was also a concern that certain artificial implants, such as latex tubes placed to drain excess fluid from the brain, or artificial hip joints, might offer internal surfaces that could be colonized by mouth bacteria, and antibiotics might be useful against this possibility too. And then antibiotics for these cases fell out of fashion, too.
That was then. Here, now, we’re up against the same situation again. Recently, a woman with an artificial knee joint arrived in hospital with a painful infection in that site. Puzzled doctors opened up the knee and discovered that the infection was by another type of bacteria, this time Streptococcus gordonii, commonly found in the mouth, and decided that because the woman had recently started vigorous flossing, that must have pushed them into the blood, and the infection of the knee followed.

Of course it did. Obviously.

Same old story, blaming the teeth again.To which I say, maybe. And if history is any sort of guide any more, probably not.

Keep flossing.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #53- A Squirrel with a Sweet Tooth

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Another baby tooth-pulling story, as reported on CBC News (it wasn’t even a slow news day- the Brexit surprise just happened): A Montreal dad is in it for the big time. After entering the fray with the use of a drone to pull his daughter’s tooth last summer, 6-year-old Mila Freiheit’s father thought that the next step up would be to use a live animal to do the job. Luckily, not anything large and dangerous like a pitbull or a racehorse, just a squirrel with a sweet tooth. This girl’s dad attached the tooth via a length of floss to a granola bar. The squirrel gave a tug and off went the tooth, so loose that the floss just popped it out. He filmed it all with 3 cameras. And the squirrel didn’t have rabies.

What next? Mila still has a bunch of baby teeth that will be loosening up over the next 5 or 6 years, so this could really escalate. The ultimate, I think, would be to lure aliens to use their UFO to do the job. Failing that, (I don’t believe in aliens- sorry, Mulder and Scully) maybe a police car racing off to fight crime, or an elevator, with the little girl in it and the floss hanging out and attached to some object outside it, like a potted plant). How about using a float at the gay parade? Or maybe the dad can attach the tooth to Scotland as it tears itself away from England one of these days.

I have news for the dad, though. It’s illegal to feed squirrels in a park in Westmount. There’s a $50 fine for doing that. Will Mr. Freiheit be charged? Stay tuned. I hope the drone flight last year was legal.

Flossing is still legal though. Squirrels do it, sort of. So you keep doing it too.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/squirrel-tooth-pull-1.3652989

1001 Uses For Dental Floss # 52- Greek Myths

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The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (and Dental Floss)

You may have heard of the Minotaur, a half-man, half bull creature kept in the Labyrinth by Minos, the King of Crete. According to Greek myth, the Labyrinth was an artificial cave with winding, intersecting tunnels and blind ends so that no one who went in could ever unravel its secret pathways and escape, built by the engineer Daedalus (whose son, Icarus, you may also remember, flew too near the sun with waxed wings Daedalus had designed.)

According to this legend, Minos’s wife, Queen Pasiphae, who came from the city of Athens, slept with a bull (there’s a lot of bull in this tale) who was sent to her by Zeus, the top God of ancient Greek mythology. After this, Minos’ son went to Athens to take part in the Panathenaic Games (something like the Olympics) and was killed by the very bull that had impregnated Minos’ wife. Understandably pretty angry, but mindful that Zeus was not a god to be trifled with, Minos captured the Minotaur (his stepson) but didn’t have it killed.

Instead he placed the bull-man in the labyrinth. From Athens, Minos every year demanded seven young men and women from that city as a punishment, and also to avoid a plague (great excuse) and confined them to the labyrinth, where the Minotaur found them and ate them. Pretty gruesome story, but that’s the type the ancient Greeks loved to tell to their children.
Minotaur, half man – half bull
Anyway, long story short, Theseus in the third year decided to take on the Minotaur by offering himself up. After entering the cave, and using dental floss given to him by Ariadne, daughter of Minos, who had fallen for him and was a dental hygienist by trade, he laid down a trail that he could follow out later. So, kids, believe it or not, Theseus confronted the Minotaur and killed him and escaped from the labyrinth by following the trail of floss. That’s not where the story ends, but you’ll have to look the rest up.

It’s complicated.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #51- Floss In Space

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Space dentistry, the final frontier. No, not really, fellow Trekkies, but studies on dentistry in the space environment have already begun.

Indian dentist Balwant Rai grew up fascinated by space and the stars. He watched the sky at night (“Balwant, time for bed! Stopping staring up into the sky. It’ll make your neck stiff!” his mother would chastise him. (I’m making this up, actually paraphrasing my own mother, and hope he takes all this in good humour.) Once in bed, he dreamt about merging the studies of dentistry and the universe into one discipline: aeronautic dentistry, which would deal with dental care during space travel.

journal-of-aeronautics-aerospace-engineering-balwant-rai-5930

From the time he was knee-high to an alien grasshopper, Dr. Rai wanted to be an astronaut, and once he became a dentist he began to study the effects of space on the oral cavity (a fancy term we dentists use to say “mouth”) Simulating the environment of space, he conducted experiments in microgravity and in conditions like those on Mars. He designed the first college course on space dentistry in 2006.

Under these conditions, he found that humans would experience swelling of the face, changes in their sense of taste, abnormal facial expressions (whatever that means), and tooth pain, dry mouth, gum disease, tooth decay, stones in ducts of the salivary glands,precancer and cancer of the mouth, and fractures of the bones of the upper and lower jaws. Pretty scary, really.

Anyone willing to sign up for that one way mission to Mars set for about 2030? Imagine a toothache all the way to Mars.

According to Dr. Rai, aeronautic dentistry (shouldn’t it be called astronautic dentistry?) is looking for answers to the following questions:

How to manage if an astronaut has an abscess, a broken tooth, or a jaw fracture during a mission.

Should one or more of the staff (presumably one with medical training) on board a space vessel have special training in providing dental treatment, along with other medical activities,

Should standardized techniques be specially modified for the space environment? What dental equipment would have to be included in a space mission? Would laser techniques or other technologies be more appropriate for space? What about taking xrays- how to keep everything steady? For example, modern dental treatment requires the use of a fine water spray to remove debris and keep the operative area clean. A cloud of bacteria-laden water droplets would have to be controlled so that it doesn’t contaminate surfaces and other humans or get into sensitive electronic equipment. The same precautions might also apply to brushing and flossing.

Should all space travellers have to have a thorough dental exam and comprehensive dental care before being allowed to come on board a spaceship?

How can an astronaut maintain proper oral hygiene during extraterrestrial missions, including the mission to Mars. How would they rinse, or spit? What could be done if they run out of dental floss on the way to Jupiter?

What are the effects of extraterrestrial environments (increased radiation, a lack of gravity, restrictions on certain foods, stomach upset) on the oral cavity?

And what about those weird alien teeth we always see in science fiction movies, like “Alien”? Who is going to look after them?

One last thought: if Dr. Leonard McCoy of the original Star Trek series was nicknamed “Bones”. What should Dr. Rai be called?

References:
Rai B, Kaur J (2011) The history and importance of aeronautic dentistry. J Oral Sci 53(2):143-6

Balwant Rai is a leading expert in aeronautic and space dentistry. He developed the first college course in aeronautic dentistry in 2006, and has since conducted several experiments under microgravity conditions. His studies mainly focus on the effects of microgravity on the human body. Balwant has published many articles on aeronautic dentistry, and he was selected for crew 78 in the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) as health and safety officer and crew 100B as commander, emergency physician and biomedical scientist. Contact him at <raibalwant29@rediffmail.com>.

1001 Uses For Dental Floss #50- Ancient Weeds Prevented Tooth Decay

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By looking at the remains of a prehistoric people living in what is now Sudan, scientists have found bits of a particularly bitter-tasting weed inside the dental calculus (hard deposits) sticking to their teeth. This plant is known to inhibit the growth of Streptoccus mutans, a bacterium which causes tooth decay in humans, but is high in carbohydrates, so it would be a good energy source and would have caused tooth decay if not for its antibacterial properties, although for us moderns, its bitter taste is unlikely to make it a big hit in the toothpaste aisle of your favourite drug store. The cavity rate in the ancients who chewed this plant was surprisingly low (around 1%), while at other locations where this plant wasn’t eaten the rate of tooth decay was much higher – 5%.

So, here’s evidence that it was possible for ancients to reduce their rates of decay by eating the right foods, but unfortunately this wouldn’t work for us – we eat much more sugar and our tolerance for unpalatable food is pretty low. We have to rely on watching our sugar intake, and on preventing decay by brushing and flossing, but if we get a cavity, we have something these ancients didn’t – at least there’s no archeological evidence so far – dentists.

ancient-dental-hygiene-01_81700_990x742 http://t.co/haUO3upSHc