Dental humour

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 Uses For Dental Floss #59- Fashion Toothpastes

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A little late for the end-of-year holidays, but I can’t always be up-to-date on everything dental. Now toothpaste has joined so many other products as worthy of a fashion article. In Vogue Magazine, an article of 8 toothpaste products deemed worthy of being considered as gifts (and why not throw in some floss) was in the December 20 issue, just in time for those last-minute head-scratchers trying to come up with the ultimate unusual and impressive article for the gift stocking. They come in a variety of flavours, including:

1. David’s Natural Toothpaste, touted as being fluoride-free (actually not a good thing, in my professional opinion) and sulphate-free (I don’t know what the value of this is, but I’m not a chemist or public health person.

2. Lebon Cinnamon-Mint flavour

3. Jarvis Jasmine Mint

4. Theodent Kids, which has a chocolate flavour

5. Couto Pasta Dentifrica

6. Acca Cappa

7. Boka Mint Natural Toothpaste

They all look fancy and flavourful, and may make you feel good about taking care of your teeth, so check them out. Not an endorsement, though, just thought this was interesting. I haven’t looked into the prices or availability, though.

So, brush your teeth every day and floss them too. Again, floss your teeth.
But like one of my dentistry teachers once told his patients, only floss the teeth you want to keep. I case you have favourites.

To see the original Vogue article, go to:

http://www.vogue.com/article/gift-worthy-toothpaste-davids-marvis-holiday-sweet-tooth

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 #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 #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