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Comment by Rhapso | Hacker News Reader

I'm increasingly of the opinion that teeth just need to go. They don't heal, so all your efforts are only to postpone their decay. The pulp and nerves only serve to help them grow and then only provide a liability. Modern implants seem overall superior. If you have the money and tolerance for short-term-pain i'd advise just yanking them all and getting implants.

Edit: I'd like to apologise. I was raised in a rural area without floride or proper dental care. My teeth are in a place where no matter what I do I will be losing almost all of them over the next decade. I am frustrated.

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My wife is a dentist so, using similar reasoning, I once asked her why people don't do this. She said the problem is that implants ultimately connect into bone and that connection fails over time -- your body is designed to renew the connection from jawbone to tooth but without a tooth it eventually degrades.

Edit reply to your edit: I am sorry about your teeth. It is amazing how dental education still isn't pervasive -- she gets teenage patients in Oakland who've never been told to brush their teeth and who will lose them all at a young age. Modern dentistry can work some wonders, so long term I hope you are doomed only to some discomfort and costs and not more severe problems.

They don't heal, so all your efforts are only to postpone their decay.

Uh, no. Your enamel can't be replaced. However, your dentin is regenerated constantly, in the same way that bone is regenerated. People with really good genetics can even over-generate dentin. Not only have I read about this, I know this firsthand, because I have developed "spurs" on the corners of some teeth where the enamel has gotten chipped. Dentin isn't as hard as enamel, but it's still pretty darn hard. Plenty hard enough to chew with.

Please don't give that advice. The current implants have a lot of long-term problems. I hope there will be a solution but at this point you would be crazy to remove healthy teeth.

> Teeth don't heal...

Read the book, "Kiss Your Dentist Goodbye".

Despite the clickbaity title (well, the paper book equivalent), it talks about how your teeth naturally do regenerate in the proper conditions, and what those conditions should be [1]. I've been personally using the system for a few years, and the last couple times I went to the doctor, no cavities have been found and my teeth are healthy.

1. If you want to skip the why and get to the how, you can read this web page and other links on it for more detail: https://drellie.com/my-system/ The only thing I do differently is include flossing using floss sticks.

Do implants last longer and/or work better? My understanding is that they try to save the original tooth because implants just push the problem down the road a bit farther, but you have to replace them again later.

This is correct. Implants are no match for the real thing. They wear away your jaw bone over time. Dentures are the same way. You're just buying another decade until you have no teeth.

This is completely incorrect. I have had a tooth implant since 2001 and it has not 'worn away my jaw', quite the opposite. Teeth implants preserve jaw bone.

I've had an implant for 25 years, and the bone around it is normal.

I'm pretty sure this was the strategy before something resembling modern dentistry and basic oral hygiene became common place... As in, people would get all their teeth pulled out and made into a set of dentures for their 20th birthday due to the inevitability of the pain and loss after that age if they didn't.

I empathise with your having to deal with dental problems... Everyone experiences it at some point and no one enjoys it. But I think this is the right strategy for science, perhaps it wont help us directly, but it will help our ancestors.

Having went through removing a single healthy tooth (Wisdom) I'd say that yanking 20+ teeth is a crazy endeavour.

People used to do it in the past, I remember reading about a groom who paid for his wife to have all her teeth removed as a wedding present.

I recall a crackpot that pulled every last one of his own teeth and replaced them one at a time with polished rocks from his own gravel driveway.

I think it was a video segment on The Daily Show, with Beth Littleford as the correspondent. So that would have been quite a long time ago, somewhere from 1996 to 2000.

I had 13 teeth taken out total when my wisdoms got taken out.

Having wisdom teeth pulled is a whole different story. Years after I had those out, I had two premolars removed under local anesthesia. A couple of hard pulls and it was over, and they never even hurt after the novocaine wore off. (Well they hurt if I poked the bare spot, but otherwise they were just fine.)

All hygiene is a scam forced on us by the big bathing industry. Plug your nose and join us.

> Modern implants seem overall superior

This your problem, they absolutely aren't. Please take care of your teeth, people.

"I'd like to apologise. I was raised in a rural area without floride or proper dental care. My teeth are in a place where no matter what I do I will be losing almost all of them over the next decade. I am frustrated."

I am in a similar boat. I first learned about flossing in my 20s. My mouth is now full of crowns and fillings and it's just a matter of time to get implants or something else.

Unfortunately dentistry doesn't have any "good" approaches. All of them are just various degrees of "bad".

But you can slow down the decay a lot. The best thing I have ever done was to get an oral irrigator. It has helped my gums a lot so my teeth are pretty stable now.

You're getting downvoted like crazy, but I agree at least conceptually even if implants aren't quite up to the right standards yet. Get me some that will last the rest of my life with no side effects and I'm on board.

Are the implants really that good? I have bad teeth and would like to hope so but i don't think we 're there yet.

[unhelpful question deleted, in response to parent's edit]

No, just raised poor in Appalachia on spring water (no floride) and a cultural expectation that false teeth and dieing in your 60s are normal.

Sorry for the snippy response. In my (possible) defense, it was before your edit. The really sad thing is that while even well-cared-for teeth do fail eventually, that time is typically after one turns 70yo. I was also raised on spring water, but my well-informed parents made certain that we took vitamins that contained fluoride on a daily basis.

> vitamins that contained fluoride on a daily basis.

Thought that flouride worked topically?

These are solid, chewable vitamins. Presumably the action of chewing is enough to handle the topical application? I think there was a prescription from a dentist, which presumably would prevent children who have fluoridated public water from overexposure to fluoride.

To be fair, false teeth and dying in your 60s are normal in many parts of the U.S.

Where I grew up people still put Dr. Pepper in baby bottles, and become grandfathers at 35. That sh*t doesn't just happen on TV.

Though, now that I think about it, it's only in the past 30 or so years that soft drinks have become so cheap that people drink it almost exclusively. When I was a little kid poor families could only afford to drink watered-downed Kool-Aid, if that. So the soft drinks->bad teeth thing is probably a recent development, which fits with the increase in diabetes, too. Not just soft drinks, but the affordability of high caloric foods, generally. But false teeth were still far more common than even today.

Do you brush and floss?

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