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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Ancient life is all romantic until you think of what you're going to do when you need a dentist.

I'm in my 40's. My grandfather told me stories about going to the dentist when he was young: Foot-powered pneumatic drills drills were still in use (electric drills were available and up to about 50% higher rpm by the time he was a little boy)

Foot powered drills reached 2,000 rpm and only dates to the mid 1800's. Early electric dental drills reached about 3000 rpm in 1914. Modern dental drills are 40,000 rpm - 800,000 rpm depending on type and use (with the highest rpm being mostly for precision work).

I shudder to think what the 2k-3k rpm ones would be like to be subjected to - I find the low rpm current drills used for high torque, low precision work bad enough.

But the hand drills that went before them were typically in the region of 15 rpm...

So as someone who has been through enough dental work that new dentists tends to marvel at all the exciting work they can see examples of when examining me, I absolutely share the terror when thinking of ancient dentistry. (On the other hand, I'd probably have died of complications in my 20's if I'd had the same dental damage back then)

One might argue that modern dentistry is just barely keeping up with the ability of modern society to destroy teeth.

As an unintentional connoisseur of modern dentistry techniques (my teeth are unusually soft, as every dentist I've ever had since my first filling at age 4 have told me as they've poked them and marvelled at it), I think it's more than keeping up with our ability to destroy teeth in terms of improving the quality of repairs.

E.g. I have no metal fillings left any more - I had many when I was younger - as whenever the old metal fillings came loose the were replaced by composite fillings or porcelain.

And I hardly have any plastic composite fillings left either, as they got replaced by porcelain as porcelain have gotten cheaper and faster to do. My teeth overall look better today at 46 than they did in my teens despite far more damage.

Today porcelain fillings are about as good as gold fillings used to be, but cheaper and better looking (no, I'm not the type to find gold teeth aesthetically pleasing).

Getting work done has gotten more comfortable too (so much so that during my last round of dental work my dentist had to use a bite block as I kept falling asleep in the chair and he got tired of waking me up; though admittedly that is probably at least partly because I'm so used to it)

But I fully agree that we absolutely badly need a revolution in preventing decay and/or fully restoring teeth rather than repairing or replacing them, though.

I read about some amoeba you can colonize your mouth with that will eat the caries causing bacteria.

Main downside is aesthetic: the amoeba colonization apparently turns your teeth grey or so.

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