The tooth, the whole tooth and the jawbone too | Hacker News Reader

The tooth, the whole tooth and the jawbone too

thequackdoctor.substack.com

47 pointsHooke25 comments

Teeth treatment alone is enough to be very very thankful that we live today vs even a century ago

If you go further back it lot does not get a lot worse, and further back at least some people would have had less tooth decay because of better diets.

A century ago is probably pretty close to the worst possible time: starchy diets, relatively cheap pure/refined sugar, but no modern dentistry.

> A century ago is probably pretty close to the worst possible time

Which may have attributed/motivated the later advancements that were made.

It took me too many unnecessarily drilled and filled teeth by overzealous dentists to realize this. I removed salt-sugar-fat junk food from the diet and care about my teeth. Absolutely nothing happened with them for one decade now. Again... bloody dentists, they abuse so much the fact that you trust them. They treat your teeth as a piece of sandstone until there is nothing to drill into anymore.

I've read that medieval populations had significant tooth wear due to stone mills depositing stone residue into flour.

Im not sure how this stacks against the time period youre referencing, if it was better or worse.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3094918/

One of the many articles studying dental health of pre-modern populations.

Yeah, it wasn't great. Human teeth aren't really suitable for a long-lived species that eats a lot of carbs.

Even as far back as ancient Egypt [1]. And they had dentistry too [2]! Any time in history where they milled grains into flour with stone, you can see this pattern. In fact, it can be used to differentiate certain agricultural vs non-agricultural populations in the archaeological record [3].

[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19396207/

[2]https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.2...

[3]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16353225/

I've always found this guy's stuff fascinating.

https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/nutrition-greats/...

Lots of pics here.

https://www.ericdavisdental.com/facial-orthotropics-for-your...

Unfortunately, here in the US, the elderly are often completely without any sort of dental coverage.

Which means they can’t afford to do anything besides watch the teeth rot out of their head when problems start showing up, leading to far worse and even more painful and expensive problems.

North American indigenous people were known to have remarkably good teeth.

Probably caused by the relatively small amount of carbs in their diet?

I suspect that the Mexica who ate a lot of maize had more cavities.

Totally agree.

At the same time, we have a lot to go. "Tooth infected? Just drill it out!" which is kinda like "Hand infected? Just chop it off!"

It's only been about a hundred years since some dental colleges began to embrace the theory that germs might have an effect on their patients.

From the OP:

> She suffered a toothache and asked a barber-surgeon to extract the offending molar. He struggled to get the tooth out, but convinced the patient to let him try again with different tools.

> > He fixed his instrument, and with a sudden exertion of all his strength, he brought away the affected Tooth, together with a piece of the jaw-bone, as big as a walnut, and three neighbouring Molares.

(wife is a dentist)

To my knowledge, the state of the art in tooth removal still is basically pliers and a lot of force. The difference today is a trained professional knows the technique and has practiced it a lot. (And anesthetic.)

Here's a random video of it from a quick search on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydv7aomV20

(I’m a dentist)

To further expand on your comment, the alveolar bone is porous so we use pilers on the tooth to compress the alveolar bone, making a big enough hole for the whole tooth to come out in one piece.

Molars have 2-3 roots so it is a lot of efforts. In difficult case, I would divide the tooth into sections to pull each root out.

What's the current state of the art in terms of being able to regrow teeth/regenerate alveolar bone?

One thing is using rapamycin for bone and soft tissue regrowth. The FDA recently approved a human study after previous research showed success in mice.

https://dental.washington.edu/uw-periodontal-study-receives-...

For teeth? The https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7880588/ Anti-USAG-1 serum.

It's laboratory antibody serum from a specific human-sourced monoclonal cell line. Seems to work on all mammals (notably both nice and ferrets; I'm told their teeth system is widely different evolutionary and that humans are kinda in the middle).

A human study should be ongoing on some children in Japan that for genetic reasons are missing a few adult teeth (never grew).

I have 4! At least on the one yanked a few years back. My dental surgeon was amused... and annoyed.

Don’t ever tell a 2 wisdom teeth story: https://youtu.be/cRdjDTMSTtY?si=4Qz0OR6B8t2MG7E9

> To my knowledge, the state of the art in tooth removal still is basically pliers and a lot of force

One time, my dentist told me "I can't get it out, I am going to fetch my dad to do it" when she had trouble removing a tooth. What followed was a not so fun experience in professionally applied dental violence. (Her father was also a dentist)

When wholesale collapse does come for humanity later this century, things are going to get very ugly for people in terms of the lack of modern dentistry and medical care.

Bravo on the title.

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