Ultrasound toothbrush promises painless checks for hidden gum problems
phys.org
phys.org
To expand on this argument. I think even medical health care is more open to innovation that mainly benefits consumer health. Doctors are kind of oblivious of the cost of procedures. This has a host of other problems, but at least innovation and health outcomes are aligned (and less aligned with cost). Dentists are massively private equity owned where I live. Bottom line is everything. You notice that where you’re in the chair. Six minute procedures (the billing time) always take seven. Kids are state insured and always get upsold to whatever procedure is fashionable (or should I say: has the highest margin). I have a strong feeling innovations are swallowed up and shelved in this sector. It makes sense for the PE to kill innovation once you have a market cornered.
The only thing this anti market rant (not my usual spiel) does not have is an explanation for how PE coordinates the suppression of innovation. I should look into the owners of the parties that deliver the dentist supplies and machinery. That would be the best way to corner a market, by owning the supply chain as well.
> toothpaste is usually self-administered haha
very funny. this is a toothbrush, unless you have someone brush your teeth it is always self administered
Because of how ubiquitous fluorinated toothpaste is the argument for adding it to water supplies is significantly reduced.
I mean, that's under attack now.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/g-s1-59452/hhs-rfk-fluoride-d...
"The Department of Health and Human Services is directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make new recommendations on the addition of fluoride to U.S. water sources. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has blamed the fluoridation of water for a number of health problems."
RFK has already made moves in this direction: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/fda-and-rfk-jr-aim-to-re...
> The products targeted by the FDA are sometimes recommended for children and teens who are at increased risk of tooth decay or cavities because of low fluoride in their local drinking water. They usually require a prescription from a pediatrician or dentist. Fluoride-based tablets and lozenges are designed to be chewed or swallowed. Companies also sell drops for babies and infants.
And other politicians:
> Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the marketing of fluoride toothpastes by Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor and Gamble. A press release from his office described the companies’ promotions as “misleading, deceptive and dangerous.”
While there’s insufficient data to say it’s neurotoxic at the recommended levels it doesn’t seem unlikely. Rather it should be required to be proven safe first.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/research/assessments/noncancer/com...
> The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children. The NTP review was designed to evaluate total fluoride exposure from all sources and was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoridated drinking water alone. It is important to note that there were insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level of 0.7 mg/L currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies has a negative effect on children’s IQ.
It seems unlikely we’d have such issues at concentrations so commonly found in natural springs. Much of the world doesn’t add it because it’s already at those levels naturally and has been throughout billions of years.
The question is at what point you should spend money removing it as many communities are forced to, not just how much to add.
If half of the world’s water supplies had lead levels of X you’d expect evolution to make that specific level a non issue. Obviously lead levels above that can and are still problematic.
Not necessarily true if the effect is relatively small compared to other evolutionary pressures. A few points drop in IQ might not be bad for ancient hunter-gatherer tribes but does have a much larger impact in our modern age. Every point increase of average IQ at the population level generally leads to better societal outcomes overall.
To your earlier question, filtering flouride might be beneficial then. We can do flouride teeth treatments at dentists or switch more to nano-hydroxyapatite [1]. Though it'd seem nano-hydroxyapatite needs more safety studies as well.
If it’s a 0.0001% drop then sure evolution would ignore that, but so should we.
Dihydrogen monoxide has significant negative effects, too. It kills thousands every year. It causes severe burns. It can corrode metal. We still, uh, don't ban it from the water supply.
(We've come close, though. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4534017)
I don't doubt that high levels of a thing can be bad. Your own quote acknowledges this "the dose makes the poison" aspect of things.
No I don't support RFK lunatic BS. I just don't like the idea of any potential toxin being blanked added to the population intentionally. Something like that should have lots of skepticism and require massive amounts of proof that it is worth the possible downsides. The government can barely be trusted to operate intelligently when human lives are not at stake.
What, no chlorine to kill bacteria?
Water is a toxin! https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/water-intoxic...
> How do you know some poorly run, underfunded water department doesn't have a malfunctioning fluoride mixer until after you have brain damage from it?
Regular daily testing (and sometimes hourly), as mandated by law. https://www.cityofrochester.gov/2024-water-quality-report "To ensure optimal dental protection, the State Department of Health requires that we monitor fluoride levels on a daily basis."
Hell, we do daily testing of the beach water in my state, let alone the drinking supply. They close them if stuff like E. coli is too high.
Cholrine has a toxic PPM of something like 400 Floride has a toxic PPM of like 2.
Its not the same.
I've seen numerous reports over the years where poor area water departments have had malfunctioning equipment for many years before anyone noticed. Despite all these "required" tests. After all if the watchers don't care who watches them? How about if the watchers just phone it in?
So what? That’s why the EPA sets a maximum level of both, independently.
> I've seen numerous reports over the years where poor area water departments have had malfunctioning equipment for many years before anyone noticed.
Not every bit of equipment is safety critical. If you’d like we can discuss a specific case.
This is a nebulous term that is most frequently used by quacks and snake oil salesmen to make a claim of health that can never be proven or disproven.
I’m not asking you for a reply to me, you can keep it for yourself, but I think if you do this, you’ll find yourself questioning whether or not you are propagating pseudoscience and it will lead you to better rational thought.
I'm not saying floride is bad/good. Just that I don't trust the government and its often very low quality workers to properly dispense a chemical with tight toxicity tolerances. Especially when it's purpose is basically to benifit people whom don't have the desire to take care of themselves. Why do I have to be exposed to something unwillingly because other people are lazy?
I have never particularly heard anyone regard civil engineers as "low quality workers" - but you don't have to trust. Water fluoridation levels can be measured for about $20 with a mail in kit, or you could even get a specialized interferometer for a couple hundred. It should be noted that we already measure these levels in municipal water facilities though.
> Especially when it's purpose is basically to benifit people whom don't have the desire to take care of themselves. Why do I have to be exposed to something unwillingly because other people are lazy?
The primary benefit of water fluoridation is the dental health of developing children and the destitute poor.
I don't really want to get into an ideological argument on hacker news, suffice to say "you should care about other people because that is how a society functions." Case in point, fluoride in my water would make my medication stop working. I still support it in the water I can't even drink without filtering because it's a net benefit to society that ultimately impacts me positively in numerous ways.
You still haven't. I never specified such a thing. Nice straw-man though.
On a side note I wasn't even thinking about this but I actually personally know two civil engineers(or did). One is a gambling addict. The other moved to a different state because he researched that they had more prostitutes there. I promise you the public welfare is low on their list of concerns.
I do care. However when the government is involved care is often manipulated(think of the children) into giving unquestioned authority against people's best interest because its for their own good after all....
i dont see why it couldnt reach the market
Merck & Co 1979: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4287173A/en
Lion Corp 1983: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4693888A/en
In all likelihood these just didn't work, but the commercial interest to not have caries immunization is just too juicy not to theorize!
I asked my dad about it (career Air Force). He laughed and said that gasoline consumption was a major logistics problem for the military. If there were 100 mpg carburetors, the military was going to use them, and to hell with any patent blockade.
(Note all the problems the Germans had in WW2 when the US severely damaged their oil refineries.)
Unlike other areas of medicine it’s also one of those frustrating areas because there are interesting devices, pastes and tools that should be easy to purchase but are locked behind the gates of a prescription.
I have had a lot of dental work done, including 4 implants. But I don't remember a _single_ dental prescription-only item.
I've had only a quarter as many implants so I guess it just depends.
Chlorhexidine mouthwash is OTC.
I have purchased specific pastes from Japan that are OTC there but not in the states, prescription only. I also use a dental appliance at night mid 4 figure costs, it’s 3d printed, the office uses a scanner to create the cad or equivalent to print. Very little hands on but huge margins. Very hard to to find a doctor using a brand I like and even then the dentist does little to nothing in the whole process.
I never said dentists don’t provide valuable care, teeth cleanings are great, checkups are great. Most of the business side is a total grift thought.
If an electric toothbrush vibrates 8000 times per minute (or any other measurable metric), then shouldn't the amount of time you need to brush for be lowered?
Seems like the whole brush your teeth for 2 minutes was just a very general guideline but was never updated to be very scientific since the introduction of electric toothbrushes.
Also, can we have electric toothbrushes advertise vibrations per minute? or some other metric like that?
It seems like over the years they get weaker and weaker.
Yes, it is impossible to clean your teeth as well with a normal brush in the same 2 minutes, but that doesn't mean that under 2 minutes of ultrasonic will suffice.
Like just because an elevator moves twice as fast doesn't mean you can go from 2 elevators to 1 and still service all floors with the same standard.
If you want to see if you're actually brushing enough, change up your strategy and use plaque disclosing tablets to see if you're still adequately hitting everything.
> It seems like over the years they get weaker and weaker
Probably related to people brushing their teeth too hard with these more powerful toothbrushes.
But even if you're comparing mSv to mSv like it's all the same, I'd rather take 33 hours of flight time per year.
There is also a problem in dentistry with chasing ghosts that only exist in imaging and doing unnecessary work.
XRay is pretty finessed at this point. It's an incredibly brief burst with as little power to it as feasible. It's not like ye olden days where people just blasted themselves with radiation not realizing the danger. The knowledge and tech is really sophisticated these days - it's as minimal as possible.
And if you don't get any XRays done, will you then decide to do more flying? Do you really budget your radiation exposure that closely? I'd be way more worried about things like nearby coal plants - both in terms of radiation and other health effects. Or Radon in a basement. Or smoke from nearby wildfires. Almost anything else nearby is a bigger source of health risk than ocassional XRays.
If we're looking at an individuals health over their life, the increase in detection (or even just earlier detection) of all sorts of health issues using Xrays vastly increases average life expectancy compared to the tiny cost of the XRays themselves. It's not even close to the same order of magnitude.
I get that sometimes doctors or dentists do unnecessary imaging of all kinds, and that sucks. It's costly in terms of time and money. But I'd much rather that then the alternative.
I would not call it exactly painless though.
In this was at least it looks like the US system is better. Of course there is no way nuance can be expressed in a short forum like this, but maybe you need to look at the Finland system to see if it is really good enough.
You might not have the dentist or dental hygienist use the probe very often. When they do it's a rounded straight tip device, and they usually call out numbers to an assistant for how deep under the gumline the probe can reach. That's the procedure this device would replace. If nothing else it's an improvement because you don't need an assistant to record the numbers, and if someone has bad gum disease it might hurt them when you poke in there with a probe.