DENTAL HEALTH...INTERESTING DENTAL FACTS

DENTAL HEALTH…INTERESTING DENTAL FACTS

Apr 10, 2016 News

By Dr. NerominiFagu
We use our teeth on a daily basis and sometimes even take them for granted. We have had them since infancy and they have become a multipurpose tool with a number of uses from opening difficult packages to chomping down on various foods. This week I am going to share some educational and fun facts about our teeth.
Early Dentists
Back in the day before modern dental science, people had to resort to different ways of dealing with their dental problems. Because dentists didn’t exist yet, the job fell to those who had the appropriate tools. For this reason, blacksmiths and barbers performed the majority of dental work.
Early Toothpaste
Early toothpaste was not like it is today. Ancient civilizations first developed toothpaste that included ingredients such as talc, honey, powdered fruit, burnt or ground shells, and dried flowers. Some stranger ingredients were lizard livers, mice, rabbit heads, and urine. However, some of these tooth paste concoctions also contained elements that were corrosive and damaged the teeth.
Early Extraction Tools
In primitive societies teeth were extracted with a chisel-shaped piece of wood held against the tooth and pounded with a mallet. Early Chinese tooth-pullers used their fingers and spent many hours pulling nails out of planks to develop the necessary strength for dental extractions. Later, ancient Greeks and Romans developed dental forceps of various designs for different uses. Today there is a wide array of dental extraction instruments available.
Dental Anesthesia
Painless dentistry was not always available and in the early days our ancestors had to endure painful extractions. The invention of nitrous oxide, also called laughing gas, made the procedure more bearable. Soon after, local anesthesia was developed, and cocaine was used briefly in dentistry. However, once the addictive properties of cocaine became known it was replaced by the drug Novocain.
Bejeweled Teeth
The Mayans were a complex civilization who had a very advanced understanding of teeth and were very skilled at dental work. While many people today try to whiten their teeth, for the Mayans that was not nearly enough. Some people, more often men, would have small holes made in their teeth that were fitted with gemstones to make their mouths look pretty. In modern dentistry the new craze is dental tattoos.
Synthetically Grown Teeth
Researchers in China have been trying to grow synthetic teeth using stem cells extracted from human urine. As these kinds of experiments cannot be legally performed on humans, they attempted to grow their tooth inside the mouth of a mouse. The results showed the growth of some dental pulp and the beginnings of enamel, but growing the teeth is only the first step. Scientists will still have to figure out how to make our mouth fully accept the new teeth.
You can have more than 200 teeth
If you thought going to the dentist to have a single tooth pulled sounds painful, then imagine if you went and they pulled out over two hundred! Thanks to a unique and benign tumor called an odontoma, a person with this condition can develop numerous teeth. A seventeen-year-old boy in India had to undergo a seven-hour long surgery to remove 232 teeth!
You will spend 38 days of your life brushing teeth
The time spent brushing your teeth from infancy to old age really adds up! Most people will dedicate a total of thirty-eight days of their life to brushing their teeth. Unfortunately, despite all the brushing people do, dental disease is still the second most common disease in the United States – right behind the common cold!
For more information contact OMNI DENTAL at 295 Quamina Street, Georgetown Tel: 227-0025, Parika Tel: 260-3133 or send emails to [email protected].

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DENTAL HEALTH…INTERESTING DENTAL FACTS

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