alt Hacker NewsIf you ever get treated at say a dental school, where they will have roving faculty each giving their own opinion to the dental student over your open mouth, you will learn there is so much subjectivity in dental practice. One point of contention is about when to do intervention. Some doctors want the procedure done because they believe the risk of not doing so is large. Others might say you've gotten by this far alright and maybe only intervene if things turn for the worse, better to keep your real tooth as long as you can. Some dentists might want to see a lot of x ray imagery and retakes until their ideal perspectives are captured, others weigh the risk of irradiation and favor taking as few as possible. Any restorative work is very much an art vs a science, some hands are genuinely more skilled and some might take a few redos to get a repair to not break in 2 days from the demands of your natural bite. They might even look at the x ray image of a past root canal from knowledgeable hands like we might the statue of David, showing it to other staff in amazement.
About the only thing that seems to be in agreement across the board is flossing and brushing your teeth.
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Last I checked, actual evidence that flossing is helpful seems pretty limited.
" In light of the results of this comprehensive literature search and critical analysis, it is concluded that a routine instruction to use floss is not supported by scientific evidence."
With modern X ray imaging devices I feel like the dangers of irradiation from dental imaging are probably quite low. If nuclear hormesis holds up, you may actually be better off getting the imaging done.
The problem is the same as the CT scan: as much as my health anxiety would love another set of CT scans to feel relieved about, even if they do find something potentially interesting it may be worse to act on it than to do nothing, while leaving other things that can't show up on imaging unnoticed, potentially diverting attention and giving you a false sense of security.
YouTuber and doctor Dr. Bernard "Chubbyemu" Hsu recently covered an upsetting example to demonstrate how doing additional routine scans wouldn't have helped and may have harmed in a specific sort of scenario that I'm sure many of us fear from time to time. It doesn't prove or even assert that such scans would be useless, only that they are far from a panacea and that it isn't settled science that we'd be better off with it.
https://youtu.be/YDYMMgyN4k0
And to me, I think that ties into how we're doing dentistry wrong: I think taking routine X rays for patients with healthy mouths, no history of issues and no symptoms is reckless. Maybe it is sometimes beneficial, but every single year as a requirement seems insane. Why not every 3? Are we really catching things early or are we drilling into teeth that are fine? I question it.
Of course, I'm just some chuckle fuck on the Internet with zero dentistry experience, but my knee-jerk is that something seems off here.