The man’s name was Bud Rubin, and he was a gentle, Carl Sagan-like wizard in his manner.  “So… bite down for me… thank you…”  His gentle voice and gentle finger pressure just soothed me like a balm.  Then his minions did the painful work.

Almost thirty years later, my teeth are still just about perfect.  Bud Rubin was a wizard, and don’t try to tell me any different.

I personally live in one of the countries facing strong austerity measures (Portugal) and literally people have died.
There are not enough ambulances, there are less maternities, even though we have chronic lack of doctors for what we need our chief of government decided loads had to be fired and told them to emigrate (by the way Germany seems to be using this as a great way to get cheap specialist almost by the bus load).

The whole government and state and what not are supposed to be a cooperative effort by the people for the people and it is supposed to lose money – it has a cost to make the country, any country, a better place. The idea of choosing based solely on cost effectiveness and on profitability is what destroys the weak tissue that holds a society together.

In all “western” countries we must react to the destruction being done, because the heavenly “each man for himself” place that many politicians seem to be aiming for looks too much like the world of the “Mad Max” film series or the “The Book Of Eli”, and I think most people who want that will actually hate it when we get there.

Still – it would be nice to have a more comprehensive and less predatory system in place.  When I needed three broken wisdom teeth surgically extracted, my dentist charged me (well, my insurance company) LESS than the guy before him, who’d extracted the first broken wisdom tooth; AND, he was done – with ZERO pain – in about 45 minutes.  Of course, it took the rest of the day for the lidocaine to wear off, but that’s jbust phhhbine bby bbe, dboctbor.

My dentist is a ninja of the mouth.

I feel so fortunate to have good dental insurance, and enough money to pay for what it doesn’t cover.

The long-term damage to the heart is even more frequent, and then there is t he stigma attached to having even yellow teeth, not to mention rotting teeth, or missing teeth. 

And, no, tooth pain is not some sort of sign of sloth or divine disfavour, or ‘making bad choices’.

I would say that maybe you should listen to less right-wing radio, but sadly, I find this lack of empathy and lack of critical thinking too common among the the so-called millennials, regardless of professed creed. 

Yikes…you might need to Google what right wing radio is, ’cause when you think ‘wing’ you think yummy buffalo wings and when you think right – well, you have to look that one up.

How the in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Most Wholly (Holy [Hole-y]) Tentacle does the majority of a country decide that #1 is a better option?

2) we eat lots and lots of sugar, and people in the past didn’t.

3) There is a vaccine-like strategy for cavities that was developed by a company called Oragenics.  Basically, cavities are initiated primarily by a bacterium called streptococcus mutans, which makes lactic acid that eats through tooth enamel.  The guy behind this (I think his name is Hillman) deleted the gene that makes lactic acid from the genome of strep mutans, then replaced it with an analogous gene from a harmless bacterium and also added a gene that caused his strep mutans to outcompete the cavity-causing strep mutans.  The idea is that people would get their mouths cleaned out really well, gargle with an antibiotic rinse to kill as many strep mutans as possible, then recolonize their mouths with his non-cavity-causing strep mutans, which would then kill off the last of the cavity-causing ones.  One of the big problems is that strep mutans is one of the bacteria that can cause infection of your heart valves if it gets into the bloodstream (which happens all the time while eating or brushing your teeth), and I think there was a lot of concern that the modified bacteria might be more likely to cause that, which would obviously be bad.  It’s a cool idea though.  Last I heard they were still in initial testing, so maybe there were bugs to iron out.

Unlike some of these horror stories, we have a good dentist, that keeps costs low. He won’t even do unnecessary work. I keep asking for vampire fangs longer than the artificial ones I have installed, and he won’t do it because he is more worried about my teeth than the cash I’d hand him. That means he’s a keeper.