> "Financial aspects of dental radiography also deserve further study," Feit added
No joke. That is a major money maker. There is minimal cost per-use and your insurance pays $200 for it (my last one was $186.00 for instance). The dentists would be crazy not to recommend them as of often as possible.
Fluoride "rinses" are likely up there too. Rinse for a few seconds and they charge the insurance $50 or something for it.
I had some dentist that figured out a way to bill my insurance once every 6 months and get paid. He was insistent I get X-Rays every 6 months as a result. I quit going to that dentist.
Remember the old adage--it's the dose that makes the poison. There is *nothing* that is not lethal if consumed in sufficient quantity. That includes *everything* that we require to live, although in some cases it becomes effectively impossible to ingest a lethal amount.
Thus showing that something is toxic doesn't mean it's something you should never consume. And note that fluoridation started because it was observed that the people in areas with higher natural levels benefited.
Fluoride may potentially have some negative effects but we’ve been drinking Florida red water across the world for several decades and different countries have added fluoridation at different times etc, and it’s hard to see any severe effect that would qualify it as anything close to “madness”.
If it was “highly toxic” it would be obvious because people would be getting sick or dying after ingesting it. Maybe it’s got some issues that aren’t obvious, but there’s not a clear answer.
However you don’t swallow mouth rinses like Act, so any nonobvious issue is also greatly reduced.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids
Not just x-rays: "As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence."
Dentistry might be the wild west full of snake oil salesmen compared to medicine but it also doesn't have nearly as many middle men and additional parties perverting incentives and creating hell for patients that medicine does.
I'm going to also throw anecdotes into the bucket: three dentists completely missed a cavity on one of my rear molars (wisdom teeth) until I mentioned pain, and then they poked around physically and said, "oh yeah, that's a big one."
I had the same but with a cracked crown. The dentist did the bite wing x-rays, did whatever examination they do, and then at the end said it all looked good. They even did some fancy 3d scan trying to sell me on a mouth guard or those transparent braces.
Then I mentioned I had pain around the crown whenever I ate something sweet or sour. The dentist took another look and said "oh yeah the crown is cracked"
So now I know I either have a cracked crown or I don't. Great service.
What kind of dental x-rays they took? Panoramic (shows the whole row of teeth in one image), CBCT (volumetric 3D) or intraoral (a digital sensor or film was put inside your mouth)?
Not OP, but I have only ever had the type of dental x-ray where they stick the L-shaped plastic into your mouth and make your bite down while they take photos. I had no idea there were others.
The original machine I used looked like a TSA body scanner but for your head. Somehow it hit plates that were developed into an image the dentist could present to me.
Your anecdote corroborates one of the key points in the article:
> For instance, a 2021 systemic review of 77 studies that included data on a total of 15,518 tooth sites or surfaces found that using X-rays to detect early tooth decay led to a high degree of false-negative results. In other words, it led to missed cases.
The article isn't just saying you're getting unnecessary radiation. It's also saying that relying on x-rays lets dentists be lazy about finding problems while also billing you for unnecessary work.
Some dentist practices (maybe they are chains) do seem very shady when it comes to overtreatment. I remember on my first visit to an office that I was recommended customized trays that I could wear overnight to have my teeth/gums soaked in hydrogen peroxide gel. This recommendation felt like a sales pitch and when I researched the proposed treatment code later I started to find some dentists online claiming that they wouldn’t recommend those because they are not clinically proven to work against gum disease.
I understand that radiation effects are cumulative but is this overexposure source worth fighting against as a patient?
It's one of those things which people endlessly argue about, but once one flosses once or twice, the rotting bits of food in between their teeth become very unappealing to them.
That's one of those statements, like a natural empiricist saying they don't believe in the big bang, that people tend to latch onto and run with without stopping to evaluate.
Flossing daily isn't necessary if you're an adequate manual brusher. Relatively few people are adequate manual brushers.
Buy a good electric toothbrush, floss periodically.
If flossing lowers the risk of certain types of gum disease and certain types of gum disease are associated with Alzheimer’s, then maybe flossing is (indirectly) good for your brain.
I still floss because I think its gross and I have bad gaps in some of my teeth, but I think flossing can also cause harms, for example some floss has PFAS in it.
>But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
That's not a meaningful standard for any health intervention. If I'd apply everything to my body that wasn't proven to hurt I'd spend a hundred bucks every morning and two hours in the bathroom. If "it doesn't hurt" was sufficient basis for a recommendation our doctors would tell us to swallow homeopathic medicine every morning.
It seems pretty obvious that anything you apply has to have at least some measurable impact, otherwise you're basically in the same category as the supplement industry.
Completely anecdotal but my gums flare up and just feel disgusting when I don't floss for too long.
I don't do the dentist recommended 2/week but if I stop flossing for over a month I notice significant decrease in my gum health. It becomes excruciatingly painful to brush and this stage and my mouth is full of blood afterwards.
Australian here, and I will say that I fully trust my dentist. I have had one tiny cavity in nearly 20 years. X-rays are every 2 years, and it's to see between the teeth where they obviously can't see visually. I've been told the radiation dose is the equivalent of an hour on a plane flight.
Basically everyone I know only goes to the dentist when something very specific is wrong, and they're all fine. I'm honestly very suspicious of the whole dental enterprise.
My bugbear with dentists in the US (after living my first 30 years in the UK) is that they all continually hassle me to have my wisdom teeth removed. Said teeth have never caused me any problems and are all through the gums. I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
I had the opposite experience. I told the dentist that I thought my wisdom teeth were causing my migraines, and they said it was possible but unlikely, and didn't really recommend removing them. I pushed, and they relented. They were right, it didn't make any difference.
Oddly, I only had wisdom teeth on one side, and not the other. So only 2 teeth were removed.
I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.
The other thing that can interfere with the nerves in your jaw is having them extracted. One of my family members has no feeling there because the extraction was bungled years ago.
I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it.
I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with.
As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways (with the tops facing the front of your mouth). The wisdom teeth then hit the rest of your teeth and basically bulldoze your mouth.
I have no idea how true/bullshit that is, but it's what I was told to get me to finally acquiesce to the procedure.
It's so odd how experiences vary on this. I'm in my 40s (in the US) and still have all four of my wisdom teeth. When I was a young adult, my dentist told me that they were all intact, and (over time) not moving, so there was no reason to do anything with them. I've gone through a few other dentists in other places since then, and no dentist (including a recent one I had that annoyed me by recommending harmless but unnecessary procedures so they could pad their bill for my insurance) has ever pushed me to get my wisdom teeth removed. When I've started as a new patient at a new practice, they've noted I still have them, and after I say "yup, they've been stable since I was a kid, and cause me no pain", they immediately move on and don't bring it up again.
Mine recommends the same, but it’s not because I need them out now, but because by the time I’m elderly I might be more likely to need them out, but by that time the surgery might be very difficult for me. As he pitched it to me, “get them out now while you’re young and it’s no big deal”.
I haven’t decided yet since they cause me no problems now and so far I’m to keep them relatively clean, but I have known several elderly family members who eventually needed molars removed because they hadn’t/couldn’t clean them well enough and it was a very difficult surgery for them.
They're not a problem until they are. I recently had a molar out likely due to damage from an impacted wisdom tooth I had out years ago. The rear of the molar was compromised on the back, and there was no way to save the tooth. If I had my molars out earlier when I was young, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
>>>I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
This may be specific to location, but would it be the same dentist recommending the treatment as performing the surgery? Here (BC, Canada) everyone I've known who's had wisdom teeth removed had it done by a specialist, not the dentist that suggested it (which presumably cuts down on self-serving recommendations).
I mean not if the dentist refers them to a specialist. Usually that involves a kickback; there's a whole slew of problems with that in the US with lactation specialists referring parents to dentists over a tongue tie problem without actually viewing the baby.
I've also retained my wisdom teeth, despite some of them not erupting and being impacted. It's certainly easier to get them out when you're young compared to when you're older, but if you've still got them as an adult, it's not worth removing them unless they're causing a problem, even if insurance is paying for it (all procedures can have side-effects).
It's one of these areas where people (including medical professionals) hold strong beliefs, but then it turns out that there are other highly-developed countries where this is not routinely practiced, and the outcomes aren't necessarily different.
Routine wisdom teeth removal is not a thing in most of Europe. Another random example are colonoscopies and routine flu vaccines (except for the elderly).
I've generally assumed the simplest explanation is that many of these weakly-supported procedures are regular, consistent income streams for the people who perform them in the US: my four wisdom teeth (that were causing me serious issues at age 19) cost $2k to remove nearly 20 years ago, and I know colonoscopies are billed to insurance in the thousands. There's not much incentive to move to cheaper tests or wait-and-see, when you can just do it to everyone who reaches a certain age by default.
Presumably flu shots are good business for the manufacturers, though I'm not sure about the science. After having the flu as a healthy late-twenty-something a while ago, which was...intensely horrible, I've chosen to get it ever since.
Flu may not be too dangerous in people who aren't elderly but it still sucks. Can a non-elderly, not in any other high risk group, person get seasonal flu vaccination in Europe if they ask for it, and is it covered by European health care systems?
This guy infamously has a problem with each and every HN user and chooses to display an NSFW image saying such if your request's referrer header has news.ycombinator.com. Don't click.
In my experience they always find something that they "have time to take care of right now if you want". I've heard anecdotes of folks going to get second opinions that reaches a different conclusion.
Just for one anecdote, three years ago my then-dentist (who was a part of a franchise practice and probably under pressure to bill) told me that I had 12 (!!) cavities across all quadrants of my mouth that needed to be filled immediately.
I went to another dentist in the area, they took some x-rays themselves, and told me that there was nothing that needed immediate work - maybe one pre-cavity that would eventually turn in to something but certainly not worth doing anything with now.
Three years later (and sticking with that new dentist) I still haven't needed to have anything done (and certainly don't have any pain in my mouth anywhere either).
Yeah, I didn't go to the dentist for a few years when I was in grad school and had no insurance. My first visit with a new dentist he informs me I had three cavities. I had no pain but just thought it was prudent to get checked out. I went ahead with the fillings and he nicked a nerve. For days I was in horrible pain and just assumed that was what happened when you had a filling. A few years later I started experiencing extreme shooting pains in the side of my mouth. Then an abscess formed. It turned out the tooth was dying and I had go get a root canal (which actually wasn't that bad).
The root canal was eight years ago. I brush and floss twice a day (brushing without flossing feels weird to me now). I haven't been to the dentist since before the pandemic and my teeth feel completely fine.
In Australia they always found me exactly 4 things to do for a total sum of just above $1000 (but never the same things to do). It’s so regular that I can only assume this is the recommended amount by the marketing that a dentist can extract each time.
I don't think anyone is arguing that routine x-rays don't ever find something that wouldn't otherwise be found. That would be a pretty amazing and surprising result. But it still can be the case that, for most situations, regular x-rays are not only unnecessary, but can be harmful too.
Procedures make money, and a nonzero fraction of dentists are all about selling more procedures and add-ons that offer negligible value because they want $$$.
I wish this article was more clear when it said that adults that don’t face an increased risk of dental carries means. I’m not sure if I should avoid the x-rays, because I’m not at risk for carries or if I should just try to delay them.
I like looking at the Xrays of my teeth, it's fun. Current dentist will talk about the status of problem teeth, and maybe after a few years think it gets worse and needs to be filled, or the fluoride took care of it. Seems a little extra, but it's safe.
People are talking about x-rays as if they are simply a test for cavities. They serve other purposes.
I get an annual dental checkup (military) with the around-the-face x-ray machine. The first thing the dentist does is to compare it to last year's scan. The x-ray allows them to spot all sorts of things they would otherwise miss, especially since I don't think I've ever seen exactly the same dentist twice. Teeth move. Teeth wear down or chip. Sometimes this can be spotted by eye but the x-ray record is more reliable and more easily communicated between offices.
As for radiation, if you are worried about an annual dental x-ray then you better not fly in an airplane, live in Colorado, or hang around too long near the bananas at the grocery store.
> Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even.
Tell me you are American, without telling me you are American.
PSA: to hot beverages and food are a constant source of scartissue and cell damage in mouths . and if the dice falls wrong to many times, chancer precursors.. so dont risk to hot stuff
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is a little off-topic, but you're correct that drinking too-hot liquids increase the risk of multiple types of cancer.
The same is true of alcohol-based mouthwash and alcohol itself. Anything that routine damages cells is going to be a carcinogen.
> "Financial aspects of dental radiography also deserve further study," Feit added
No joke. That is a major money maker. There is minimal cost per-use and your insurance pays $200 for it (my last one was $186.00 for instance). The dentists would be crazy not to recommend them as of often as possible.
Fluoride "rinses" are likely up there too. Rinse for a few seconds and they charge the insurance $50 or something for it.
I had some dentist that figured out a way to bill my insurance once every 6 months and get paid. He was insistent I get X-Rays every 6 months as a result. I quit going to that dentist.
At least fouride rinses provide some benefit. Although you can get much more benefit from buying a bottle of Act and rinsing with it every day.
You sure about that?
Fluoride has a bunch of effects on human bodies; it's highly toxic to begin with, putting it in drinking water is beyond madness.
Remember the old adage--it's the dose that makes the poison. There is *nothing* that is not lethal if consumed in sufficient quantity. That includes *everything* that we require to live, although in some cases it becomes effectively impossible to ingest a lethal amount.
Thus showing that something is toxic doesn't mean it's something you should never consume. And note that fluoridation started because it was observed that the people in areas with higher natural levels benefited.
Fluoridation started because they wanted to get rid of toxic byproducts from making aluminum, the rest is marketing.
Fluoride may potentially have some negative effects but we’ve been drinking Florida red water across the world for several decades and different countries have added fluoridation at different times etc, and it’s hard to see any severe effect that would qualify it as anything close to “madness”.
Really, you don't see it?
If it was “highly toxic” it would be obvious because people would be getting sick or dying after ingesting it. Maybe it’s got some issues that aren’t obvious, but there’s not a clear answer.
However you don’t swallow mouth rinses like Act, so any nonobvious issue is also greatly reduced.
Or, it could be a contributing factor to any of the umpteen lifestyle diseases we're dealing with atm.
Not swallowing is great, but I'm sure the concentration is high enough for it to be absorbed anyway.
Like with everything else, the dosage makes the poison.
I personally intend to stay vigilante to dihydrogen monoxide poisoning.
https://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Yeah, but the doses are way different for different substances, as are the side effects.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
More like profiting from making people sick, aka. modern medicine.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids
Not just x-rays: "As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-tro...
Dentistry might be the wild west full of snake oil salesmen compared to medicine but it also doesn't have nearly as many middle men and additional parties perverting incentives and creating hell for patients that medicine does.
I'm going to also throw anecdotes into the bucket: three dentists completely missed a cavity on one of my rear molars (wisdom teeth) until I mentioned pain, and then they poked around physically and said, "oh yeah, that's a big one."
I had the same but with a cracked crown. The dentist did the bite wing x-rays, did whatever examination they do, and then at the end said it all looked good. They even did some fancy 3d scan trying to sell me on a mouth guard or those transparent braces.
Then I mentioned I had pain around the crown whenever I ate something sweet or sour. The dentist took another look and said "oh yeah the crown is cracked"
So now I know I either have a cracked crown or I don't. Great service.
What kind of dental x-rays they took? Panoramic (shows the whole row of teeth in one image), CBCT (volumetric 3D) or intraoral (a digital sensor or film was put inside your mouth)?
Not OP, but I have only ever had the type of dental x-ray where they stick the L-shaped plastic into your mouth and make your bite down while they take photos. I had no idea there were others.
That's a bitewing, intraoral.
The original machine I used looked like a TSA body scanner but for your head. Somehow it hit plates that were developed into an image the dentist could present to me.
I have had both types, within the same office, over time.
Your anecdote corroborates one of the key points in the article:
> For instance, a 2021 systemic review of 77 studies that included data on a total of 15,518 tooth sites or surfaces found that using X-rays to detect early tooth decay led to a high degree of false-negative results. In other words, it led to missed cases.
The article isn't just saying you're getting unnecessary radiation. It's also saying that relying on x-rays lets dentists be lazy about finding problems while also billing you for unnecessary work.
Some dentist practices (maybe they are chains) do seem very shady when it comes to overtreatment. I remember on my first visit to an office that I was recommended customized trays that I could wear overnight to have my teeth/gums soaked in hydrogen peroxide gel. This recommendation felt like a sales pitch and when I researched the proposed treatment code later I started to find some dentists online claiming that they wouldn’t recommend those because they are not clinically proven to work against gum disease.
I understand that radiation effects are cumulative but is this overexposure source worth fighting against as a patient?
Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
It's one of those things which people endlessly argue about, but once one flosses once or twice, the rotting bits of food in between their teeth become very unappealing to them.
That's one of those statements, like a natural empiricist saying they don't believe in the big bang, that people tend to latch onto and run with without stopping to evaluate.
Flossing daily isn't necessary if you're an adequate manual brusher. Relatively few people are adequate manual brushers.
Buy a good electric toothbrush, floss periodically.
If flossing lowers the risk of certain types of gum disease and certain types of gum disease are associated with Alzheimer’s, then maybe flossing is (indirectly) good for your brain.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt...
the whole Alzheimers field recently got turned upside down... not sure how to assess them anymore... https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-...
Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help. But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
I still floss because I think its gross and I have bad gaps in some of my teeth, but I think flossing can also cause harms, for example some floss has PFAS in it.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/d...
You can say the exact same thing about eating a blank piece of paper twice a day. Pascal's wager is no way to live life.
> Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help.
It's demonstrable that something like a bean skin, lodged in your teeth, will erode the teeth touching it.
>cannot be proven to hurt
Inserting floss between your teeth pushes them slightly apart. I wonder if that could have any negatives?
Considering orthodontic treatments, no. I imagine you could damage the connective tissues under the gums though.
>But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
That's not a meaningful standard for any health intervention. If I'd apply everything to my body that wasn't proven to hurt I'd spend a hundred bucks every morning and two hours in the bathroom. If "it doesn't hurt" was sufficient basis for a recommendation our doctors would tell us to swallow homeopathic medicine every morning.
It seems pretty obvious that anything you apply has to have at least some measurable impact, otherwise you're basically in the same category as the supplement industry.
Completely anecdotal but my gums flare up and just feel disgusting when I don't floss for too long.
I don't do the dentist recommended 2/week but if I stop flossing for over a month I notice significant decrease in my gum health. It becomes excruciatingly painful to brush and this stage and my mouth is full of blood afterwards.
So I'm sticking to flossing pretty often now.
Perhaps you'll find it useful that a double-blind study found no improvement in outcome from use of a parachute when jumping out of a helicopter.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
That's not at all what that "study" says. It is a critique (in poor taste if you ask me) that everything does not require a double-blind study.
My most recent trip to the dentist include a brief recommendation to floss, but they weren't really pushing it like they used to.
Australian here, and I will say that I fully trust my dentist. I have had one tiny cavity in nearly 20 years. X-rays are every 2 years, and it's to see between the teeth where they obviously can't see visually. I've been told the radiation dose is the equivalent of an hour on a plane flight.
Basically everyone I know only goes to the dentist when something very specific is wrong, and they're all fine. I'm honestly very suspicious of the whole dental enterprise.
Other outdated yet still routine dental practices include polishing of teeth during checkups for any justification other than cosmetic reasons
My bugbear with dentists in the US (after living my first 30 years in the UK) is that they all continually hassle me to have my wisdom teeth removed. Said teeth have never caused me any problems and are all through the gums. I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
I had the opposite experience. I told the dentist that I thought my wisdom teeth were causing my migraines, and they said it was possible but unlikely, and didn't really recommend removing them. I pushed, and they relented. They were right, it didn't make any difference.
Oddly, I only had wisdom teeth on one side, and not the other. So only 2 teeth were removed.
I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-teeth-removal-neces...
The other thing that can interfere with the nerves in your jaw is having them extracted. One of my family members has no feeling there because the extraction was bungled years ago.
I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it.
I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with.
As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways (with the tops facing the front of your mouth). The wisdom teeth then hit the rest of your teeth and basically bulldoze your mouth.
I have no idea how true/bullshit that is, but it's what I was told to get me to finally acquiesce to the procedure.
It can be true for some people. Look at the lower right one on the xray here: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wisdom-teeth.html
Unless you wanna see an adviceanimals take on a hairy ballsack, you've gotta open that incognito.
I don't think Jamie wants HN traffic on his blog.
It's so odd how experiences vary on this. I'm in my 40s (in the US) and still have all four of my wisdom teeth. When I was a young adult, my dentist told me that they were all intact, and (over time) not moving, so there was no reason to do anything with them. I've gone through a few other dentists in other places since then, and no dentist (including a recent one I had that annoyed me by recommending harmless but unnecessary procedures so they could pad their bill for my insurance) has ever pushed me to get my wisdom teeth removed. When I've started as a new patient at a new practice, they've noted I still have them, and after I say "yup, they've been stable since I was a kid, and cause me no pain", they immediately move on and don't bring it up again.
Mine recommends the same, but it’s not because I need them out now, but because by the time I’m elderly I might be more likely to need them out, but by that time the surgery might be very difficult for me. As he pitched it to me, “get them out now while you’re young and it’s no big deal”.
I haven’t decided yet since they cause me no problems now and so far I’m to keep them relatively clean, but I have known several elderly family members who eventually needed molars removed because they hadn’t/couldn’t clean them well enough and it was a very difficult surgery for them.
They're not a problem until they are. I recently had a molar out likely due to damage from an impacted wisdom tooth I had out years ago. The rear of the molar was compromised on the back, and there was no way to save the tooth. If I had my molars out earlier when I was young, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
>>>I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
This may be specific to location, but would it be the same dentist recommending the treatment as performing the surgery? Here (BC, Canada) everyone I've known who's had wisdom teeth removed had it done by a specialist, not the dentist that suggested it (which presumably cuts down on self-serving recommendations).
I mean not if the dentist refers them to a specialist. Usually that involves a kickback; there's a whole slew of problems with that in the US with lactation specialists referring parents to dentists over a tongue tie problem without actually viewing the baby.
I've also retained my wisdom teeth, despite some of them not erupting and being impacted. It's certainly easier to get them out when you're young compared to when you're older, but if you've still got them as an adult, it's not worth removing them unless they're causing a problem, even if insurance is paying for it (all procedures can have side-effects).
I am in the US and I had my wisdom teeth filled. Granted after the procedure my dentist said he was never filling wisdom teeth again, lol.
Filled? What does this mean?
It means they fixed cavities on those teeth.
I was told they get harder to remove when you’re older
It's one of these areas where people (including medical professionals) hold strong beliefs, but then it turns out that there are other highly-developed countries where this is not routinely practiced, and the outcomes aren't necessarily different.
Routine wisdom teeth removal is not a thing in most of Europe. Another random example are colonoscopies and routine flu vaccines (except for the elderly).
I've generally assumed the simplest explanation is that many of these weakly-supported procedures are regular, consistent income streams for the people who perform them in the US: my four wisdom teeth (that were causing me serious issues at age 19) cost $2k to remove nearly 20 years ago, and I know colonoscopies are billed to insurance in the thousands. There's not much incentive to move to cheaper tests or wait-and-see, when you can just do it to everyone who reaches a certain age by default.
Presumably flu shots are good business for the manufacturers, though I'm not sure about the science. After having the flu as a healthy late-twenty-something a while ago, which was...intensely horrible, I've chosen to get it ever since.
Flu may not be too dangerous in people who aren't elderly but it still sucks. Can a non-elderly, not in any other high risk group, person get seasonal flu vaccination in Europe if they ask for it, and is it covered by European health care systems?
Yes, it's much harder for a dentist to convince a 30 year old adult than is to convince a 12 year and his helicopter parents.
https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wisdom-teeth.html
This guy infamously has a problem with each and every HN user and chooses to display an NSFW image saying such if your request's referrer header has news.ycombinator.com. Don't click.
Sorry, I thought he disabled that.
Don’t you polish your prized possessions?
and fees. But are checkups themselves backed by evidence? Unless you say “It hurts there”, will the dentist find anything on their own?
Good question, cochrane says longer check-up intervals than the standard 6-months aren't any worse assuming you don't have pre-existing conditions
https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-how-often-shou...
> will the dentist find anything on their own?
In my experience they always find something that they "have time to take care of right now if you want". I've heard anecdotes of folks going to get second opinions that reaches a different conclusion.
Just for one anecdote, three years ago my then-dentist (who was a part of a franchise practice and probably under pressure to bill) told me that I had 12 (!!) cavities across all quadrants of my mouth that needed to be filled immediately.
I went to another dentist in the area, they took some x-rays themselves, and told me that there was nothing that needed immediate work - maybe one pre-cavity that would eventually turn in to something but certainly not worth doing anything with now.
Three years later (and sticking with that new dentist) I still haven't needed to have anything done (and certainly don't have any pain in my mouth anywhere either).
Yeah, I didn't go to the dentist for a few years when I was in grad school and had no insurance. My first visit with a new dentist he informs me I had three cavities. I had no pain but just thought it was prudent to get checked out. I went ahead with the fillings and he nicked a nerve. For days I was in horrible pain and just assumed that was what happened when you had a filling. A few years later I started experiencing extreme shooting pains in the side of my mouth. Then an abscess formed. It turned out the tooth was dying and I had go get a root canal (which actually wasn't that bad).
The root canal was eight years ago. I brush and floss twice a day (brushing without flossing feels weird to me now). I haven't been to the dentist since before the pandemic and my teeth feel completely fine.
In Australia they always found me exactly 4 things to do for a total sum of just above $1000 (but never the same things to do). It’s so regular that I can only assume this is the recommended amount by the marketing that a dentist can extract each time.
A routine dental X-ray recently caught my failed root canal and the tooth needs to be extracted asap or I risk pain, huge swelling, and nerve damage.
I don't think anyone is arguing that routine x-rays don't ever find something that wouldn't otherwise be found. That would be a pretty amazing and surprising result. But it still can be the case that, for most situations, regular x-rays are not only unnecessary, but can be harmful too.
Procedures make money, and a nonzero fraction of dentists are all about selling more procedures and add-ons that offer negligible value because they want $$$.
I wish this article was more clear when it said that adults that don’t face an increased risk of dental carries means. I’m not sure if I should avoid the x-rays, because I’m not at risk for carries or if I should just try to delay them.
I like looking at the Xrays of my teeth, it's fun. Current dentist will talk about the status of problem teeth, and maybe after a few years think it gets worse and needs to be filled, or the fluoride took care of it. Seems a little extra, but it's safe.
Mine does it every other year. It does show cavities. I agree overuse is borderline fraud and should be put in check.
Wow, the US are crazy.
Here in Europe I never heard a dentist recommend that (yearly check-ups yes, of course, but they're manual - and accurate)
People are talking about x-rays as if they are simply a test for cavities. They serve other purposes.
I get an annual dental checkup (military) with the around-the-face x-ray machine. The first thing the dentist does is to compare it to last year's scan. The x-ray allows them to spot all sorts of things they would otherwise miss, especially since I don't think I've ever seen exactly the same dentist twice. Teeth move. Teeth wear down or chip. Sometimes this can be spotted by eye but the x-ray record is more reliable and more easily communicated between offices.
As for radiation, if you are worried about an annual dental x-ray then you better not fly in an airplane, live in Colorado, or hang around too long near the bananas at the grocery store.
> Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even.
Tell me you are American, without telling me you are American.
PSA: to hot beverages and food are a constant source of scartissue and cell damage in mouths . and if the dice falls wrong to many times, chancer precursors.. so dont risk to hot stuff
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is a little off-topic, but you're correct that drinking too-hot liquids increase the risk of multiple types of cancer.
The same is true of alcohol-based mouthwash and alcohol itself. Anything that routine damages cells is going to be a carcinogen.