It’s been a long week, and I’m excited for the weekend! Two more weeks until the end of the semester, then we’re going to go exploring to find a place where we’ll end up after dental school.
We’ve been to Maine and Vermont. We’re headed to Maryland in August.
10 more months and I’ll be a dentist. Time’s passing by fast!
Here’s some interesting links that caught my eye over the past week:
Is Your Dentist Putting Germs Around Your Neck?
I read this Fox News article and was a little grossed out. It turns out that the little chains dentists use to hook the patient napkin around your neck can harbor bacteria from the previous patient.
I always thought my dental school was just being cheap — we tape our patient’s napkins to their shirt to hold them on rather than using the standard chain.
Today I did an externship at a community dental clinic and the germophobe in me made me sanitize the chain that we were using there. Hopefully, it fit into the 80% of “uninfected” chains after I was done with it…
An Eggsperiment to Understand Your Teeth
Crest whipped up a little experiment to help kids understand dental decay. It involves using an egg, vinegar, and Crest toothpaste (of course no other brand would work! Any fluoridated toothpaste should fit the bill.) to understand how the bacteria in your mouth eat away at your teeth and weaken them, and how fluoride can make your teeth stronger.
If you don’t want to do the experiment, but want the educational experience, try reading the article Try to Keep Your Teeth Below Freezing.
Fairbanks De-Fluoridates Their Water
The city of Fairbanks, Alaska has stopped adding fluoride to their public water supply. Given that their water is already naturally fluoridated with 0.3 ppm of fluoride and people are getting fluoride from other sources, it may not be such a bad move to balance out the prevention of dental fluorosis as well as the prevention of cavities.
If you want a closer look into the water fluoridation debate, check out this final report from the Fairbanks Fluoride Task Force. It is a PDF file, so it may take a bit longer to load.
Questions or Comments?
I’d love to hear what you have to say about any of these articles. Feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below. Thanks for reading – have a great weekend!
