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Saliva is very important. It is easy to think that it is not, as we are constantly making it, and it is always around, making us forget how important it really is. Many things can go wrong with saliva and the parts of the body that produce this vital liquid.

A relatively new beverage, energy drinks are all the rage nowadays. You can see people, especially in Europe, where the soft drinks are more heavily controlled and regulated, walking down the street slurping cans of Monsters and Red Bulls early in the morning on their way to work. The main ingredients in these drinks are sugar, caffeine, and a little known stimulant called taurine. Taurine is indeed a synthetic stimulant, much like caffeine, that has some macabre origins. Taurine is derived from bull testicles, and the original formula was rife with gonad liquids of said animal, hence the name of the first energy drink: red bull.

The science of tooth replacement is one that, like all medical science, is constantly in a stage of evolution, getting better and better with less and less negative side effects and complications. Until now, the best chance you had was to get a crown or a bridge to replace your missing tooth. This method allowed you to regain normal chewing function, but it cannot stop the disintegration of alveolar tissue, and thus could not prevent tooth loss. The problem is, when you lose a tooth, the tissue that supports teeth, the soft tissue in the gums, starts to disintegrate, and this will make the adjacent teeth loosen as well, and eventually the those will fall out too. So an artificial tooth root was invented partially by accident in the sixties, and this was known as the dental implant. Now the way we replace missing teeth is by anchoring the crown or bridge to the dental implant, and thus no alveolar tissue is lost.