Main Topics

Cancer seems to be the final frontier of medicine, the only disease keeping humanity from the semi-utopian future envisioned in the minds of great sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, in which humans live for hundreds of years at a time. Every other disease can be contained, avoided, quarantined or outright cured, but cancer is much more difficult; it is the result of our own bodies turning against us, and killing us in the process, and as we cannot reprogram the human genome, and a lot of cancer is inoperable, and untreatable, it is the nightmare reality of all too many people world wide.

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.

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.

Fluoride is good for your teeth, and is found in abundance in all sorts of tooth related things produced by mammals. Teeth have a large amount of fluoride in them, and your mouth also produces fluoride in large quantities to help repair your teeth. But what the exact mechanisms are that makes fluoride good for your teeth is incredibly not known. This is why fluoride has been studied for the past fifty years.

The periodical General Dentistry, the go to place for innovations and new findings about the general condition of teeth, and for information about them produces a periodical every two months. This April/May the issue was full of articles related to tooth erosion and enamel troubles. One of the most interesting finds was related to soda.