Dear Santa,

This is so hard; I didn’t know who else I could write that could help me in my dilemma. My college finals are over and I recently went to oral surgeon’s office about my wisdom teeth. The plan is to have them taken out right after Christmas. The deal is, they’re not hurting. In fact, they are so buried in the bone that they aren’t even close to my other molars.

The weird thing was when I went to the oral surgeon for a consultation, he told me that when he took the wisdom teeth out, he could send all of them to a cryogenics lab where they would extract my stem cells and freeze them in case I needed them in the future to grow new nerve, cartilage, bone, a liver, or even a new heart.

I thought about it a lot, I really did, Santa. Did my research, too and realized that you’ve got some experience dealing with people who want to deep freeze everything they can touch. Here’s what I came up with:

• The company that my dentist is using is called StemSave. It costs about $700 for StemSave to process and store my wisdom teeth for the first year and $100 per year afterwards. Until I use them or die, whichever comes first. 
•  BioEden is another company that also cryopreserves teeth for future use, with methods and fees similar to StemSave’s.
• The technology for the actual preservation seems good, and wisdom teeth may have more useable adult stem cells compared to bone marrow if I get sick and need them later in life.
• As teeth age, they have fewer stem cells in them.
• There is a bit of controversy on the subject – I’m worried that stem cell banking may be more beneficial for the cryobanking investors than for the patients. There’s not really enough long-term data to suggest anything but hope on the researcher’s parts.

Then I got to thinking in the opposite direction. What if I just left my wisdom teeth in place? Doesn’t my own body work pretty good as an incubator for all those stem cells? Guaranteed to stay a steamy 98.6 degrees (or more), whether or not I make the payments each month? And the future, being so bright and all, maybe there will be a way to harvest my wisdom teeth with lasers instead, and then tease out all those precious tidbits from the insides.

Now I know you’re not a dentist yourself, Santa. But didn’t I hear that one of your elves become part of the North Pole Cavity Patrol? I’ve enclosed a copy of my X-Ray for Dr. Hermey to look at. All I want for Christmas is my four back teeth, one way or the other. Please help me decide what to do, Santa!

Signed,

Blue Christmas Girl               

Hi. I’m a very sad American Indian. I am crying because I just learned that my children have Bisphenol-A in their dental sealants. BPA is bad. It means my boys might end up with man-boobs.

This is about dental pollution, people. It may be ignored by mainstream science, but this problem is real enough to sell newspapers, magazines, and make you read online articles.

What I’ve Heard About Dental Pollution

Everywhere I go I hear about how it’s not fair that the citizens of cities have no choice about the fluoride in their drinking water. Sure, it makes teeth stronger, but there’s a conspiracy of pollution! And it’s the people who are so poor that they can’t even afford cups, they have to tilt their heads sideways to drink under the sink faucet, they are the ones who get the most fluoride in their bodies.

Does fluoride save lives like chlorine does? Wait, I didn’t say that, because it’s going to sound like I am in favor of putting poisons in the water.

You dentists also are protecting the right to fix the holes in people’s mouths with evil substances. If you drill a tooth and put in a silver filling, you have to make the filling soft with toxic mercury. Why can’t you just heat up the silver and pour it in the cavity?

The high road dentists are no better, with their lady-man BPA-leaching plastic composites. I’d rather gnaw on a Nalgene bottle and take my chances with it than have an oil-slick wedged between my teeth 24/7.  The recent petroleum price increases are nothing compared to the cost in human lives.

The other thing that’s polluting our mouths is lead. There’s been lead found in ceramic/metal crowns. They say these crowns come from China. We like to blame everything on China.  But the real reason that there’s lead coming from the dental labs is because the cheap dentists have forced lab technicians to scavenge for scrap metal by secretly dumpster-diving for X-ray film packets.

My shaman tells me that all the metal he sees in people’s mouths is creating imbalance in their meridians. This pollution is caused by all the various metals sending out galvanic currents, which turns our mouths into electrolyte-driven batteries. It scares me even today when I see that trick with the guy who sticks the end of a lightbulb in his mouth and it turns on. I know he’s dying from galvanic currents just for a laugh.

One more pollutant that is caused by the well-meaning but unenlightened dentists of the world is when they leave a dead tooth in a living mouth. Would you leave a cadaver just laying around with living people? Well, this is just what is done when a dentist fills the root canal of a tooth and just leaves the dead shell of a tooth in place.

I’m no Navajo with my sand art, but I sketched out this modern flow chart to help us understand where all this pollution is leading:

The pollutants are circled in red. Only one treatment is circled in green because it doesn’t involve dental pollution.

With only two choices in life if we find that we need a dentist – a polluted mouth or the totally toothless gums of a baby – all we can do is pray to our ancestors to give us naturally strong, healthy teeth.

My life has been one of ignorance until now. I have been going to the dentist regularly, and have had various pollutants placed in my mouth. I still have all of my teeth and have no ill symptoms from the poisons. Should I be grateful, or should I be worried? Are teeth worth it, in the end?

Six Degrees Of Dental Pollution

Here are various tests that you can either do in your office or send home with patients to make sure that you aren’t polluting their mouths:

Fluoride: http://www.hach.com

Bisphenol-A: http://www.biosense.com

Mercury: http://www.heavymetalstest.com/_hgkit.php

Lead: http://www.zefon.com/store/leadcheck-swabs.html

Galvanic Currents: http://www.biomeridian.com/devices.htm

Root Canal Therapy: http://www.holisticdentist.com/articles/root-canal-treatment.html

I know that this isn’t Keep America Beautiful or any other grand public service announcement, but it’s important for dentists to understand the consequences of their actions. And sorry about the waterworks; you know how pollution is a touchy subject for me.