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Archives for April 2012

1939 – The year of the glowing wand

April 24, 2012 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

Welcome to the latest edition of Timewarp Tuesdays, where you are NOT asked to click your heels three times, or threatened to have houses dropped on your relatives, or coerced to chant “there’s no place like home” because there was much more to 1939 than overbudget Hollywood films.

Like Tube Lights! There were tube lights, the precursors to fiber optics, in ginormous scale. Wands! To deliver light to the unlit crevices of orificies from Omaha to Oregon to Oz.

Click on the photo below to see this excerpt from the March 1939 issue of Popular Science in its full-size:

 

 This looks pretty amazing for the time, actually. And it makes me wonder if our isolites, our fiber-optic handpieces, our loupe-mounted headlights, and other super-LED tech will seem quaint in another 70 years. And if so, what will replace them? Teeth lit from the inside? A glowing pink ball that drops from the ceiling and slowly expands to fully illuminate the oral cavity?

In the end it’s about the power of the light, something that is essential for our practice. Maybe Glenda said it best back in 1939:

“You’ve always had the power, my dear. You’ve had it all along.”

 

 

Filed Under: Fun, Products, Timewarp Tuesdays Tagged With: dental antiquities, dental fiber optics, dental lights, linkedin, piped light

One CT scan = 200 Panoramics

April 10, 2012 By Trish Walraven 5 Comments

No doubt you listened to the radio or television news today with a double take whut-What? There’s a Yale study that just came out which links the incidence of meningiomas to the frequency of dental radiographs taken during childhood? Your gentle ionizing beam of extrasensory perception is….BEING CRITICIZED?

Yes, yes it is. But have no fear, because the research, my friend, is also having its validity questioned. Supposedly there’s a significant likelihood of being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor if you grew up going to the dentist regularly and having periodic x-rays. This tumor, called a meningioma, is usually asymptomatic, and the vast majority of the time is discovered only when a person has a routine CT scan.

Okay, so is it just me who sees this flaw in the study? People who have CT scans just for “fun” are most likely to go to the dentist for “fun.” Only you should substitute the word “prevention” for “fun.” There were other people in the study who weren’t diagnosed with meningiomas. Was this because they didn’t have CT scans voluntarily (and their parents didn’t take them to the dentist very often, possibly)? And what is the criteria for needing a scan, since we’re criticizing the “need” for dental x-rays? I mean, CT zapping is not exactly radiation-free.

Go read these articles for yourself so that you’ll have well-formed opinions when patients ask about what they’ve heard in the media to help you turn around any radiation defiance that you may come up against in the next few weeks:

Dental X-Rays Linked to Common Brain Tumor, Study Finds – Huffington Post

Web MD: Annual X-rays May Expose Patients to Unnecessary Risk

Dental x-rays can double brain tumor risk – MSNBC.com

All about Meningiomas from Wikipedia

From ABC News: Early Dental X-Rays Linked to Brain Tumors

Now ask yourself who is healthier: the guy who never took a pill or saw a doctor his whole life, and felt great until the day he died? Or the one who did all the preventive stuff and discovered along the way that yes, he had some imperfections that needed to be treated?

See, it’s a stupid question that is irrelevant. Put it to bed, put this story to bed, go scare the masses with something fun. And yummy. And dangerous.

Like sugar.

For other reading, here’s a PDF of the ADA’s radiography recommendations, along with a previous DentalBuzz parody about radiation safety, and a comparison of dental radiation doses to other medical radiation doses.

Filed Under: News, Preventive Care Tagged With: Brain Tumors, CT scans, Dental X-Rays, Meningiomas, radiation safety

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DentalBuzz explores rising trends in dentistry with its own slant. The speed at which new products and ideas enter the dental field can often outpace our ability to understand just exactly the direction in which we are heading. But somehow, by being a little less serious about dentistry and dental care, we might get closer to making sense of it all.

So yeah, a tongue-in-cheek pun would fit really nicely here, but that would be in bad taste. Never mind, it just happened anyways. Stop reading sidebars already and click on some content instead.

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