People don’t realize how
important their teeth are. There is a direct correlation between the health of
one’s teeth and the overall body health stemming from the ability to chew and
eat nutritional foods, including the health of one’s heart, which can be
adversely affected by oral bacteria and decaying dentition.
I am not sure when
flossing was revealed as a necessary dental hygienic tool. Anthropologists
found evidence that ancient peoples and even isolated tribes used sticks for
interdental cleaning. Credit for inventing the dental floss goes to a New
Orleans dentist in 1815. In 1896 Johnson
& Johnson patented its silk version produced out of the same thread used
for surgical stiches.
Some toothless 45-50 year
old Europeans might have saved their teeth and the troubles of finding a
dentist who would properly fit them with dentures if they had known about
flossing. Come to think of it, the Eastern Europeans, in their utopian
socialist/communist states, did not have floss and had difficulty finding
toothpaste and toothbrushes, much less adopt a daily brushing routine. On my
last trip, young women were selling Crest toothbrushes and handing out leaflets
in a strip mall with instructions on how to properly brush your teeth,
including the tip that it had to be done daily. When I asked her if I could
photograph her booth, she refused.
Growing up in the village,
Grandma and Grandpa had two toothbrushes made of rough and uneven bristles,
stored outside by the water pump, hanging on a wooden board with nails for
hooks. The tube of gritty toothpaste hanged in a cloth bag. The water coming
out of the ground was as cold as a mountain spring. Each family member used the
same two brushes once a week, making sure they were properly hanged on the
hooks. Flies loved to land on them during the day. After a year of two, when
the bristles were so bent out of shape or have fallen, a new toothbrush was
purchased.
The socialized medicine
dentists who were paid the same as everybody, a miserable salary decided by the
communist elites, could not care less about the people’s dental hygiene or
keeping their teeth. They got paid the same whether they did their job well or
poorly. Anesthetics were non-existent. I had root canal at the age of 15
without any anesthetics, howling and wriggling in the dental chair, and the torturous
“treatment” stretched over six months, at the end of which he had to pull the
tooth out anyway.
When braces became
popular, a close relative, who is a dentist and had terrible misaligned teeth
herself, chewed me out for putting braces on my two young daughters. “What kind
of ignorant mother are you, did you not know that braces cause cavities and ruin
people’s teeth?” Thank God, her “stellar” socialist medical training was wrong,
my beautiful daughters have gorgeous pearly-whites.
Western European dental
care did not fare that much better. There is a good reason why so many Brits
have yellow and bad teeth. Their national medical care rations healthcare and
the waiting period is so long for many procedures, tests, and labs, including
dental care, that people pull their own teeth out after weeks and months of
agony while waiting to be seen by a doctor.
I can still see my
dentist, buy floss, see my doctors; I can have a needed test within a
reasonable amount of time because capitalist competition works well. Come 2014,
under the “new and improved” unaffordable socialist and misnamed Affordable
Care Act, our medical care will more closely resemble the care we used to get
under socialist medicine – rationing, special polyclinics for the elites, black
market for needed drugs, empty pharmacy shelves, bring your own drugs and syringes
to the hospital, and shortages of basics, either over the counter drugs,
vitamins, and prescription drugs.
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