Thanks for the reminder to ask for more sealants and a fluoride treatment at my next dentist appointment.
For some perspective: I'm someone who has serious dental issues - and for those who like to place blame, it's ENTIRELY genetic. I inherited my dad's crooked teeth and my mom's soft enamel. My teeth didn't even start growing in until I was a year and a half old, and I didn't lose a tooth until third grade. Some of my teeth literally grew with holes in them, and many of the back teeth have deep grooves. I've had to have multiple dental surgeries and years of heavy orthodontia, including hardware to realign my jaw. Even my wisdom teeth turned out to be complex; I had five, with two in one of the sockets. Non-fluoridated toothpaste and a few years of not getting semiannual cleanings, WITH good hygiene practices, gave me five cavities and an infected tooth that needed a root canal when I was in my twenties. I have only four or five non-incisor teeth that haven't needed work.
So, even with brushing, flossing, and going to the dentist, I still get cavities JUST FROM NORMAL WEAR AND TEAR because my teeth have always sucked. And I'm someone with dental insurance, a provider in walking distance who has weekend appointments, and easy access to emergency dental facilities (which I've had to use in the past year alone because of those dental grooves)! I have the best resources possible for dental care in this fucking country and this may still affect me.
Let me tell you what will happen to quite a few people without my advantages who lose fluoridated water and toothpaste. They will die.
The teeth line the primary gateway to basically every internal organ you possess. The human mouth is naturally a cesspit full of bacteria, including anaerobic bacteria and hard-to-detect species that love to travel through the bloodstream. Said mouth is also very well-supplied with blood vessels that bypass your liver and go straight to those internal organs. Know what's next to your mouth? Your brain. Hello, abscesses. Know where some of those blood vessels take bacteria? The heart and its valves. Nice to meet you, endocarditis. Know what it's very easy to do when you're ill or unable to protect your airway, such as if you're imprisoned, intoxicated, or unhoused? Inhale bacteria-ridden food pieces and saliva. Aspiration pneumonia, how have you been?
Do you think I'm exaggerating? I've seen people sick and dead from this shit and I'm barely starting out in my medical career. Sick and dead, in some instances, because they couldn't afford to go to the dentist or thought their toothache would pass. The same bacteria that cause those infections create and infest your simple fucking cavities - which thrive when your teeth are under-mineralized.
Not to mention that your oral microbiome isn't confined to you. As my dentist has told me, if you kiss someone with a mouth in poor condition, their oral hygiene problems become yours. Bacteria love nothing more than to grow and spread.
Now. The piper may not be paid for a while. But know this: anyone who signs off on reducing the measures that increase dental mineralization is signing death certificates...not only of the uniquely vulnerable, such as the elderly, the hospitalized, the disabled, and CHILDREN WITH ERUPTING AND MINERALIZING TEETH, but of young and healthy adults who have a toothache and, weeks later, drop dead from a heart so loaded with bacteria that their entire system is contaminated and a valve has perforated.
Dental isn't cosmetic (including braces, because misaligned teeth trap food particles) and teeth deprived of the ionic cofactor that helps build their enamel can and will kill you. Your teeth are one of your first lines of defense, and if they turn on you, the consequences can be permanent to deadly. Just ask me and my twenty-seven and a half teeth. Ask the people who will never get off those ventilators. Ask the little kids whose mouths hurt and they don't know why. Ask the dead whose bacteria-loaded blood, brains, hearts, and lungs will be on the hands of RFK and every coward who enabled him.
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