Dental diseases

The Navy has experimented further-with a "self-preparation" program. Before they go to the dental clinic, servicemen get a cup of pumice paste containing fluoride and are shown in groups how to brush it on their teeth for 10 minutes to achieve a thorough cleaning and burnishing. 

After that, a dentist has only to apply a fluoride solution for 15 seconds and the treatment is completed. The self-preparation technique has been extended to children of naval personnel, and Admiral Kyes is convinced it has broad implications for the civilian community. 

As Navy children scrub their teeth at home under their mothers' supervision and go todental clinics for brief and inexpensive treatment, so schoolchildren can scrub at home and receive their topical application at home. Self-preparation is a dental Pandora's box because it breaks through dentistry's two restraining bonds-time and lack of manpower.

 The Armed Forces' work has provided a clear-cut demonstration on a massive scale that decay prevention techniques are highly effective for adults as well as children and that they may be widely and inexpensively applied.

Dental diseases are directly responsible for general poor health, affecting patients of all ages. Rampant dental cavities in children not only result in facial deformities in adulthood but contribute significantly to bacterial contamination of the blood and may be quite important in the development of certain forms of heart disease. 

The elimination of decay ... is most urgent in the treatment of bacterial endocarditis [a heart infection] and rheumatic fever. Elimination of dental disease is essential in preventing certain forms of kidney disease in children and adults.

The Teeth and how to care about it?

 THE TEETH

THE most exciting news in dentistry today is not any new drill, anesthetic, denture material, or other fix-it device or procedure. Just the opposite: It's a whole new concept which puts the emphasis on stopping dental disease before it can happen rather than treating it after it does. It is based on the development of simple, practical tools for calling a halt to tooth decay and gum disease. It promises, if you use it, to cut your dental pains and dental bills and could do much for your appearance and general health as well, no matter how old you are or even how much you have been ravaged by dental disease up to now. It is high time we had it. 

Good teeth contribute not only to appearance but to good digestion. They are necessary, too, for good and clear speech. And teeth that are free of disease provide no portal of entry for infections that may spread to affect other areas of the body. And yet tooth and gum troubles, which have plagued man through all recorded history, do so even now.

Even though American dentistry has been the best in the world from a reparative standpoint, the American mouth is a disaster area, getting worse, not better. Right now, more than 20 million Americans have lost all their teeth; 90 million have at least 18 missing, decayed, or filled teeth; and there are more than a billion unfilled cavities in the country. By age 35, one of every five of us needs dentures; by 55, one of every two. 'Fifty percent of all two-year-olds have decaying teeth; by the teens, five of every six youngsters do. 

On top of this, gum disease takes a huge toll, affecting not only older people-90 percent of those over 65 and 80 percent of the middle-aged -but also two thirds of young adults. Even among 12-year-olds, four out of five have gingivitis, the precursor of most gum disease. Dentists have been kept so busy fixing and patching that, according to a recent survey, 40.3 percent of the 90,000 dentists in the country are unable to take on any new patients. This, despite the fact that 40 per- cent of the population, practicing complete neglect, have never once visited a dentist. 

So bad is our dental health that, according to the American Council on Education, if all the dentists in the country were lined up on the East Coast and moved westward, taking care of the needs of the population as they went along, they would get only as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before having to turn around and go back and start over again. Such facts, coupled with insights into the why of both decay and gum disease, are galvanizing the dental profession. Its leaders and the best dental schools now are working to turn dentistry into a new kind of profession-no longer mechanical and reparative in major emphasis but rather primarily devoted to making dental disease as avoidable, in effect, as measles or smallpox.

Already, the Armed Forces dental corps has developed pioneering programs which are producing dramatic results. At the U.s. Naval Academy, Rear Admiral Frank M. Kyes, Chief of the Navy's Dental Division, has reported, "Dental decay has virtually be- come a thing of the past." In a recent cross-country trip to visit dentists leading in introducing the new preventive dentistry into private practice, one of us found them reporting enthusiastically that decay can be reduced by as much as 90 percent and even more in both children and adults; that gum disease also can be checked; and that the required measures are to a very great extent simply new, more effective methods of home care.