Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
You know...I find that very hard to believe. Not disbelieving you; just...when I view my own life, that seems bizarre. My mother had gorgeous teeth as a teen. Her dentist convinced my grandmother that she needed braces, and from that point forward it was all downhill. Both her parents had their own teeth upon their own demises.
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I find the notion there is no genetic component to tooth wear and longevity impossible to believe, but don't assume it necessarily breaks down on geographical or ethnic lines. I suspect I'd discover bad teeth were prevalent in both my mother's and father's family lines, and I simply inherited the pre-disposition.
I will agree that proper dental care from the beginning will go a long way toward preserving teeth,
I had braces as a kid - I simply had too many teeth for the size of my upper jaw, and the answer was to extract a couple and use braces to readjust the positions of the others. (I was sometimes called "bucky" as a small child because of the ferocious overbite braces were intended to correct.)
I had the odd cavity and fillings, too. One difference between current dentistry and what I got as a kid is fillings. Back when, fillings were a silver amalgam. The ones I got more recently were resin composites, packed into the drilled out cavity and bonded with UV. Unfortunately, they never seemed to hold as well as the old silver amalgam, and I had several that simply fell out and had to be replaced.
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Dennis