Free Republic

July 22-24 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Schedule of Events BelowArlington, Virginia (July 8, 2015)—State legislators, business leaders, policy experts and citizen organizations will come together in San Diego for the 42nd American Legislative Exchange Council Annual Meeting July 22-24. Attendees will share experiences and ideas and develop research-based model policies focused on limited government, free markets and federalism.During the three-day conference, members will participate in training sessions, policy workshops and task force meetings. Attendees will also hear from keynote speakers, including presidential hopefuls Governor Scott Walker, former Governor Mike Huckabee and Senator Ted Cruz. Other speakers include author Travis...

My dental health is something I have always taken seriously — and as a gadget fan, I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on the latest high-tech electronic toothbrushes and expensive toothpastes, gels and mouthwashes. But then I had to go without brushing my teeth for a fortnight. This was for a new two-part series on dental health for the BBC, and what we discovered was truly eye-opening, with implications not just for me, but for all of us. My wife was anything but keen on the no-brushing experiment and there was a lot less kissing during that fortnight. And she was...

A group of male fourth-year Dalhousie University dentistry students who posted misogynistic comments about their female colleagues on a Facebook page, including crude jokes about sedating them for rough sex, are at risk of expulsion. University president Richard Florizone has launched an investigation into the incident, and immediately postponed exams for the 47 fourth-year students – 26 men and 21 women – until January, not wanting any targets of the offensive posts to be sitting next to a perpetrator until he knows more. .... The social media group was called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen. According to the CBC,...

People living in Roman Britain had healthier gums than their modern-day descendants, a feat of archaeological dentistry shows. A team at King's College London and the Natural History Museum found only 5% of adults had gum disease in the Roman, and certainly pre-toothbrush, era. Modern day smoking and type 2 diabetes are blamed for a figure of nearly one in three today. But ancient Britain was certainly not a golden age of gleaming gnashers. The smiles of our ancestors were littered with infections, abscesses and tooth decay, the study showed... The research group analysed 303 skulls from a burial ground...

Benjamin LaMontagne, who died at his home in February four days after wisdom tooth extraction, was killed by a tissue infection of his gums, neck and jaw... after routine oral surgery, was killed by a rare, aggressive bacterial infection that caused swelling of his jaw and neck, according to the state Medical Examiner’s Office. The medical examiner’s report, released Thursday to the Portland Press Herald in response to a public records request, lists the cause of death as cervical necrotizing fasciitis, commonly called “flesh-eating bacteria.” The infection is caused by a powerful strain of streptococcus A, a group of pathogens...

With her children grown, Trisha Eck thought it would be fun to go from being a stay-at-home mom to a small entrepreneur—so she rented a room at a medical spa, where she started her own business, Tooth Fairies Teeth Whitening. She purchased equipment and supplies from a vendor she met at a trade show, including non-prescription strength teeth whitening gels. Customers could purchase her products as a take home kit or apply them to their own teeth while visiting the spa. Since she’s not a dentist, Eck says she never performed the treatments on customers but was there to offer...

...The results published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) also suggest tooth decay was more prevalent in earlier societies than previously estimated. The results also suggest that the hunter-gatherer society studied may have developed a more sedentary lifestyle than previously thought, relying on nut harvesting. Dental disease was thought to have originated with the introduction of farming and changes in food processing around 10,000 years ago. A greater reliance on cultivated plant foods, rich in fermentable carbohydrates, resulted in rotting teeth.High level of decayNow, the analysis of 52 adult dentitions from hunter-gatherer skeletons found in a cave...

Athletes may have some of the fittest bodies in the world but a new study has found they also have really bad teeth. Tests were carried out on 302 participants at the London 2012 Olympics and found athletes had poorer dental health than people in other occupations of the same age. Just over half of those examined had signs of cavities, three quarters were suffering from gum disease and 45 per cent showed evidence of tooth erosion. ‘Our data and other studies suggest that, for a similar age profile, the oral health of athletes is poor. It’s quite striking,’ said...

Dr. Jay Friedman relishes his role as dental outcast. Like a pesky younger brother who enjoys watching his siblings squirm, the 86-year-old dentist and public health advocate has for decades been poking and prodding at the oral health community over his personal obsession: wisdom teeth. Friedman has argued for more than 30 years that removing a young person's healthy wisdom teeth -- called "third molars" by professionals -- is an unnecessary and irresponsible practice. While many dentists and oral surgeons have dismissed him as a traitor and a zealot, in 2007, people in the public health arena began to listen....

Researchers may have uncovered new evidence of ancient dentistry in the form of a 6,500-year-old human jaw bone with a tooth showing traces of beeswax filling, as reported Sep. 19 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers, led by Federico Bernardini and Claudio Tuniz of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy in cooperation with Sincrotrone Trieste and other institutions, write that the beeswax was applied around the time of the individual's death, but cannot confirm whether it was shortly before or after. If it was before death, however, they write that it was likely...

Could this new gel be the biggest dental breakthrough since the introduction of fluoride? THE GIST A new gel could soon eliminate painful fillings and root canals. The technology doesn't prevent cavities; it heals teeth by regenerating them. Although this is good news for teeth, the research could also be applied to heal bones and other tissues in the body. Dentists could soon hang up their drills. A new peptide, embedded in a soft gel or a thin, flexible film and placed next to a cavity, encourages cells inside teeth to regenerate in about a month, according to a new...

A Kitchener truck driver is facing a careless driving charge but on the bright side, his tooth doesn't hurt anymore. Lambton County OPP say they stopped a big rig driver doing some driving dentistry along Hwy. 402 on Wednesday... Cops determined the 58-year-old driver was driving so poorly because he was trying to pull out a tooth while he was driving. "The driver was very forthright with the officer," Reurink said. The amateur dentist of a driver had rigged a string around his hurting tooth and then tied the other end to the roof of the cab, police said. "One...

A US worker came within seconds of destroying Lincoln's copy of the Magna Carta after nearly spraying it with a chemical cleaner. The 800-year-old document is currently on display in New York, but almost met a sticky end thanks to an overzealous cleaner. Lincoln Cathedral's archive conservation consultant Chris Woods accompanied the document, spending hours making sure the inked sheepskin which contains the charter of freedom, was placed correctly into a £42,000 vacuum-sealed display case to keep it safe from the elements. And it was, until a lock briefly malfunctioned just as a workman tried to give it a last...

A DODGY accent and startling false teeth were all that was needed to turn Canadian actor Mike Myers into the British super-spy Austin Powers. In “The Simpsons”, a television show, Ralph Wiggum’s dentist scares him into brushing with the decaying snaggle-teeth of the (fictional) “Big Book of British Smiles”. And there is some truth behind the awful stereotype: the factory workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution were fed on sugar from the colonies, and led the known world in dental caries. Early in the 20th century Americans were brushing and flossing while some British dentists still believed that chomping on hard...

The glittering "grills" of some hip-hop stars aren't exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says. Ancient peoples of southern North America went to "dentists"—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico). Scientists don't know the origin of most of the teeth in the collections, which belonged to people living...

Some years ago, when I was young and green in judgement, just graduated from college, I moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, so as to be closer to aunts and uncles and cousins. I myself had been born and raised in Nebraska; the parents and older siblings had been born and raised in Pennsylvania and New York, before moving to Nebraska, a trek for which their families never forgave them. The parents and older siblings took to Nebraska like ducks to water, but I myself had always dreamed of, fantasized about, living among hordes of wonderful caring loving relatives. And so when...

Experimental chewy mint beats tooth decay 09th April 2008 A new chewable mint looks set to solve the worldwide problem of tooth decay. BasicMints is an experimental fluoride-free treatment designed to mimic a component in human saliva that neutralises acids in the mouth that can erode tooth enamel. US researchers tested the product on 200 children – aged between 10-and-a-half and 11 – over a year. The results show that children who were administered BasicMints had 62% fewer cavities in their molars when the year was up, compared to children in the placebo group. The research team, from New York's...

Dental fillings could become a thing of the past By Laura Clout  Last Updated: 12:23am BST 05/04/2008     Dentists will one day be able to dispense with fillings and help decaying teeth repair themselves, scientists believe.Researchers say they have developed a way of regrowing dentine, the yellow mineral substance in the middle of teeth that is most affected by decay. They hope that within a decade, dentists will be able to use the technique and eliminate the need for fillings.Prof Sally Marshall, of the University of California, said the technique involves painting a calcium solution onto the damaged dentine.This...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Chris Collier has been a patient of Dr. Dave Rummel for 30 years. When it comes to teeth, Collier is more concerned about his health than his smile. "The reason I come here is because I know I can trust the dentist I have," Collier said. "I know I can get good workmanship." SLIDESHOW: Images From Report Rummel is one of the few dentists in central Ohio who makes his own crowns, bridges and dentures, but most other dentists rely on outside dental labs, 10 Investigates' Lindsey Seavert reported. The labs can be down the street or...

When he was stopped at Heathrow, dentist Sohail Qureshi claimed he was flying to Pakistan to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid with his family. The haul of weapons, cash and terror handbooks he was carrying however told a much more sinister story. An Islamic extremist, the 30-year-old was in fact on his way to fight for the Taliban against British troops. In an email to a contact before he left Qureshi wrote: "Pray that I kill many, brother. Revenge, revenge, revenge." Yesterday he became the first person to be convicted under tough new anti-terror laws. However it emerged he...