Current final year dental student pitching in here. While dentists of the past may push for unnecessary annual radiographs, the curriculum in dental school has changed to favour evidence-based dentistry. Annual bitewings are only indicated if you're a high caries risk, and, as the article mentions, 2-3 years if you're low caries risk. So your younger/newer dentist will be following much better protocols (and hopefully not scamming you)!
Slightly worrying that evidence-based dentistry wasn't the default position (though not surprising). I'm always kind of amazed that when I look up the robust evidence for even things as common as flossing, the evidence just...doesn't seem to be there. Let alone all the myriad of dental products from various mouth washes, tooth pastes, brushes and water picks.
How we've ended up regulating medicine to the nth degree, but when it's teeth we're like "oh well, lol", continues to mystify me.
How about for cavities? I remember reading an article recently about major increases in the number of cavity related treatments because $$$. My kid has had multiple recommendations for cavities and I've got some suspicions about the absolute necessity of all of it.
Fillings are definitely a staple of the procedures a dentist would perform. The article does mention overtreatment, so really depends on your child's caries risk. As mentioned in another comment, healthy dose of skepticism is always required. I usually try to show signs of decay either intraorally or detected on radiographs.
[delayed]
I'm glad curriculum is improving, but nothing stops a dentist from overtreating of is so decides, and the incentive is there.
I think that applies to any industry! Like nothing is stopping a car mechanic from overcharging you. But dental treatments need to be clinically justifiable, so I'm sure any well-meaning dentist will happily explain their reasoning for any treatment.
Patients regularly push back on some treatments I've recommended, and I've always enjoyed the discussion. If a dentist is offended, then something is not right
anecdote on their usefulness. I recently had my yearly inspection, _without_ xrays (which she said it was probably about time for "next time"). A month later, I had pain in a rear molar, and went for a checkup. They reacted "that is not good, because that tooth is root-treated - no nerves, so pain from a place without nerves is not good". They then did an xray, which revealed the tooth had started rotting - a lot - inside, from below. They advised extraction - now a week ago. It turned out the tooth had a hidden fracture in the roots. It was not visible on the xrays - only its hollowing result - but evident once the tooth was out; it came out in two pieces. Just an anecdote, but this would be caught by the 2-3 year xray, and because of the missing nerve, it was pretty bad/serious when I finally felt it myself. I'm not advocating the yearly xray, but the semi-annual makes sense to me.
Some dentist practices (maybe they are chains) do seem very shady when it comes to overtreatment. I remember on my first visit to an office that I was recommended customized trays that I could wear overnight to have my teeth/gums soaked in hydrogen peroxide gel. This recommendation felt like a sales pitch and when I researched the proposed treatment code later I started to find some dentists online claiming that they wouldn’t recommend those because they are not clinically proven to work against gum disease.
I understand that radiation effects are cumulative but is this overexposure source worth fighting against as a patient?
Right, that's really the problem: that question is impossible to answer in general because presumably the person who knows the best is the professional who actually examined you. And if you dare question him he's going to be offended.
What actually positively surprises me is that the American Dental Association publishes recommendations that are to the financial disadvantage of almost all its members.
These panoramic X-rays are typically performed by technicians/adjunct personnel. So I would guess that dentists don't directly pocket the money from them, or willingly recommend them.
A more likely scenario is that dentists are employed by a dental clinic (even if you see the same dentist every time). The dental clinic wants to maximize profit for shareholders, so they invented the "routine dental X-ray" guideline. The guideline is then imposed on the destists as a "performance quota". E.g. if you have 300 patients assigned to you, you are expected to prescribe at least 150 panoramic X-rays to you patient pool. Drop below the quota, and there goes your performance bonus, which you may otherwise be totally worth of.
Of course, there will also be cases where the dental clinic is owned by a single greedy dentist.
I just tell them no thanks. sometimes they get visibly upset but one place was pushing to do it every 6 months, it just makes no sense unless they're scamming
> "Financial aspects of dental radiography also deserve further study," Feit added
No joke. That is a major money maker. There is minimal cost per-use and your insurance pays $200 for it (my last one was $186.00 for instance). The dentists would be crazy not to recommend them as of often as possible.
Fluoride "rinses" are likely up there too. Rinse for a few seconds and they charge the insurance $50 or something for it.
I think most private dentists charge about £20/$25 for a radiography in the UK. In the US, this pricing seems also available - https://www.teethtalkgirl.com/dental-health/cost-for-dental-....
Interestingly, I lived in Central Europe for a while and all my private dentists just used visual inspection for teeth. I never had an issue with that, all decay was spotted in time and in many cases earlier than with the x-ray only method, because more attention was paid to how the teeth look up-close, at all angles.
However, the visual inspection takes more time and skill. One might argue x-ray is the cheaper and quicker option. Though it costs more to the patient in many cases. Ah, the world of dentistry.
It is still like this.the only time I had x-rays at a dentist in Poland is for a root canal work.
However, I did have a dentist recommend a 3d x-ray once.
Same experience in Portugal. I've only had a dental x-ray before removing wisdom teeth.
I had some dentist that figured out a way to bill my insurance once every 6 months and get paid. He was insistent I get X-Rays every 6 months as a result. I quit going to that dentist.
Those prices are absurd. My whole annual check up including a digital X-ray, visual inspection, tartar removal, polishing, costs less than that.
And that is in high cost Norway.
How much did it cost?
If _much_ lower than 200 USD per visit in a very wealthy country, then I assume:
(a) dentists don't make very much money. Less than 100K USD?
(b) most of the work is done by poorly paid dental assistants (20 USD per hour or less).
Running a high quality dental clinic is expensive, both for equipment and staff. How can it be so cheap in Norway?
It's pretty similar in the UK for private dentistry, x-rays ~£10-30, hygienist/scale/polish ~£50-120, filling ~£70-150, root canal/extraction ~£120-300.
Dentist salaries seem to range between £70-200k depending on experience, specialty, etc.
Bone graft and implant for a single tooth can be up to £9K...
For sure, stuff like implants, cosmetic dentistry, braces, crowns etc. still cost a non-trivial amount (though hopefully most are once in a lifetime things).
I'd say they're in the upper percentiles here in Norway when it comes to making money. Especially if they're having a small privat clinic instead of "renting a chair". So maybe not too much when converted USD, but they're often well off here.
I've had the dentist themselves always do most of the work. The assistant is often shared between multiple dentists in the same office in my experience.
Those prices are insane... I wonder if it's due to the insurance f-up of the whole health system in the USA (i.e. ballooning the prices because "insurance will pay"))
All I'm seeing here is insurance, yet again, over-complicated or increasing the price of things and dentists doing what they can to continue to make a buck while they're severely underpaid for their other procedures.
At least fouride rinses provide some benefit. Although you can get much more benefit from buying a bottle of Act and rinsing with it every day.
Isn't flossing not supported by science also, but all the news articles said you should keep flossing?
That's one of those statements, like a natural empiricist saying they don't believe in the big bang, that people tend to latch onto and run with without stopping to evaluate.
Flossing daily isn't necessary if you're an adequate manual brusher. Relatively few people are adequate manual brushers.
Buy a good electric toothbrush, floss periodically.
It's one of those things which people endlessly argue about, but once one flosses once or twice, the rotting bits of food in between their teeth become very unappealing to them.
If flossing lowers the risk of certain types of gum disease and certain types of gum disease are associated with Alzheimer’s, then maybe flossing is (indirectly) good for your brain.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt...
the whole Alzheimers field recently got turned upside down... not sure how to assess them anymore... https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-...
If you follow news in France, it’s been shown and been shown in court cases that certain pesticides, commonly used in wine farming, cause Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
They have much higher rates of these diseases, and recently in a court case the death of a farmers daughter has been shown to be caused by these pesticides.
I thought it was gum disease and heart disease?
That story is because no-one had thought to study it so there was no scientific evidence that it made any difference. Not that a study had found it made no difference.
Perhaps you'll find it useful that a double-blind study found no improvement in outcome from use of a parachute when jumping out of a helicopter.
Your comment is misled.
This is a systemic review. A RCT would absolutely find a difference. The whole point of this satire is to point out that there's not always studies on what you want to know. "No randomised controlled trials of parachute use have been undertaken"
Flossing has absolutely been studied. Professional flossing seems effective at combating gum disease. Telling people to floss doesn't seem to be. It's unclear why (is it just compliance effects? are people educated on how to floss still ineffective? etc.)
Ah, you're right I grabbed the wrong paper. I presume the other commenter (hervature ) also knew what paper I meant.
But yes, the item you want studied might not have been studied. ("However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.")
OK. So another low effort comment on a serious subthread.
That's not at all what that "study" says. It is a critique (in poor taste if you ask me) that everything does not require a double-blind study.
> It is a critique (in poor taste if you ask me) that everything does not require a double-blind study.
I think the real point is that systemic reviews often will have a pretty tilted set of included studies, because they are influenced by what things researchers choose to study.
Indeed, you probably couldn't publish a study saying that parachutes work; it's not an interesting enough finding for publication. So the only stuff you'll find, in many cases, are studies that buck the prevailing wisdom.
the studies are about outcomes of parachute use writ-large ("gravitational challenges"), not just helicopters.
Only reason I'm being pedantic here is because if the study was in-fact looking at parachutes from helicopters, it could actually be plausible that parachutes had no improvements when used with helicopters. Most, if not all pilots, don't wear parachutes because there's not enough time to jump out of a crashing helicopter to deploy one and the blades would probably hit you anyway (unlike a plane which you could glide for some time, helicopters are notoriously more likely to fall straight like a brick)
Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help. But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
You can say the exact same thing about eating a blank piece of paper twice a day. Pascal's wager is no way to live life.
I still floss because I think its gross and I have bad gaps in some of my teeth, but I think flossing can also cause harms, for example some floss has PFAS in it.
https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/d...
> Yes, flossing cannot be proven to help.
It's demonstrable that something like a bean skin, lodged in your teeth, will erode the teeth touching it.
>cannot be proven to hurt
Inserting floss between your teeth pushes them slightly apart. I wonder if that could have any negatives?
Considering orthodontic treatments, no. I imagine you could damage the connective tissues under the gums though.
Cannot be proven to help if you don't mind your organic matter decomposing in your mouth.
>But it cannot be proven to hurt, either, so current recommendations are to do it anyway.
That's not a meaningful standard for any health intervention. If I'd apply everything to my body that wasn't proven to hurt I'd spend a hundred bucks every morning and two hours in the bathroom. If "it doesn't hurt" was sufficient basis for a recommendation our doctors would tell us to swallow homeopathic medicine every morning.
It seems pretty obvious that anything you apply has to have at least some measurable impact, otherwise you're basically in the same category as the supplement industry.
It's like when I researched whether an electric toothbrush is better: All the studies say it's not, assuming you're a good brusher. You're probably not. For bad brushers and people that can't manipulate the toothbrush properly for whatever reason, an electric toothbrush gets them to the same performance.
Completely anecdotal but my gums flare up and just feel disgusting when I don't floss for too long.
I don't do the dentist recommended 2/week but if I stop flossing for over a month I notice significant decrease in my gum health. It becomes excruciatingly painful to brush and this stage and my mouth is full of blood afterwards.
So I'm sticking to flossing pretty often now.
My most recent trip to the dentist include a brief recommendation to floss, but they weren't really pushing it like they used to.
Not just x-rays: "As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-tro...
Dentistry might be the wild west full of snake oil salesmen compared to medicine but it also doesn't have nearly as many middle men and additional parties perverting incentives and creating hell for patients that medicine does.
One thing is evidence based medicine, another just simple greed: I like this older study from Switzerland where they sent the same healthy guy to 180 dentists, about 30% of whom performed unnecessary treatments, often on different teeth.
Australian here, and I will say that I fully trust my dentist. I have had one tiny cavity in nearly 20 years. X-rays are every 2 years, and it's to see between the teeth where they obviously can't see visually. I've been told the radiation dose is the equivalent of an hour on a plane flight.
I’m just a layperson, but I’ve never been comfortable with that argument. An hour’s worth of radiation concentrated into a moment seems very different to me.
I'm going to also throw anecdotes into the bucket: three dentists completely missed a cavity on one of my rear molars (wisdom teeth) until I mentioned pain, and then they poked around physically and said, "oh yeah, that's a big one."
I had the same but with a cracked crown. The dentist did the bite wing x-rays, did whatever examination they do, and then at the end said it all looked good. They even did some fancy 3d scan trying to sell me on a mouth guard or those transparent braces.
Then I mentioned I had pain around the crown whenever I ate something sweet or sour. The dentist took another look and said "oh yeah the crown is cracked"
So now I know I either have a cracked crown or I don't. Great service.
What kind of dental x-rays they took? Panoramic (shows the whole row of teeth in one image), CBCT (volumetric 3D) or intraoral (a digital sensor or film was put inside your mouth)?
Not OP, but I have only ever had the type of dental x-ray where they stick the L-shaped plastic into your mouth and make your bite down while they take photos. I had no idea there were others.
The original machine I used looked like a TSA body scanner but for your head. Somehow it hit plates that were developed into an image the dentist could present to me.
I have had both types, within the same office, over time.
That's a bitewing, intraoral.
Your anecdote corroborates one of the key points in the article:
> For instance, a 2021 systemic review of 77 studies that included data on a total of 15,518 tooth sites or surfaces found that using X-rays to detect early tooth decay led to a high degree of false-negative results. In other words, it led to missed cases.
The article isn't just saying you're getting unnecessary radiation. It's also saying that relying on x-rays lets dentists be lazy about finding problems while also billing you for unnecessary work.
Does it catch cases though? If so, it doesn't mean it isn't worth it just because it misses cases.
Also, this may be a good application for AI. I would assume this is an issue with dentists being able to read X-rays carefully and not that the X-rays are unable to capture the signs.
Other outdated yet still routine dental practices include polishing of teeth during checkups for any justification other than cosmetic reasons
My bugbear with dentists in the US (after living my first 30 years in the UK) is that they all continually hassle me to have my wisdom teeth removed. Said teeth have never caused me any problems and are all through the gums. I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
I had the opposite experience. I told the dentist that I thought my wisdom teeth were causing my migraines, and they said it was possible but unlikely, and didn't really recommend removing them. I pushed, and they relented. They were right, it didn't make any difference.
Oddly, I only had wisdom teeth on one side, and not the other. So only 2 teeth were removed.
I asked mine, and he said the wisdom teeth can crowd teeth if the jaw size is too small causing buckling (a cosmetic issue). More seriously, it can interfere with nerves in your jaw (again because of size constraints) causing numbness / paralysis, etc. Likely the decision to remove them comes down to your genetic / jaw structure and whether they have fully come in yet or not.
https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/wisdom-teeth-removal-neces...
The other thing that can interfere with the nerves in your jaw is having them extracted. One of my family members has no feeling there because the extraction was bungled years ago.
I had mine done in college. I really didn't want to do it.
I would have been totally happy to buck the pressure of "this is what everyone does," but the thing that made me reluctantly agree to it was an explanation that if I didn't, they would bore holes into my then-back teeth as they grew in and I'd have a big problem to deal with.
As I understood it, teeth normally grow straight up, but wisdom teeth grow sideways (with the tops facing the front of your mouth). The wisdom teeth then hit the rest of your teeth and basically bulldoze your mouth.
I have no idea how true/bullshit that is, but it's what I was told to get me to finally acquiesce to the procedure.
Definitely not all wisdom teeth come in like that: it's possible to have all 4 aligned normally and have have enough room (I do).
But coming in towards other teeth and hitting them, or other forms of impaction, are pretty common. You probably saw (or could have seen) the situation pretty clearly on an x-ray.
That being said, there is/was definitely an air of "this is just what we do, it's easier this way" for removing wisdom teeth, akin to say, what removing tonsils once was.
My wisdom teeth came in like you describe. They meet my back molars at a 90 degree angle. They never bothered me, though - I have had two removed because they got infected, but otherwise they never caused any issues.
It can be true for some people. Look at the lower right one on the xray here: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wisdom-teeth.html
Unless you wanna see an adviceanimals take on a hairy ballsack, you've gotta open that incognito.
I don't think Jamie wants HN traffic on his blog.
You just copy and paste the url, so that the referrer is unset.
I am in the US and I had my wisdom teeth filled. Granted after the procedure my dentist said he was never filling wisdom teeth again, lol.
Filled? What does this mean?
It means they fixed cavities on those teeth.
Mine recommends the same, but it’s not because I need them out now, but because by the time I’m elderly I might be more likely to need them out, but by that time the surgery might be very difficult for me. As he pitched it to me, “get them out now while you’re young and it’s no big deal”.
I haven’t decided yet since they cause me no problems now and so far I’m to keep them relatively clean, but I have known several elderly family members who eventually needed molars removed because they hadn’t/couldn’t clean them well enough and it was a very difficult surgery for them.
It's so odd how experiences vary on this. I'm in my 40s (in the US) and still have all four of my wisdom teeth. When I was a young adult, my dentist told me that they were all intact, and (over time) not moving, so there was no reason to do anything with them. I've gone through a few other dentists in other places since then, and no dentist (including a recent one I had that annoyed me by recommending harmless but unnecessary procedures so they could pad their bill for my insurance) has ever pushed me to get my wisdom teeth removed. When I've started as a new patient at a new practice, they've noted I still have them, and after I say "yup, they've been stable since I was a kid, and cause me no pain", they immediately move on and don't bring it up again.
>>>I can only assume it's dogma or an opportunity to bill insurance for costly unnecessary surgery.
This may be specific to location, but would it be the same dentist recommending the treatment as performing the surgery? Here (BC, Canada) everyone I've known who's had wisdom teeth removed had it done by a specialist, not the dentist that suggested it (which presumably cuts down on self-serving recommendations).
I mean not if the dentist refers them to a specialist. Usually that involves a kickback; there's a whole slew of problems with that in the US with lactation specialists referring parents to dentists over a tongue tie problem without actually viewing the baby.
I've also retained my wisdom teeth, despite some of them not erupting and being impacted. It's certainly easier to get them out when you're young compared to when you're older, but if you've still got them as an adult, it's not worth removing them unless they're causing a problem, even if insurance is paying for it (all procedures can have side-effects).
They're not a problem until they are. I recently had a molar out likely due to damage from an impacted wisdom tooth I had out years ago. The rear of the molar was compromised on the back, and there was no way to save the tooth. If I had my molars out earlier when I was young, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.
I was told they get harder to remove when you’re older
It's one of these areas where people (including medical professionals) hold strong beliefs, but then it turns out that there are other highly-developed countries where this is not routinely practiced, and the outcomes aren't necessarily different.
Routine wisdom teeth removal is not a thing in most of Europe. Another random example are colonoscopies and routine flu vaccines (except for the elderly).
I've generally assumed the simplest explanation is that many of these weakly-supported procedures are regular, consistent income streams for the people who perform them in the US: my four wisdom teeth (that were causing me serious issues at age 19) cost $2k to remove nearly 20 years ago, and I know colonoscopies are billed to insurance in the thousands. There's not much incentive to move to cheaper tests or wait-and-see, when you can just do it to everyone who reaches a certain age by default.
Presumably flu shots are good business for the manufacturers, though I'm not sure about the science. After having the flu as a healthy late-twenty-something a while ago, which was...intensely horrible, I've chosen to get it ever since.
It's not always true though. My dentist in Europe pushed me to get my wisdom teeth removed early "because you're going to need to get them removed eventually anyway" at a government clinic with no profit incentive.
Flu may not be too dangerous in people who aren't elderly but it still sucks. Can a non-elderly, not in any other high risk group, person get seasonal flu vaccination in Europe if they ask for it, and is it covered by European health care systems?
Yes, it's much harder for a dentist to convince a 30 year old adult than is to convince a 12 year and his helicopter parents.
This guy infamously has a problem with each and every HN user and chooses to display an NSFW image saying such if your request's referrer header has news.ycombinator.com. Don't click.
Sorry, I thought he disabled that.
Don’t you polish your prized possessions?
and fees. But are checkups themselves backed by evidence? Unless you say “It hurts there”, will the dentist find anything on their own?
Good question, cochrane says longer check-up intervals than the standard 6-months aren't any worse assuming you don't have pre-existing conditions
https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-how-often-shou...
> will the dentist find anything on their own?
In my experience they always find something that they "have time to take care of right now if you want". I've heard anecdotes of folks going to get second opinions that reaches a different conclusion.
Just for one anecdote, three years ago my then-dentist (who was a part of a franchise practice and probably under pressure to bill) told me that I had 12 (!!) cavities across all quadrants of my mouth that needed to be filled immediately.
I went to another dentist in the area, they took some x-rays themselves, and told me that there was nothing that needed immediate work - maybe one pre-cavity that would eventually turn in to something but certainly not worth doing anything with now.
Three years later (and sticking with that new dentist) I still haven't needed to have anything done (and certainly don't have any pain in my mouth anywhere either).
Yeah, I didn't go to the dentist for a few years when I was in grad school and had no insurance. My first visit with a new dentist he informs me I had three cavities. I had no pain but just thought it was prudent to get checked out. I went ahead with the fillings and he nicked a nerve. For days I was in horrible pain and just assumed that was what happened when you had a filling. A few years later I started experiencing extreme shooting pains in the side of my mouth. Then an abscess formed. It turned out the tooth was dying and I had go get a root canal (which actually wasn't that bad).
The root canal was eight years ago. I brush and floss twice a day (brushing without flossing feels weird to me now). I haven't been to the dentist since before the pandemic and my teeth feel completely fine.
In Australia they always found me exactly 4 things to do for a total sum of just above $1000 (but never the same things to do). It’s so regular that I can only assume this is the recommended amount by the marketing that a dentist can extract each time.
Basically everyone I know only goes to the dentist when something very specific is wrong, and they're all fine. I'm honestly very suspicious of the whole dental enterprise.
A routine dental X-ray recently caught my failed root canal and the tooth needs to be extracted asap or I risk pain, huge swelling, and nerve damage.
I don't think anyone is arguing that routine x-rays don't ever find something that wouldn't otherwise be found. That would be a pretty amazing and surprising result. But it still can be the case that, for most situations, regular x-rays are not only unnecessary, but can be harmful too.
Uhm... Most of my life I went to a doctor that simply checkeed my teeth "physically". Then a couple of years back she send me to get x-ray to her's son place "just in case". And then she retired and I moved to him. And while he does x-ray more often it's mostly as a fallback when he checks my mouth and has some doubt/x-ray was done more than 2 years ago.. but again - it's not very expensive - like $25 :D
I wish this article was more clear when it said that adults that don’t face an increased risk of dental carries means. I’m not sure if I should avoid the x-rays, because I’m not at risk for carries or if I should just try to delay them.
Procedures make money, and a nonzero fraction of dentists are all about selling more procedures and add-ons that offer negligible value because they want $$$.
I like looking at the Xrays of my teeth, it's fun. Current dentist will talk about the status of problem teeth, and maybe after a few years think it gets worse and needs to be filled, or the fluoride took care of it. Seems a little extra, but it's safe.
I had x-rays when I went to see my dentist every few years. For 8ish years they said the small cavity in my tooth was probably fine. I finally had a filling and it turned out to be huge. Fucking useless scam.
Mine does it every other year. It does show cavities. I agree overuse is borderline fraud and should be put in check.
> Has your dentist ever told you that it's recommended to get routine dental X-rays every year? My (former) dentist's office did this year—in writing, even.
Tell me you are American, without telling me you are American.
People are talking about x-rays as if they are simply a test for cavities. They serve other purposes.
I get an annual dental checkup (military) with the around-the-face x-ray machine. The first thing the dentist does is to compare it to last year's scan. The x-ray allows them to spot all sorts of things they would otherwise miss, especially since I don't think I've ever seen exactly the same dentist twice. Teeth move. Teeth wear down or chip. Sometimes this can be spotted by eye but the x-ray record is more reliable and more easily communicated between offices.
As for radiation, if you are worried about an annual dental x-ray then you better not fly in an airplane, live in Colorado, or hang around too long near the bananas at the grocery store.
Here in the US, I do 0 medical procedures and only would go to the ER if I broke a bone or something. Thailand, India, Singapore all cheaper + better care.
Incentives are 100% misaligned and even good actors are forced to shorten your lifespan/quality of life to make somebody money
Wow, the US are crazy.
Here in Europe I never heard a dentist recommend that (yearly check-ups yes, of course, but they're manual - and accurate)
Because in civilized countries insurances pay 100% of x-ray exams, and needed treatment.
But some countries still believe in the advantages of the middle ages.
PSA: to hot beverages and food are a constant source of scartissue and cell damage in mouths . and if the dice falls wrong to many times, chancer precursors.. so dont risk to hot stuff
I don't know why you're being downvoted. It is a little off-topic, but you're correct that drinking too-hot liquids increase the risk of multiple types of cancer.
The same is true of alcohol-based mouthwash and alcohol itself. Anything that routine damages cells is going to be a carcinogen.
> I don't know why you're being downvoted
Because it's unrelated to the article, doesn't have a source, has multiple typos, and even if it's true, I'm not going to give up hot beverages and food just to avoid (what I assume they're implying to be) a tiny increased mouth and throat cancer risk.