Now, okay, obviously a dentist knows more about teeth than I do. But I think I'd notice if there was something wrong with my teeth. I'd get pain, or bleeding gums, or something, surely?
I had to have a tooth out not long before Christmas 2002 (only a couple of days before my dad's 60th birthday party) because I broke it while eating a sandwich. It broke because it had previously had to be filled from the root canal up, which apparently makes the tooth fragile — it happens, it was just bad luck. The root canal treatment had been a couple of years previous, and the top bit of it had had to be redone because a couple of days after having it done the first time I managed to chip a bit off the tooth. Clearly there wasn't actually much of this tooth left after the dentist had filled it.
Anyway.
How this started was: when I moved to my current house I didn't register with a new dentist, for reasons of being lazy and avoidant, and I hadn't seen my previous dentist for a while because they had gone private and also because I missed my last appointment owing to having lost my diary on a train and they wanted to charge me 15 quid for the privilege of not having seen a dentist. So it was somewhere between three and five years since I'd seen a dentist when one December while I was visiting my parents I noticed something odd about one of the gaps between my teeth while eating a bread roll and I thought I found a flake of tooth that had come out of the gap. I couldn't feel anything actually wrong, though. When I got back to Oxford I decided I had better look for a dentist and booked a checkup. Because it had been a while since I had last been to a dentist (and I'd never had a dental X-ray anyway) the dentist decided I should have an X-ray taken. Then he did the checkup and said "Your teeth look fine — we'll just wait for the X-ray to be developed to make sure." When the X-ray came back there was a big area of decay immediately visible below the surface, and that's when he decided I needed root canal treatment.
Not that I want to scare you or anything, but. It can happen. And dentists wouldn't take routine X-rays if it were always obvious when something's wrong.
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Date: 2005-02-23 01:42 pm (UTC)I had to have a tooth out not long before Christmas 2002 (only a couple of days before my dad's 60th birthday party) because I broke it while eating a sandwich. It broke because it had previously had to be filled from the root canal up, which apparently makes the tooth fragile — it happens, it was just bad luck. The root canal treatment had been a couple of years previous, and the top bit of it had had to be redone because a couple of days after having it done the first time I managed to chip a bit off the tooth. Clearly there wasn't actually much of this tooth left after the dentist had filled it.
Anyway.
How this started was: when I moved to my current house I didn't register with a new dentist, for reasons of being lazy and avoidant, and I hadn't seen my previous dentist for a while because they had gone private and also because I missed my last appointment owing to having lost my diary on a train and they wanted to charge me 15 quid for the privilege of not having seen a dentist. So it was somewhere between three and five years since I'd seen a dentist when one December while I was visiting my parents I noticed something odd about one of the gaps between my teeth while eating a bread roll and I thought I found a flake of tooth that had come out of the gap. I couldn't feel anything actually wrong, though. When I got back to Oxford I decided I had better look for a dentist and booked a checkup. Because it had been a while since I had last been to a dentist (and I'd never had a dental X-ray anyway) the dentist decided I should have an X-ray taken. Then he did the checkup and said "Your teeth look fine — we'll just wait for the X-ray to be developed to make sure." When the X-ray came back there was a big area of decay immediately visible below the surface, and that's when he decided I needed root canal treatment.
Not that I want to scare you or anything, but. It can happen. And dentists wouldn't take routine X-rays if it were always obvious when something's wrong.