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WE DENTAL HEALTH professionals tend to be big fans of the Tooth Fairy. We can remember leaving a baby tooth under the pillow and looking forward to finding a nice reward the next morning. Other parts of the world have their own fascinating traditions with baby teeth too. How About a Tooth Mouse?Many European and […]

WOMEN FACED AN uphill battle establishing themselves in many career fields, dentistry included. That’s why, for Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating three pioneers for women in dentistry. Lucy Hobbs TaylorLucy Hobbs Taylor, born 1833, was the world’s first female dental school graduate. Many dental schools refused to admit her, but the Ohio College of Dental […]

BEING TONGUE-TIED isn’t just an expression; for many people, it’s an actual medical condition, and a similar one is being lip-tied. We all have thin, stretchy pieces of tissue that connect our tongues to the floor of our mouths and our lips to our gums. Sometimes those pieces of tissue are unusually thick or tight, […]

WE’VE BEEN HEARING for decades how dangerous smoking is to many aspects of our health. As dental professionals, our focus is particularly on the dangers to oral health, including unsightly stains on teeth at the less serious end of the spectrum, to a massively increased risk of tooth decay and gum disease, to life-threatening oral […]

OUR JAWS GET a pretty constant workout between all the talking, chewing, and yawning we do, but those simple activities become more complicated for those with temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD or TMJ). There’s a small, fibrous disk that serves as a cushion between the ball and socket of the joint. If it shifts out of […]

UNLESS THE DENTIST is an active TikTok user, it’s not a good idea to get dental health advice from social media. We’ve noticed a lot of dangerous DIY ideas popping up so let’s take a minute to nip them in the bud. 1. “Healthy Soda”No soda is truly healthy for teeth, as the bubbles in […]

40% OF KIDS WILL have at least one cavity by the time they start school, usually due to poor oral hygiene and eating and drinking lots of sugary things. It’s critical to teach kids good oral health habits early on and to help them brush their teeth until they are able to do it themselves, […]

FOR AS LONG AS there have been people, there has been tooth decay, but people in past civilizations didn’t have as many answers about what caused their tooth problems as we do now. That led to some very strange beliefs about dental health. One of the most common was the “tooth worm.” Ancient Well-Intentioned ErrorsAs […]

“MOUTH-BREATHER” HAS made the rounds as an insult in recent years, but breathing primarily through the mouth instead of the nose can actually have some pretty negative effects on health, including oral health. Mouth-breathing should only be done as an emergency backup, not the main way to breathe. The Nose Is a Built-In Air FilterThe […]

WE CAN SEE a hint of the state of dental health in Shakespeare’s England from a sonnet in which he describes his lady love’s reeking breath. The lines “black contagious breath” and “his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese” make it into two of the history plays. This was likely because dental health in England […]