First, let me first address the misconceptions:
· Teeth must be kept clean but gums don’t need a great deal of attention.
· Electric toothbrush is better important than manual.
· Doesn’t matter what you put in your mouth to fill yourself.
· Make dentist visits, 6-monthly, but no need to do much in-between the visits.
Perhaps some of these facts and citations below will remove these misconceptions.
According to The Guardian, January 2018, “Surgeons performing record numbers of operations to pull out rotten teeth in children. Hospitals extracted multiple teeth from children and teenagers in England a total of 42,911 times – 170 a day – in 2016-17, according to statistics obtained by the Local Government Association. That is almost a fifth (17%) more than the 36,833 of those procedures that surgical teams carried out in 2012-13. Each one involves a child having a general anesthetic and at least two teeth removed.”
And the numbers are increasing. It would be interesting to get some figures after 2018.
And according to The Dentist, March 2018, “Tooth decay is the number one reason why children are admitted to hospital in England, with recent figures from the Local Government Association (LGA), revealing that there were nearly 43,000 hospital operations to remove unhealthy teeth in children in the last year.”
It is laughable when you read on important sites like Public Health England, how much sugar should children be consuming daily. Please don’t buy into this. If children are eating nutritious meals, they do not need sugar.
Among grownups, the rise of dental issues has grown by 20% over the past 20 years. Should it not be the other way around, with so much education and tech around us?
