The last bite

02 February 2015
Volume 31 · Issue 2

Chilly results

Despite the mornings lightening slightly and the evenings lengthening it is a nippy time of the year, which may have been the inspiration for researchers at London’s King’s College Hospital to develop a new chilled face mask.
Under trial, the device, called the Hilotherm, has tubes through which water flows at programmed temperatures; never going below 15oC. The mask is powered by a small bedside pump about the size of a toaster, which circulates the water and will be placed on the patient’s face immediately after all four wisdom teeth have been extracted. The theory
is that since cold is a useful method for reducing the after-effects of trauma it might help with the post-extraction hamster syndrome.
Whether or not a portable version might follow remains to be seen, although, call me old fashioned but didn’t people sometimes use a pack of frozen peas in such cases? No, don’t be daft, no chance of a PhD thesis there.
 
Practising dentistry
There has been much excitement about a YouTube posting in which a seven-year-old boy called Noah loses a tooth.
If losing a tooth doesn’t seem like such a big deal, the difference here is that Noah’s dad is a golf enthusiast who came up with an unconventional way to yank out the wobbly baby tooth. Traditional wisdom involves a piece of string and a door knob but this 21st century variant included dental floss tied to a golf ball. The young man looks at the camera anxiously as his father explains how he plans to hit the ball to extract the tooth, which moments later is swiftly removed as a whole in one.
All well and good but surely this amounts to the practice of dentistry? I don’t want to be a wet blanket or a jobs-worth but dentistry is defined as ‘what a dentist does’; in this instance tooth extraction rather than playing golf. So, with its new found zealousness in prosecuting I imagine it is only a matter of time before Noah’s dad get a knock on the door from the GDC police and find himself the subject of yet another £70k court case. Well, thank goodness someone is
protecting the public.
 
It’s a fair cop
On the subject of teeth and the law, I was fascinated to read that German researchers have developed a method
to detect morphine, cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs and their metabolites in teeth. The method, which requires only very little sample material (0.05g of tooth substance), was based on specially prepared bovine teeth and has been successfully applied to the analysis of archaeological human material. The thought is that the technique could benefit the work of forensic pathologists, anthropologists and archaeologists; but what about traffic cops too?
There must be an instant application whereby a dental care professional accompanying the police can leap into action scaling a minute sample from a convenient incisor or canine for curbside analysis. What price the breathalyser now?