OldRooster
*******Get off my lawn!******* 65, stop asking.
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2019
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At some point when I was a small child before by permanent teeth grew in, I was given some medication, probably tetracyline, that caused my teeth to grow in very yellow. More or less like this:
No one told me this when I was a kid. In fact everyone including Dentists and Dental assistants would tell me it was my fault my teeth were yellow because I did not brush them enough. It was not even till a few years ago that I actually pieced this all together.
I am not sure if novacaine/lidocaine existed back in the 1960s, but I am sure my Dentist as a kid did not use numbing medication when filling cavities. I did not even know that numbing medication existed until we moved and switched Dentists when I was 13. I lack the vocabulary to explain how painful that was.
When I was in my teens, even my 20s, veneers did not exist, and there was no way to whiten yellow teeth. There are supposedly some whitening processes now, but I am skeptical they are effective for teeth as yellow as mine where. About the age of 29, I had good comprehensive dental insurance, and I decided to get my 12 front teeth crowned. It was a big improvement, but it isn't like I had a Tom Cruise smile, I still had a narrow palate and smallish teeth. And you could still see some of yellow teeth in the back of my mouth that were not crowned.
Those 1990 era crowns were crap compared to the crowns they have today, those crowns were all metal with a thin layer of ceramic on top. Inevitably the gum line would recede after a couple of years, and the underlying metal would show through. So after about 10 years I had to have another entire set of 12 crowns replaced , this time with the new and improved non metal crowns so I did not need to be concerned about the metal showing.
But the thing is, even the best crowns have to be replaced every 12 years or so, and every time you replace them you have to resurface the tooth, removing some of the tooth structure. And once you get the smallest bit of erosion at the base of the crown it acts like a trap for food particles and becomes almost impossible to clean.
After a few cycles of crowns, 3 of my top teeth have broken off at the gum line from the everyday hydraulic pressure of eating of eating. I had them replaced with implants. That is the good news. The bad news is that my bottom teeth became completely destroyed, I had a couple of failed root canals, then a bridge, and yet I still experienced a chronic infection from all the crowns in my lower arch that were just impossible to keep clean. I had no choice but the nuclear option.
.
A month ago I had what is generically known as "all on 4" done on my lower arch. It involved extracting all the remaining teeth on my lower arch, then having 4-6 titanium screw implants placed around my mouth, and a temporary plastic dental arch placed on top of the titanium screws. In a couple of months that will be replaced with a permanent one piece dental arch. Like this...
No one told me this when I was a kid. In fact everyone including Dentists and Dental assistants would tell me it was my fault my teeth were yellow because I did not brush them enough. It was not even till a few years ago that I actually pieced this all together.
I am not sure if novacaine/lidocaine existed back in the 1960s, but I am sure my Dentist as a kid did not use numbing medication when filling cavities. I did not even know that numbing medication existed until we moved and switched Dentists when I was 13. I lack the vocabulary to explain how painful that was.
When I was in my teens, even my 20s, veneers did not exist, and there was no way to whiten yellow teeth. There are supposedly some whitening processes now, but I am skeptical they are effective for teeth as yellow as mine where. About the age of 29, I had good comprehensive dental insurance, and I decided to get my 12 front teeth crowned. It was a big improvement, but it isn't like I had a Tom Cruise smile, I still had a narrow palate and smallish teeth. And you could still see some of yellow teeth in the back of my mouth that were not crowned.
Those 1990 era crowns were crap compared to the crowns they have today, those crowns were all metal with a thin layer of ceramic on top. Inevitably the gum line would recede after a couple of years, and the underlying metal would show through. So after about 10 years I had to have another entire set of 12 crowns replaced , this time with the new and improved non metal crowns so I did not need to be concerned about the metal showing.
But the thing is, even the best crowns have to be replaced every 12 years or so, and every time you replace them you have to resurface the tooth, removing some of the tooth structure. And once you get the smallest bit of erosion at the base of the crown it acts like a trap for food particles and becomes almost impossible to clean.
After a few cycles of crowns, 3 of my top teeth have broken off at the gum line from the everyday hydraulic pressure of eating of eating. I had them replaced with implants. That is the good news. The bad news is that my bottom teeth became completely destroyed, I had a couple of failed root canals, then a bridge, and yet I still experienced a chronic infection from all the crowns in my lower arch that were just impossible to keep clean. I had no choice but the nuclear option.
.
A month ago I had what is generically known as "all on 4" done on my lower arch. It involved extracting all the remaining teeth on my lower arch, then having 4-6 titanium screw implants placed around my mouth, and a temporary plastic dental arch placed on top of the titanium screws. In a couple of months that will be replaced with a permanent one piece dental arch. Like this...
