Science moves too slow for my own good. Ship me a supply of gel and I'll DIY. If I wind up growing three new teeth as a weird side-effect, I wouldn't care. Anything to get rid of that damned primitive drill!

You had a drill? Wow that's way ahead of me. I had a tooth "taken care of" in a dental hospital over here (PRChina). They used a hammer and chisel.

There was a stern nurse whose only job was to go around the cubicals(booths?they're certainly not rooms) knocking out teeth. On my way out I seen her in another cubicle doing the same to some other poor chap.

My jaw was more painful than the actual tooth for a good few days after that.

But yeah, ship the gel.

I wonder which is more painful? What you had, or what I had in Eastern Europe, which is the same old drill, but no anesthesia.

Incidentally, living in the west has totally pussyfied me. No offense meant to my (now) fellow westerners.

We've got it good, and by that I mean to include Eastern Europe.

"An Egyptian lower jaw, dated by experts from 2900 to 2750 BC, demonstrates two holes drilled through the bone, presumably to drain an abscessed tooth."

Other than that, as best I understand back in the day people simply had to live with it.

I'm not sure which choice is worse, but I'd certainly rather you get me drunk, knock me out and drill my tooth, than either of those.

> Other than that, as best I understand back in the day people simply had to live with it.

An untreated cavity often causes infection that spreads to the jaw and from there to the rest of the head. This is usually lethal.

Before dentists, teeth that developed cavities were usually removed.

Well sure it kills you, but did they know to pull the tooth in 4000BC?

Ever have a root canal with no pain killers? And you complain about drills, HA!

That sounds extremely face-numbingly painful.

Aren't cavities a solved problem? I don't have any cavities and neither do most young people I know. Brush your teeth twice a day!

Another interesting development in the fight against cavities is the idea of genetically modifying the bacteria that secrete the acid that causes cavities to make them harmless. The NYTimes had an article about it 8 years ago, I wonder whatever happened to the technology

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15GENE.html

Someone killed a Comment about the expense of dentistry. There's been a huge growth in "medical tourism." One of them is to fix teeth and this is an excellent account of when it was still very inexpensive to have done in Costa Rica: http://tftb.com/beautyfromafar/newsmile1.html

From the end of the article: "That said, regenerating a tooth from within would only be useful in a relatively small number of cases. Most cavities would still need to be drilled and filled."

Still cool, I guess.

I'm assuming from that sentence that the treatment will be costly. Though, honestly, for a tooth regeneration treatment you'd not need high margins for profitability.

What with the number of people that get cavities, I'd hope it wouldn't be hard to make profitable.

I'd also hope it'll be cheap. Getting a tooth drilled requires all sorts of infrastructure, and hours of time on the part of a trained PhD. Slapping some goop on? All you have to do is make the goop cheaper, and costs plummet.

I'm assuming that treatment is slow. So a big cavity can maybe take too long to regenerate (a year?) which means that many won't be willing to live with the pain while the tooth heals vs waiting it out and having a brand spankin' new tooth.

Or, you know, just keep your vitamin D and calcium intake high and not worry too much about it.

Replace the tooth-filling material with something that bone can grow into/replace and you would have something more general. I have no idea how that would work, but they do something similar with joint replacements.

I've seen reports where coral was used for bone regrowth. A quick Google find: http://www.arthroscopy.com/sp12013.htm

Yes. Just remember, teeth are not bone.

Let's see, that would be under the "five year" plan http://xkcd.com/678/

Great timing, in 15 minutes I go to the dentist for my first ever cavities :(

Honestly, the drill does not bother me whatsoever. After a bad root canal and someone fixing it up after an infection, drills are like walking through rainbow fields with unicorns and happiness.

However the potential of this is amazing. There are other implications of fillings. If you keep getting fillings in the same tooth, eventually you will need a root canal which means... a dead tooth, which is bad. However this will make your tooth regenerate meaning that there is no filling and thus the hole never gets "deeper" approaching your root. This will not only eliminate the drill for small holes but can potentially reduce the total number of necessary root canals. Maybe long-term treatment could cause teeth to completely regenerate, maybe pain for a year, but pain for a year for a completely healed tooth is worth it vs fillings which are a patch-up. Can't wait till this is a reality.

The problem being is that the people in Step 1 aren't the same in Step 4 and you are misrepresenting the people in Step 2.

It's more like:

Step 1) Alternative medicine quacks say that their special goop can regenerate teeth.

Step 2) Actual researchers, scientists, and doctors investigate the goop and discover it's flour, water, and sugar, with some ginseng thrown in. And that such a combination would never be able to regenerate teeth.

Step 3) Inspired by the idea of tooth regenerating goop, people with a knowledge of chemistry, dentistry, and biology work on making a goop that can when combined with the materials commonly found in human mouths will begin to calcify and harden.

Step 4) Tooth goop gets announced to public.

Step 5) Alternative medicine quacks act like they were the foundational research the led to this advance.

Here's something I've heard once: "You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine".

Good old Tim Minchin (That quote is from Storm, if you don't remember.)

I'm honestly surprised at the downvotes here. Even including people who went back to download older comments on totally different threads. Interesitng.

In any case, I simply stated the pattern. Everyone else added a value judgment into it, apparently.

And no, I did not misrepresent those in Step 2. There is a huge difference between saying, "That is impossible.", and saying, "Interesting idea. Your implementation is wrong, but we will see what we can do with the idea."

Most of the time, I see the "impossible" reaction.

Of course people in Step 1 and 4 are different. And of course real research is done on it. That is exactly the point. It is the pattern that is interesting, and the talk of who the players are is exactly why it is interesting

It is a misrepresentation because doctors aren't saying "that's impossible" they're saying "what you claim your product does is false because for your implementation to work would require impossible reactions".

You've misrepresented their position of debunking junk medicine by claiming their position is that the end result is impossible.

And you imply (by omission basically) that the people in Steps 1 and 4 are from the same field (junk medicine) which is never the case. You want to attribute this general fuzzy-wuzzy idea concept to junk medicine to validate junk medicine as a whole.

However, of course results claimed by junk medicine will be replicated by real medicine later. Junk medicine doesn't have to work. Junk medicine has had baldness cures and impotency cures since forever. Real medicine now actually does have stuff to correct baldness and impotency. That does not mean that junk medicine had anything to do with solving the problems. The best that could be said for junk medicine is that it articulates problems.

And most quacks are quite good at listening to their clients. Perhaps because that's all they can do.

Most physician are way too busy to spend much time with their patients.

Unless you can show the "alternative medicine quacks" actually doing the "impossible", your point is irrelevant. Is there some wildly successful "alternative" medicine treatment that regrows teeth but has somehow eluded popularity for lo these many thousands of years?

Step 3.5) selectively reduce sample size by a factor of 1000(0? 00?).