Dentists' Progress

Mankind's teeth are not in very good condition. This was the considered judgment of some 15,000 dentists from 54 nations who met in Boston last week for the first time since 1935.

Dentist Maurice E. Peters of Boston struck the convention keynote when he cried: "We seem to have developed to the stage where the exodontist takes them out and the prosthodontist puts them back, not only decoratively, but quite efficiently and expensively. But is that dentistry? . . . Why should people go to dentists for dental care and end up with artificial teeth?"

The dentists hopefully concentrated on preventive measures. There was some encouraging progress to report:

The biggest hope is still fluorine in drinking water, which seems to fortify children's growing teeth against decay. The delegates heard that some 26 U.S. communities are now carrying on long-range experiments with fluorinated water, and that results so far are promising. Some impatient delegates, believing that there has been experimenting enough, proposed that all the nation's drinking water be fluorinated without further delay. But the U.S. Public Health Service cautioned that investigators were not yet sure that the fluorine doses under study were safe.

Meanwhile, dentists have discovered a new fluorine treatment for children which also looks promising: a solution of sodium fluoride applied directly to the teeth. Already widely tested, the treatment has been found to reduce caries (tooth decay) up to 40%. PHS officers issued a warning, however, against some other fluorine fads. Not recommended: fluorinated dentifrices (they do no good) and fluorine tablets (unwisely used, they may mottle teeth and bones, cause kidney trouble).

Vienna-born Dentist Bernhard Gottlieb and three colleagues at Baylor University reported a treatment which they claimed was even better than sodium fluoride: a solution of zinc chloride and potassium ferrocyanide, which plugs microscopic cracks in the teeth against bacterial invasion.

For grownups with toothache, who cannot be helped by these preventive measures, there were a few crumbs of comfort. Best crumbs: an anesthetic for painless drilling (applied to the tooth without a hypodermic) called "topocaine", a new kind of gold crown for front teeth, so cunningly contrived (by the University of Washington's Dr. Arthur Schultz) that the gold doesn't show.

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