Martin Rickett/PA Wire via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I have never gone to the dentist for a cleaning every six months. I figure once a year is enough, and sometimes I don’t even do it that often. Ferris Jabr tells me that this is fine. The whole 6-month thing is basically just a way for dentists to make more money:

Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding. Scholars have traced its origins to a few potential sources, including a toothpaste advertisement from the 1930s and an illustrated pamphlet from 1849 that follows the travails of a man with a severe toothache. Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months.

Hmmm. This sounds a lot like my good friend, the “drink eight glasses of water every day” nonsense.

I’ve never been afraid of the dentist or anything like that. But I have to say that my recent encounters with the dental profession have been less than confidence inspiring. Several years ago I dropped my dentist after beginning to wonder if their advice was based a wee bit too much on sales goals from the head office. I had started to get a little uneasy after listening in on a scene near the waiting room that sounded more like a hawker at a Turkish bazaar than a dentist recommending treatment. I got more uneasy when they started replacing fillings awfully frequently. And then I got really uneasy when it suddenly turned out that every time I went in they discovered an “infection” that required a new kind of antibiotic treatment. The third time this happened, I tried to ask about just what this “infection” really was and what dentists did about them before this new treatment came on the market. I was unable to get a straight answer, so I left.

I switched to a dentist recommended by a friend, but last year I dropped her too. The primary reason was a fairly egregious mistake she had made, but it was also because she told me, in a conversational aside, that she had been replacing several of my old fillings because they were metal and she thought that was bad. What she had said at the time was that they were coming loose. Guess what?

The Cochrane organization, a highly respected arbiter of evidence-based medicine, has conducted systematic reviews of oral-health studies since 1999….Little medical evidence justifies the substitution of tooth-colored resins for typical metal amalgams to fill cavities….When Cochrane researchers tried to determine whether faulty metal fillings should be repaired or replaced, they could not find a single study that met their standards.

I would never have bothered getting the fillings replaced just to get rid of the metal, and now it looks as though they probably didn’t need to be replaced even if they were faulty. (Which I now doubt, based on the egregious mistake I mentioned earlier.)

Anyway, I guess it’s time for me to find a new dentist. All I want is someone who will do what’s necessary, but only what’s necessary. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how you figure that out ahead of time.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate