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When was the last time you were grateful for your cavities ?  You might want to start thanking them. People with a lot of cavities are less likely to get head and neck cancer, according to medicaldaily.com. Cavities are often a sign of poor oral hygiene, and tooth decay is "an incredibly common disorder, affecting 60 to 90 percent of children and 100 percent of adults, according to the   World Health Organization (WHO) ," Lizette Borreli reports. While cavities usually aren't a big deal -- "drill and fill," as dentists refer to them -- they can also be a sign of other problems, from gum disease to diabetes, heart disease, and stroke,  according to the CDC . But it turns out poor oral healh may have a silver lining.  Recent findings have shown that "adults who have a lot of cavities are a third less likely to develop head and neck cancer than those without cavities," writes Borreli. "This was an unexpected finding since dental cavities h...

Want to know the best way to tell whether your parent in a nursing home is doing well?  Open his mouth. A shocking number of nursing home residents rarely if ever have their teeth looked at, according to Catherine Saint Louis, and though you might think it's just teeth, infection in gums from poor dental hygiene can lead to life-threatening illnesses like pneumonia, one of the number-one killers of those living in nursing homes. "In nursing homes across the country, residents. . . are plagued by cavities, gum disease and cracked teeth, in part because their mouths are not kept clean," Saint Louis writes. And nursing home personnel, spending most of their time helping residents to the toilet, being fed, or repositioned in bed, just don't have much to spend on dental hygiene, even just brushing teeth. “I always say you can measure quality in a nursing home by looking in people’s mouths, because it’s one of the last things to be taken care of,” Dr. Judith A. Jones...

My husband always grimaces when he sees babies sleeping with bottles in their mouths, especially if it's sugary juice. "They're going to ruin their teeth!" he mourns.  (I should mention he's a dentist.) But a new study is showing that a glass of milk after sugary cereals may go a long way in preventing cavities, according to a story at newswise.com. "Washing down sugary breakfast cereal with milk after eating reduces plaque acid levels and may prevent damage to tooth enamel that leads to cavities, according to new research at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry," the Web site reports. That's because dry, ready-to-eat, sugar-added cereals combine refined sugar and starch, and "when those carbohydrates are consumed, bacteria in the dental plaque on tooth surfaces produce acids," newswise.com quotes Christine Wu, professor of pediatric dentistry and director of cariology, who served as principal investigator of the ...

No, it's not to talk about how much you fear the dentist. These people are now filling teeth, performing crowns and bridges -- and just about taking the last scraps of business for dentists, according to my dentist husband.  It's all, of course, to save money. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/21/dental-therapists-minnesota/1731979/