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Creating beautiful smiles since 1969
Lucy Stock says the craze for ‘Turkey teeth’ is fuelling aggressive tooth cutting and full-coverage crowns
Has enamel really gone out of fashion? There seems to be an epidemic of belligerently cutting the stuff with staggering disregard for the material we are flushing down the drain. Enamel is paying the ultimate price on the “Turkey teeth” train journey with its chaotic aftermath and bleak final destination.
Why is it that we can eat day after day, and our teeth don’t break? Well, it’s all down to the ingenious design of a tooth. A tooth is coated with the hardest material in the body – enamel; it’s harder than steel, iron, and bone.
It gets its strength from an exceptional design; on a minuscule scale, enamel resembles squashed honeycomb tubes filled with millions of overlapping spaghetti-like crystals, snugly packed together.
On its own, enamel would be immensely strong but brittle, so underneath a layer of dentine, which is more supple, allows the tooth to “flex” and absorb the forces when we eat. This design is why we can bite into hard foods for decades without breaking all our teeth.
The design of the tooth dates back 500 million years; early tooth-like structures were first observed in fish. A shark’s skin may look smooth, but it’s really made up of teeth-like V-shaped structures known as dermal denticles.
Just like teeth, dermal denticles have a hard outer layer of enamel, a middle layer of dentine and an inner chamber containing blood vessels. Sharks are clad in this tooth chainmail suit of armour for protection, thanks to its robust construction. The conclusion is that the tooth, with its enamel, is a proven, super-strong design to be cherished.
There simply is no dental material that acts like enamel. When we unthinkingly cut the stuff away and replace it with wall-to-wall porcelain crowns, we lose all the magic of the supreme characteristics that enamel offers. Of course, there are times when a crown is the best option for restoring a tooth. However, there are many other options to rebuild a tooth before we decide to cut away tooth enamel.
The goal is to achieve a great-looking smile, teeth we can eat comfortably with, and dental treatment that is kind to our teeth and lasts. I’ll discuss affordable dental alternatives rather than wall-to-wall crowns in my next article.
