Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/03/teeth-as-time-capsules-soviet-secrets-and-my-dentist-grandmother

by Petiver • 2 years ago

63 15 2 years ago

theguardian.com

lynx23• 2 years ago

Rather longwinded personal intro, followed by

due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school!

YAY! What a horror story.

watt• 2 years ago

That explains quite a lot about dentistry in USSR

riehwvfbk• 2 years ago

It explains your bias and preconceived notions.

One could read the story as "people had to do what they had to in order to survive and help their fellow humans". But no, you choose to focus on "Soviet dentistry hurrr" without knowing a thing about it.

The article is also guilty. It talks at length about this book with a story of horrible torture that is entirely made up. Essentially that book is a collection of every stereotype and conspiracy mashed into one. The modern-day equivalent would be a book about how QAnon and Pizzagate are real. But no, the author says "the book is a lie, but Russia is bad so it's justified", missing the obvious: the book is trash.

supermatt3• 2 years ago

Clearly you didn't read the article. The grandmother was in Poland.

tombert• 2 years ago

Very tangential, but interesting enough story:

My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces.

After a few months, she "borrowed" the materials required for braces, and installed them on my dad, and removed them about a year later. Apparently it worked out fine, my dad's teeth are alright.

Obviously, things going "alright" is more a matter of luck than anything else: there's a reason that people go to dental school, and they were fortunate that there weren't any complications, but I always thought it was amusing that that's how my dad got his teeth straightened.

mncharity• 2 years ago

they were fortunate that there weren't any complications

I long ago saw a proposal for a country-scale medical training system designed for graceful upgrading. A highly experienced nurse, wishing to become a doctor, just learns the delta, rather than restarting from scratch. Similarly for a community heath worker moving into nursing, etc. And a different proposal, for automated support and oversight of community health workers' hard-to-take-well cervical-cancer screening photos, integrated with ai-filtered city-based expert consults. And then there's patients who become single-disease domain experts.

So looking forward, perhaps we could imagine a human-computer-hybrid setup where a grandma training and executing with oversight was gracefully supported? Especially if haptic vr becomes widely available.

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

Ask an experienced cosmetologist at a salon how many of their clients come in, wearing a hat or scarf, asking them to rescue a home project going awry.

And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.

Hnrobert42• 2 years ago

WARNING: article is only tangential related to teeth. I gave up skimming halfway through. There were a few mentions of the effects of jail and torture on teeth.

Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

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