Hey, Indonesian health authorities! say something about this fact! British Government has warned its people of the criminal dentists...Also, Indon govt should announce that dental X-rays is really dangerous for human health. Honestly..it was kind of shocking when finding this article saying the dental radiology is not safe. So, why some dentists I attended said "it is very safe". How come they lie? Maybe this article's writer judgment is right that most dentist just want to line their own pockets...Oh, this is crappy..Then, one thing we can do as patients "speak up and sue them for making us doing an overtreatment"
Last week, the Government warned the public to ignore dentists who tell us to come for check-ups every six months. In fact, according to experts at the health watchdog, The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), most adults need to have a check-up only every two years.The experts at Nice first issued this advice seven years ago. But since then the dental industry has done much to obliterate this fact. It undoubtedly threatens to dent their incomes.Are you seeing the dentist too often? Pointless X-rays and needless check-ups could be adding up to a rip-off | Mail Online
But even with the most morally scrupulous dentist, unnecessarily frequent check-ups may expose you to another danger. This is due to X-rays, which have long been a feature of routine dental checks.
The risk level is controversial, but British researchers warned last year that the more dental X-rays you have, the higher your risk grows of developing thyroid cancer. Their study of just over 300 thyroid cancer patients, in the medical journal Acta Oncologica, found that repeated X-rays significantly increased the risk of the disease, prompting the researchers to question the widely held belief that dental radiography is absolutely safe.
Certainly, the disease has become significantly more common in recent years. The researchers, led by Dr Anjum Memon, a consultant in public health medicine at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, report that the rates of thyroid cancer in the UK have doubled from 1.4 in every 100,000 people in 1975 to 2.9 per 100,000 in 2006.
A number of earlier studies have reported a link between dental X-rays and cancers of the thyroid, salivary glands and brain. It is known that dentists and their assistants are at higher risk of tumours. Dr Memon has called for a rethink on the use of X-rays as part of routine check-ups and for greater caution when using them on children.
A more positive reason for not traipsing to the surgery every six months is that we don’t have to worry about our wisdom teeth. Fashions have changed, so dentists should no longer be urging you to have them whipped out in case they cause trouble some day in the future.
The official guidance from Nice now is that unless your wisdom teeth are causing pain or pushing other teeth out of the way, they should be left exactly where they are. Around one in 100 people suffer serious nerve damage from wisdom-teeth removal, according to American Journal of Public Health. They can be left with no feeling in their lips, tongue and cheek.
Someone should have told that to the Arsenal striker Robin Van Persie, though. He was so convinced that his wisdom teeth were somehow responsible for a string of injuries that he had them pulled out in 2009. The expert advice now is that such fears are merely the stuff of tooth-fairy tales.
All of this should come as reassuring news to the many thousands of people who suffer extreme anxiety before they even enter a surgery. The Adult Dental Health (ADH) survey earlier this year found that one in five women, and one in ten men admit to being gripped by terror at the thought of the dentist’s chair.
It may also bring comfort to the growing numbers who guiltily fear that they can no longer afford to answer the dentist’s six-monthly summons. One in five of us have put off check-ups because of fear that the bills will be too high, according to the ADH survey.
Of course, common sense must prevail here. If you have problems such as inflamed gums, toothache, broken fillings and crowns or mouth sores that refuse to go away, then a prompt dental visit is a must. For the rest of us, aim to sit in the chair only once every two years. Quite simply, there is no good reason to put yourself through it any more often than that.
