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Comments Off As if I Needed Another Reason To Hate The Dentist
About 18 years ago I had a minor toothache which turned out to be a cavity. I did what you are supposed to do and headed on to the dentist. He dug it out, packed it with stuff and sent me on my way. A month later it hurt again, so I went back. He said it was infected, and did the digging and packing thing again along with anti-biotics.
A couple weeks later it really started hurting and I went back to the same idiot who said I needed a root canal and had to go to someone else. I got the root canal, which sucked like a root canal. Then it got painful, more painful than anything I’d ever experienced so I went to a periodontist who told me my tooth was cracked, infected and they needed to extract the thing.
So they did extraction and it was awful, so awful that I didn’t go back to a dentist for five years. To this day I still shake going to the dentist. It took just about all the will I have this fall to have my wisdom teeth out.
So I hate dentists. I tell them directly during appointments how I feel. I do it funny, but I’m not kidding.
And now we learn that they’re giving us brain cancer.
Cancer researchers have found that certain types of dental X-rays significantly increased the incidence of the most common type of brain tumor in the United States: meningioma.
The study authors offer the caveat that their subjects likely received X-rays as kids that delivered a much higher dose of radiation than those used today. But the numbers are still alarming: they found that people diagnosed with meningiomas were more than twice as likely to have undergone so-called bitewing X-rays—the kind that tend to hurt like a mother when the dentist makes you bite down on a hard, pointy piece of cardboard with your molars.
Amazing.