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Fillings Get Smaller…and Smaller
By: Judith Sloan
—We all remember going to the dentist, opening wide, and listening with held breath while he examined our teeth for decay. “Please, no cavities,” we prayed.
With his prickly instrument in hand, our dentist probed every tooth, looking for “soft” spots where decay had invaded our once hard, pristine dental enamel. And when the point found its quarry, a tiny spot of decay, he would nod and say, “We’ve got a small one here. We’ll watch to see if it grows into something.”
No longer. Fast-forward to 2004, and the prickly instrument takes a back seat to a high-tech laser probe (http://www.washdent.com/services.html) that lands a preemptive strike in the battle against decay.
Make way for “Minimally Invasive Dentistry.” (http://www.washdent.com/services.html) The mouthful of words means simply that dentists no longer allow dots of decay to advance into large craters. Armed with the ultimate in high-tech sleuthing, they now set out to find decay—at the earliest possible moment.
“Now we can absolutely eliminate many large fillings that lead to cracked teeth, crowns and other more invasive treatment,” says Dr. Daniel J. Deutsch (http://www.washdent.com/deutsch.html), of the Washington Center for Dentistry in Washington, DC. (http://www.washdent.com)
Here’s how it works: The dental decay finder touches the surface of every tooth, each time flashing a digital score that reports the presence of decay.
A tooth that scores above a certain number—has at least the tiniest dot of decay.
And getting at the teeny offending area involves another technological wonder. A gentle dental “sandblaster” uses tiny particles to whisk away decay in layers. The area gets filled in with a tooth-colored liquid that hardens in seconds under a special light.
Patients walk out of the office with tiny fillings.
“And the best part,” says Dr. Deutsch, “is they have treatment with no needle and no drill!”
This article was posted on November 24, 2004
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How to Benefit from the Mind-Body Connection
(excerpt)
You are about to gain insight into the
mind-body connection. The number of
people who truly understand these principles on our
planet are relatively few.
There is an undeniable connection between our minds and
bodies, you can learn
to use this fact to your benefit.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine and
Miracles" was once a
distraught cancer surgeon until he
began to understand the greater principles
of the mind-
body connection. He felt dragged down by the artificial
barriers
that existed between patient and doctor, and the
helplessness he often felt as
a result of his inability
to effectively serve those patients. Eventually, those
barriers
were disintegrated by Dr. Siegel's recognition
and growing understanding of the
mind-body connection and
how it could serve his patients and himself.
Dr. Siegel, or Bernie as he began to have his patients
refer to him, had some
startling realizations as a cancer surgeon. He found that
there were actually
quite a few people in the world that successfully beat
the statistics on cancer
survival. He began to recognize that a patient's ability
to defeat something as
serious as cancer had to do with the patient's mind and
attitude about their
disease.
If you would like to see the rest of
this article, please go here:
http://www.tobeinformed.com/repository/mind-body.html
copyright 2004 - David Snape
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