| Teeth | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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| Airdate | May 11, 1999 | ||
| Curriculum | Health | ||
Teeth is a BrainPOP Health video that aired on May 11, 1999.
Summary[]
At the end, Moby pins Tim to the ground and flosses his teeth.
Appearances[]
Transcript[]
Quiz[]
FYIs[]
In Practice
Here are some dental care tips, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota!
- Brush your teeth at least twice a day, and preferably after every meal.
- Toothbrushes with hard bristles can damage your gums, so use one with soft bristles. Don’t brush too hard, either—you can damage your gums that way.
- Make sure you brush properly. Use short back-and-forth motions, and make sure to clean the inside surfaces of your teeth, and the chewing surfaces, too.
- Every time you brush, do so for two minutes.
- Brush your tongue and the roof of your mouth; it’s a good way to get rid of bacteria.
- Replace your toothbrush at least every three or four months.
- Make sure to floss every day. But be careful and gentle with it—you can really cut your gums up if you floss too hard.
- Use an inter-dental cleaner, like a pick or a stick you can use to clean between your teeth.
- A mouth rinse can help reduce plaque buildup between your teeth.
- Visit your dentist every six months for a cleaning and checkup.
Personalities
Some famous people have also been dentists! Here are a bunch of them.
Paul Revere: The famous American patriot was a silversmith, engraver, and dentist—he would carve false teeth and wire them into place.
Doc Holliday: This gunslinger and gambler earned a doctorate from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in Philadelphia. But Holliday (pictured) soon discovered that gambling paid way more than dentistry, so he began traveling through frontier towns in the West. There, he gambled and pulled teeth on the side. In a newspaper ad, Holliday even promised to give his patients’ money back if they weren’t satisfied with his work. He and Wyatt Earp later participated in a famous gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ.
William George Beers: The “father of modern lacrosse” codified the sport’s rules, defined the number of players per team, set the dimensions of the playing field, and standardized the size and composition of the ball. He also founded Canada’s first dental journal and served as dean of its first dental college.
Zane Grey: The American author, famous for his adventure tales set in the American West, was the son of an Ohio dentist. He himself practiced dentistry in New York City before turning to writing full-time around 1910.
Cary Middlecoff: This golfer gave up his dental practice in Memphis, TN to turn professional in his sport. He won the U.S. Open in 1949 and 1956 and the Masters in 1955 before becoming a successful television commentator.
Discoveries and Inventions
At the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Frederick McKay, a dentist from Colorado Springs, noticed that many of his patients were getting mysterious brown stains on their teeth. Oddly, he also noticed that these people usually had fewer cavities and lower rates of tooth decay.
But it wasn’t until the early 1930s that researchers figured out exactly what was going on. The water in Colorado Springs contained high levels of the element fluoride, which caused both the stain (known today as dental fluorosis) and the lack of cavities.
The U.S. Public Health Service stepped in and conducted a survey, which seemed to prove that children who grew up drinking fluoridated water had healthier teeth than kids who didn’t. When fluoride was removed from the water, the level of decay immediately increased.
So, during the 1940s and 50s, the government decided to encourage communities across the nation to add a safe level of fluoride to their water supplies. As long as the fluoride level was less than 1.2 milligrams per liter, it looked like people’s teeth would get stronger, but they wouldn’t develop fluorosis.
By the end of the 1950s, most American communities, as well as most developed countries around the world, had fluoridated their water supplies. But there was also a backlash, mostly due to the damage that fluoride can cause to the human body if it’s consumed in large quantities. Some recent studies seem to show that fluoridation does not have a measurably beneficial effect on kids’ dental health, and as a result, some places have recently removed fluorine from their water supplies.
Language
Enjoy some terrific teeth terminology!
- Alveolus: A small socket in your jawbone in which the root of a tooth is nestled
- Bonding: The act of applying resin to a tooth to change its shape or color
- Crown: The part of a tooth covered by enamel; can be natural or artificial
- Cusp: Pointed top of a tooth
- Dentition: A fancy word meaning “all the teeth in your mouth”
- Denture: An artificial tooth or set of teeth
- Eruption: When a tooth pushes through the gums
- Gingiva: The soft tissue that encircles the base of your teeth. An inflammation of this tissue is called gingivitis.
- Impacted tooth: A partially-erupted tooth that is positioned in such a way that it can’t emerge fully
- Malocclusion: When the biting or chewing surfaces of the upper and lower teeth don’t line up properly with one another
- Oral mucosa: The pinkish-red tissue that lines the mouth
- Palate: The hard and soft tissues that make up the roof of the mouth
- Periodontist: A doctor that specializes in treating the gums and other soft tissues around the teeth
- Root canal: Refers to both the canals underneath the dentin (hard part) of the teeth, and the procedure for repairing them when they decay or become infected
FYI Comic[]
