School Dental Vans and Unnceccessary treatment
Franny
Posts: 2,054
My sons school has the dental van provided by Queensland Health visiting at the moment.
Oral hygiene is important, but I am not anal about it. I'm not going to wake up a kid who has fallen asleep without brushing thier, one night isn't going to cause full on mouth rot. I am actually surprised that 2 of my sons friends have fillings and they are only 5yo. I'm not going to judge onthat because you don't whether or not they were sick a lot as babies and it a result of antibiotic use.
But I am concerned about the professionalism of this service. My experiences from when I was kid with the dental van weren't really positive, so that has some bearing on it. Also a friends daughter 2 years ago had the dental van remove a molar as they said it had an abcess under it...she was also 5yo. Then to be told by the staff the following year that whoever removed the tooth shouldn't have done that to a 5yo. Then one of the mum's of a girl in my sons class was telling us that yesterday her daughter was going to the dental van as they said she needed 6 FILLINGS!!!! I am utterly amazed. Personally if they said that to me about my son, I would get a second opinion. I mean 6 fillings in 5yo, either there is a hygiene issue or are the dental staff trying to bump up thier stats?
My son had appointment with our family dentist last year and everything was fine, so I have consented that the school van van may inspect and clean his teeth, but if they believe any further treatment is required, it will undertaken by the family dentist.
So has anyone else had any other school dental van horror stories, are these people really qualified to be taking our childrens dental health into thier hands???
Oral hygiene is important, but I am not anal about it. I'm not going to wake up a kid who has fallen asleep without brushing thier, one night isn't going to cause full on mouth rot. I am actually surprised that 2 of my sons friends have fillings and they are only 5yo. I'm not going to judge onthat because you don't whether or not they were sick a lot as babies and it a result of antibiotic use.
But I am concerned about the professionalism of this service. My experiences from when I was kid with the dental van weren't really positive, so that has some bearing on it. Also a friends daughter 2 years ago had the dental van remove a molar as they said it had an abcess under it...she was also 5yo. Then to be told by the staff the following year that whoever removed the tooth shouldn't have done that to a 5yo. Then one of the mum's of a girl in my sons class was telling us that yesterday her daughter was going to the dental van as they said she needed 6 FILLINGS!!!! I am utterly amazed. Personally if they said that to me about my son, I would get a second opinion. I mean 6 fillings in 5yo, either there is a hygiene issue or are the dental staff trying to bump up thier stats?
My son had appointment with our family dentist last year and everything was fine, so I have consented that the school van van may inspect and clean his teeth, but if they believe any further treatment is required, it will undertaken by the family dentist.
So has anyone else had any other school dental van horror stories, are these people really qualified to be taking our childrens dental health into thier hands???
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By all means feel free to seek a secondary opinion regarding treatment (the dental staff won't be working on a quota basis though, let me assure you there are no hidden agenda's). Treatment for children is mainly aimed at preserving the deciduous (baby) teeth for as long as possible to allow proper and functional erruption of the permanent adult teeth. Early loss of baby teeth results in an array of problems such as not having enough room for the adult teeth to errupt.
6 fillings may seem like alot, but there are many factors that would influence this (without actually having seen the girl). Hygeine is an important influencing factor (especially in a child as young as 5), but diet plays an incredible role as does the individual structure of the teeth (some people are more succeptable to decay due to open fissures on the surface of the teeth or rotated teeth which catch food). Queensland as a state compared to the rest of Australia has ranks very poorly on the dmft index (this is a measure of the number of baby teeth decayed, missing or filled.) The oral health of children is declining in general due to an increasing intake of sugar and lack of preventive oral health care. This problem of dental decay is exaccerbated in Queensland by the lack of community prevention methods such as water fluoridation (which has only recently been legislated). I hope this helps
Thanks for your reply. Qualified was probably the wrong word to use, I know you guys are qualified, but my tiny night shift brain couldn't get the right word to appear! LOL
I am just shocked at the quantity of fillings and the amount of kids with fillings that are just in my sons class alone! It amazes that people are so against flouride in the water when it is shown to be so overwhelmingly effective. Some people like to harbour fear and instill that in others and shows in the resisitance people have had to flouride. I mean it is in our toothpaste, so it can't be that harmful in the tiny minute does we are subjected to.
Funny your in Brisbane....you're not doing prac work with the van on the northside at the moment are you?? :oops:
Hopefully the number of fillings is kids gets a bit lower as time goes, some of the photos you see and stories you hear makes you feel a bit sorry for the little guys, there's not alot they can do about it (some adults barely know what a toothbrush is let alone their children :shock: )
No poison is safe in tiny amounts. Does Australian toothpaste have the same warnings on it as American toothpaste has? Ours tells us that ingesting toothpaste is poisonous!!! So imagine how much MORE poison children will be exposed to if they ingest it every time they drink a glass of water, eat food made with that water, and absorb it through their skin every time they soak in a bath. That is a HELL of a lot of fluoride to take internally.
Calcium fluoride was the natural substance that was originally used to rub on the surface of teeth. For decades now, it has been a very different chemical: Sodium fluoride. Bags of this chemical that water companies dump in the public supply come with skull and crossbones on the outside, explaining that it causes death, liver damage, kidney damage, eye damage, bone damage, and teeth damage. Have you seen a child with dental fluorosis? The condition is epidemic here in the U.S. As a result of taking fluoride internally, the teeth become brittle and have hideous yellow discolouration. Only the damage to the teeth can be seen, but the same process occurs in the bones. Fluoride is difficult for the body to shed. Most builds up inside the bones, and is one of the main causes of bone cancer- especially in children and males.
When I was younger, fluoride was one of those things I never questioned. I just took people's word for it that it must be great. Sort of a "group think" mentality. But then I actually looked into it.... and found out that fluoride is as deadly as lead. Oops!
Don't take my word for it. Do your own research. The truth is out there
R.i.p. My Dad - May 28, 2007
R.i.p. Black Tail (cat) - Sept. 20, 2008
and i admit that having a cavity is torture.
never heard of traveling dental vans.
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1
2018 - Fenway 1&2
2022 - Hamilton, Toronto
2023 - Chicago 1&2
2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
It is basically a (free) mobile dental surgery provided by the state govt that travels around to the primary schools across the state. They are quite large and are trucked in to the school. The school distributed consent forms to all of the parents before the easter break and that just said that we allowed our children to have a dental check up. It states on the form that if any further treatment is required then they would send further info to the parent, but they can't do anything other than inspect and a clean, without further consent from the parents.
It is a good thing if you are unable to afford private dental treatment, but luckily for me I have a great family dentist (I have seen him since I was about 4yo) and he only charges what my private health cover will pay for treating children, so I have no gap to pay.
The other thing with flouride in the water, is that in queensland we only just started getting it in our water supply last year. And it is not across the entire state yet. We are in an area that has got it, but as we don't drink town water (can't stand the taste of it) the effects of ingestion will be minimal, as we only use it rinse after brushing. Many people have even gone and gotten filters for thier taps to remove the flouride from thier drinking water.
I don't drink water from a tap anymore, about 7 yrs ago, the town beside us had a huge ecoli break out in the town water, 7 people died and many a thousand were sick. I was working in the town at the time and in the water, lucky I didn't get sick. But from that moment on, never drank town water again.
In a couple of weeks there is a dentist in our town who holds a day where the service are for free, wheather its just a check up, a filling, or even getting a tooth pulled, pretty cool on his part, but a very busy day for him and his staff.
2009 - Toronto
2010 - Buffalo
2011 - Toronto 1&2
2013 - London, Pittsburgh, Buffalo
2014 - Cincinnati, St. Louis, Detroit
2016 - Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ottawa, Toronto 1
2018 - Fenway 1&2
2022 - Hamilton, Toronto
2023 - Chicago 1&2
2024 - Las Vegas 1&2
I politely disagree, and here is why;
1) The level of fluoride in the average store bought toothpaste is 1000 parts per million (ppm), up to 3000 parts per million. Prescription stuff for people at high risk (in australia at least) is 5000 ppm +. This compares to the level of fluoridation in government instituted fluoridation of 0.8ppm in queensland, on par with a recommended level of 1 part per million (that's greater than a 1000th dilution of the level found in toothpaste). This means, that, to get ''a hell of a lot of fluoride'' (the equivalent of swallowing a pea sized amount of toothpaste say) you would need to drink upwards of 10,000 litres of water (thats over 40,000 glasses). A day. And if you're drinking that much water, you're going to have other problems (namely oedema and death from cell's exploding; fluorosis )
2) dental fluorosis is a condition that we see and treat every now and again for aethetic reasons; a case of discoloration of the teeth. This is caused by ingesting high levels of fluoride during development (such as eating fluoride tablets as a child, which many of you in the older generations will remember). Whilst it is true that some britleness of the teeth and bones may result, but Water fluoridation at a government instituted level is not enough on it's own to cause fluorosis (see the 0.8ppm figure above) in most cases. If you're eating toothpaste regularly, then yes, I would be concerned for you, but at a base level of 0.8 ppm in the water that isn't the case.
3)natural water sources around the world contain anywhere between <0.1 and 10ppm + fluoride, depending on where you live. This is where the initial research for fluoridation came from; children living in areas with higher natural levels of fluoride had lesser levels of decay than those living in areas with less fluoride naturally; this result has been repeated again and again in large population studies. People have been fluoridated at much higher levels than that being instituted nationally for thousands of years thanks to naturally occuring fluoride salts.
4) fluoride and bone cancer? I'd love to see the evidence if you have it. A search of the 19 million medical journal entries on www.pubmed.gov didn't show any results, maybe the American National Institute of Health missed something? Remember the dosage levels that are occuring in water fluoridation when reading articles like this; people often like to leave out certain point of information to sensationalise things.
5) No poison in tiny amounts is safe? Everything becomes a poison at a certain level; it's all relative to dose per Kg (pound) of body weight. Fat soluble vitamins such as vitamin A and D are required for life; above a certain level they become pathological and cause death quite effectively. Oxygen is a poison if taken purely; as is nitrogen, the list of required elements for our body goes on. The Toxic dose of fluoride is 28mg / Kg for an adult; compare this to a dose of total maximum reccomended dose of 6mg (for the entire body) of vitamin A. Interestingly enough, the amount of fluoride ingested from drinking fluridated water (at 2L per day) for the average adult is around 2mg, roughly 1.5mg of which is excreted through urine; for a 70kg person this is 1/4000th the ''lethal dose''. I'd be more worried about our nitrogen and carbon monoxide consumption to be honest.
Hope this helps
Fluoride Fatigue by Bruce Spittle of New Zealand is available online. It covers nearly every negative effect of fluoride: Hypothyroidism, obesity, depression, lower IQ, headache, brain fog, arthritis, infertility, early adolescence in girls, brittle bones, cancer, Crohn's/colitis, etc.
http://www.pauapress.com/fluoride/files/1418.pdf
There are a few revealing photos: (I am listing the page numbers from the book. Page number at bottom of pdf file on one's monitor is different.)
Page 28, damage to gut flora.
Page 29, sperm damage.
Pages 54-58, bone, skin, and tooth damage to horses.
Page 65 mentions that in 1944, the head of ALCOA, the Aluminum Company of America, left his high-paying job to work for the government. He promoted fluoride for the 'Public Health Service.' Toxic waste from aluminum smelting is so deadly that it cannot legally be dumped. For decades, the companies have sold the various fluoride chemicals from their waste to water utilities for public consumption.
I'm 36. There is only one generation younger than me. Not sure what you are implying?
Luckily, no, I never ate fluoride as a child. And I was raised on clean, delicious well water.
Page 73: "5 to7-fold increase in osteosarcoma." The author refers to a 2006 study at Harvard University, but does not provide a link to the full study results.
Yeah, um...fluoride is not an essential vitamin.
But niether are the ingredients in many medications that are so readily available to us and that we willingly ingest in the interest of improving our health. And for many people medications are a part of thier daily routine. So how is it any different? Both are methods of prevention/improvement aren't they?
"Fluoride is not a vitamin" was my response to Matt Baker's point: I inferred that he was saying fluoride in water is harmless because it is present in what he considers to be a small dose. Then he moved on to say even vitamins are deadly in huge doses. But he was comparing two very different things. None of us needs the essential nutrient 'fluoride' like we need A and D. Fluoride is a toxin.
Your post: "We willingly ingest." I do not willingly ingest drugs to improve my health. Medicine is for sick people. I know a lot of people who take daily pharmaceutical drugs, but they are all chronically ill. No improvement there!
"So how is it any different?" You asked. Good question. Mass-medicating an entire population through the water supply removes choice and consent. There is no "willingly ingest" about it. Individuals will receive wildly different doses of the medication depending on how much they drink. If some people decide to drink fluoride, that is their decision. Pumping it into every tap is something else entirely.
Have a shufti at the book I linked to. The short section on foetal development (near the beginning of the book) is quite revealing.
I think fluoride was used at "just" 1 part per million in Nazi concentration camps.