I currently have a hillbilly smile.  This past Sunday I bit into something soft (yes soft) and lost about half of a right top molar.  The gap is just next to my canine so is visible when I smile – discouraging me from doing so even more than usual.  I am really looking forward to the process of getting a crown.

Over the past several years I have been slowly redoing some fine dental work that was accomplished when I was a child.  While I have had no new cavities in the last two decades, I have had significant remodeling work done on existing fillings.

Somehow, even though my teeth have suffered no such decay as an adult, my childhood dentist managed to find cavities in pretty much all of my molars.  Now, 35 – 40 years later those old fillings are wearing out.  Some to the point of weakening my teeth (case in point, my broken molar).

I won’t name names for fear of libel (although I suspect Dr. Bischel is dead), but it seems to me that it could be pretty easy as a dentist in the late 60s or early 70s to “find” cavities in unsuspecting kids.  This was before the era of dental hygienists or routine x-rays.  We were simply taking the dentist’s word for it.  That would be a decent bit of extra income and once the drilling and filling is done, all the evidence is gone.

Or maybe my dental hygiene as a kid was just that bad . . .