Today’s Dentists Are PURE EVIL

That sound you hear this morning is the collective shriek of parents whose kids have braces, as the dental world is being ROCKED by a New York Times exposé on the rampant misuse of newfangled-ish head-scanners — cone-beam CT scanners — that provide quick and nifty 3-D images of your skull while also zapping it with hundreds of times more radiation than, say, airport scanners use. And for possibly no reason, as they don’t seem to do much more for the average dentist-goer than the safer (but sooo much slower!) 2-D cameras.

“The parents of these children,” said Dr. Nicholas Dello Russo, a Boston periodontist who teaches at Harvard Dental School, “have no idea about the amount of radiation used in these CT scans, and even more frightening, neither do the dentists.”

So, tear out your braces? I’m prying the permanent retainer thing out of my jaw as we speak; it just seems like the smart thing to do.

Anyway, the good news is the scans themselves cost hundreds of dollars, with a big profit going to the dentist, so at least someone’s benefiting! No, but seriously, a true silver lining is that there’s a company trying to keep these radiation levels down, and that that company’s real, actual name is Diquad (no word from their sister company, Shyt Haid). (Oh, and then also this guy? This guy is fucked.)

And if none of this made sense (because of the radiation!?), here’s a helpful video explanation.