Calcium Hydroxide
After spending an entire day at a dental conference about Composite/Resin/Glass fillings, I finally got it. Those fillings seem no better for teeth than other fillings, except they look better. They are beautiful, but that isn’t what I got that day. The speaker, a California dental guru, digressed several times to mention calcium hydroxide. That got to me.
While the hundred or so dentists and hygienists took in his detailed diversion and followed his every word, I couldn’t get off his phrase "calcium hydroxide." Calcium hydroxide? Calcium hydro…? Then, it hit me. I noticed that all of them didn’t notice that calcium hydroxide is not calcium. Dentists don’t get it! In fact, that’s why many dentists don’t understand what we have been doing for the last 45 years. It’s Calcium Therapy.
It’s a mental habit passed down over generations. We see something so often we no longer see it, right in front of the nose. Like Simon & Garfunkle sang in The Sound of Silence,
"It’s a vision, that was planted, in my brain, the sound of silence."
The beauty of dentistry is not merely beautiful fillings. Nor is it calcium hydroxide. But calcium is beautiful for preventing human infections. Dentists have heard of calcium hydroxide and seen dental x-rays so often we’ve planted them deep in our brains, in silence. We can’t see the infection, we don’t listen to our own words, and so, we don’t treat it. And yet, the diastema space screams out for treatment.
During that day a few of the 70,000 slides shown to us displayed the tragic dilemma as well as the silent culprit, the diastema deviation. The speaker diligently explained how to use the elegant filling materials to make the teeth look rather sexy. However, not once did he point out how calcium prevents and heals such disasters. It was then I noticed that no one else noticed. Calcium hydroxide is not calcium. There it was planted in our brains, lost forever under the streets of Boston, waiting for the "The Last Train To Clarksville."
It’s worth noting, however, that when we speak with patients without a dental education, and show them an x-ray of diastemic spacing, they then, ask, almost without exception,
"What’s that black space," or "Hey, there’s something wrong there."
Patients know a difference on an x-ray when they see it. They know the black area needs to be explained. When we listen to them, they tell us the symptoms of infection which leads us to test for a dead tooth. Then, they get treatment for it, the Calcium Method of Osteo-Endo-Cystic Therapy.
The diastema space is the classic sign of one of the most common causes of complete dental breakdown, and Calcium Therapy can solve it, heal it, and prevent a host of dental problems.
Mark J. Manhart DDS