Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from house stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
Speaker 1: have you ever had any like extensive dental work done before? Who?
Speaker 1: I mean, any kind of dental work feels extensive? That's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, a little bit here and there. I guess
Speaker 1: it's um. It's always a weird issue from me because
Speaker 1: my dad was a dentist, and so at least for
Speaker 1: a few years there when I was having my had
Speaker 1: my my wisdom teeth yanked out. Yeah, it was had this.
Speaker 1: It was in a super weird kind of headspace about
Speaker 1: it because for most of my life my dad had
Speaker 1: been my dentist, and so I'm kind of getting these weird,
Speaker 1: like illogical feelings of like, you can't be my dentist,
Speaker 1: you're not my dad, yeah, kind of thing going on.
Speaker 1: And then and then yeah, it sucks to have your
Speaker 1: your teeth worked on. Yeah, And well that's that's a
Speaker 1: perfect sort of allegory actually, because you know what we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about today is the cultural ramifications and
Speaker 1: connections to modifying your teeth. Uh. In my case. I
Speaker 1: you know, I haven't had a ton done, but I
Speaker 1: did have my wisdom teeth taking out as well in
Speaker 1: my early twenties, and it was a nightmare. I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, I was a poor college student at the time,
Speaker 1: and I like had the procedure done and I woke
Speaker 1: up and was just like bleeding everywhere, and my girlfriend
Speaker 1: at the time had to take me back to her
Speaker 1: place where I was supposed to like rest up for
Speaker 1: two days, you know. And it's just I wasn't like
Speaker 1: equipped maturity wise to deal with that kind of a procedure.
Speaker 1: And like weeks later, like I forget what they call
Speaker 1: it in dental practice, but like fragments of tooth would
Speaker 1: like work their way up through my gums. It was.
Speaker 1: It was horrifying. Yeah, when I had mine out, my
Speaker 1: my wife picked me up from the procedure and uh
Speaker 1: and almost fainted when I took the bloody gauze out. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh that's the weirdest, is the bloody gauze. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about the body modification of teeth in
Speaker 1: various cultures around the world, but I think it's a
Speaker 1: good starting point for us to sort of compare our
Speaker 1: own dental horror stories in Western culture because it's fairly similar,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, I mean it scenario where a lot
Speaker 1: of people have a lot of well deserved anxiety, and
Speaker 1: not only because dental surgery kind of sucks and dental
Speaker 1: pain sucks, but also because these are the only teeth
Speaker 1: you have, and when you start having problems with them,
Speaker 1: it's this damning reminder of your mortality. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: it was Tina Fey and her autobiography. She had this
Speaker 1: great line that I remember above all else in that book.
Speaker 1: She says, the mouth dies first, talking about just as
Speaker 1: older and like not not even necessarily procedures you have
Speaker 1: to have done, but just like like dealing with like
Speaker 1: the breath of an older person. You know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: my breath smells so bad in the morning. What's going on?
Speaker 1: And this feeling that that the rest of me still
Speaker 1: feels young, but my my teeth are on this uh,
Speaker 1: this irreversible path to the grave. Well, Tina fe then
Speaker 1: would probably understand some of the cultures we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today, especially when it comes to tooth extraction
Speaker 1: and which is also referred to as ablation, uh, and
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, by preemptively yanking them out
Speaker 1: of your head, you're sort of cutting off disease at
Speaker 1: the past. Yeah. So we're gonna talk about different cultural
Speaker 1: rituals and practices that involve the the the shaving of teeth,
Speaker 1: the filing of teeth, the sharpening of teeth, the removal
Speaker 1: of teeth. But before we even get into the details
Speaker 1: of any of these practice, I think it's important to
Speaker 1: really connect those practices to our modern dental obsessions. And
Speaker 1: we have a wonderful quote here, um that you're about
Speaker 1: to read, and it's from one of the sources that
Speaker 1: we use on this episode, the Cultural Modification of Teeth
Speaker 1: by Clark Johnson, d D, s pH D. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: really nailed it, and I think that it provided an
Speaker 1: excellent overview that seemed to be mostly for people in
Speaker 1: school for dent a practice, but giving them an idea
Speaker 1: of you know what without there in the larger scale. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he says, an alien visitor to Earth might describe
Speaker 1: a tooth related cult now common in many industrialized societies.
Speaker 1: The people believe in the tooth cult so unquestionable they
Speaker 1: call the Holy Doers doctor. The cult requires an initiation
Speaker 1: wherein the holy material objects are fastened to their teeth.
Speaker 1: Then they go through to two difficult years of trial
Speaker 1: until they emerge purified and the holy material objects are
Speaker 1: taken off in a right of passage. These people live
Speaker 1: in a society that admires what it sees on billboards
Speaker 1: in magazines, in a mystical place they call Hollywood. Both
Speaker 1: believers and priests learn their ideals there. The practitioners of
Speaker 1: the cult have an obsession with lines and angles. I
Speaker 1: really like that that and I think that it's an
Speaker 1: important distinction for us to set up to as Westerners.
Speaker 1: And we may have some listeners out out there who
Speaker 1: are familiar with some of these cultures that we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about, but as Westerners, we mess around with
Speaker 1: our teeth just as much as some of this stuff
Speaker 1: that we're about to talk about. That's gonna seem weird
Speaker 1: and sort of cult dish, right, Yeah. I mean it's
Speaker 1: especially when you look at the cult of the Hollywood smile,
Speaker 1: Like how much time and energy goes into the straightening, whitening,
Speaker 1: and not only just the physical manipulation of the teeth,
Speaker 1: but then placing uh, you know, essentially fake teeth over
Speaker 1: those teeth. And sculpting them down and just getting everything
Speaker 1: perfectly lined up for that magazine worthy smile. So before
Speaker 1: we dive into the first chunk here where we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about everything except for the extraction, let's remind
Speaker 1: uh you the listener out there, if you're new to
Speaker 1: the show, there's a bunch of stuff that we do
Speaker 1: other than just podcasting. So Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: is Robert myself and Joe McCormick, and we podcast, but
Speaker 1: we also do videos. We also write articles. We all
Speaker 1: work out of how stuff works, and you can find
Speaker 1: us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler where we're all blow
Speaker 1: the Mind as our handle, and we curate throughout the
Speaker 1: week various weird science, kind of bizarre oddity articles as
Speaker 1: well as our own content and Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: Dot com is the mothership where you can find most
Speaker 1: of that content, right Yeah, So let's get down to it.
Speaker 1: Let's just start with teeth. Well, what are some of
Speaker 1: the main reasons we have teeth to begin with? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, when we think about it, the essential functions
Speaker 1: for our teeth are mastication, speech, and then there's the
Speaker 1: aesthetic part, right um, And you know here in Western society.
Speaker 1: I know that most of us worry about the whiteness
Speaker 1: of our teeth, or the shape of our teeth, or
Speaker 1: or how they smell, right, all of those kinds of things.
Speaker 1: But there are also anthropological what are referred to as
Speaker 1: para masticatory functions of teeth. And this is where teeth
Speaker 1: are altered by intent or sometimes in what's called like
Speaker 1: an unconscious accident or maybe some kind of behavioral result.
Speaker 1: Right now, okay, you might be reeling from this idea already.
Speaker 1: You might be one of those people who doesn't like
Speaker 1: going to the dentist, and there's that you know, there's
Speaker 1: that special kind of person persons. Now you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Isn't there like a particular kind of dentist
Speaker 1: you can go to if you have a little bit
Speaker 1: of trauma associated with dental practice that's like quiet and
Speaker 1: they play soft music and they're like very gentle about
Speaker 1: the way they go about things. I forget what there's
Speaker 1: a name for it, but I've I've read about it before.
Speaker 1: But so if you're that, you know, type of patient
Speaker 1: for dentists, you might be reeling from this idea already
Speaker 1: about body modification culture in general, especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to your mouth. Yeah, Like I know, having read a
Speaker 1: lot of Stephen King, especially in my junior nine teen years,
Speaker 1: I feel like that was something Keen would come back
Speaker 1: to time and time again. It's the image of an
Speaker 1: individual with with sharpened teeth because on one hand, it's
Speaker 1: it's like they've completely given themselves over to some sort
Speaker 1: of animalistic uh quality, and and at the same time
Speaker 1: it's irreversible. Right, you've how could you try teeth? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, there's our fascination with vampires. There's just
Speaker 1: the idea of exactly like kind of what you're mentioning,
Speaker 1: like the the canine teeth of the human being sort
Speaker 1: of a representation of our primal nature, right, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: of course we have teeth for tearing, teeth for crushing,
Speaker 1: all important for our omnivorous diet. But h yeah. And
Speaker 1: then also it's worth noting that you know, historically teeth
Speaker 1: have come in handy for tool use. We don't recommend it,
Speaker 1: but it is they can be used as a tool,
Speaker 1: and that's another way they can be altered for sure, right,
Speaker 1: if you're like chewing on rope or something like. Right,
Speaker 1: But then also you know, self defense, um, situations as
Speaker 1: well as a last ditch scenario, humans can bite. So
Speaker 1: what the important thing to remember here as we're going
Speaker 1: over this is that, you know, teeth are artifacts of
Speaker 1: human behavior, just in the same way as like our
Speaker 1: clothing are, and as such, we modify them in ways
Speaker 1: to communicate with others nonverbally. My experience in in communications
Speaker 1: theory is this is referred to as artifactual communication. Right,
Speaker 1: So whereas like we might brush our teeth or wear
Speaker 1: braces or um white in our teeth or something like that,
Speaker 1: and other societies they're drilling holes into their teeth and
Speaker 1: mounting jewels in them, or they're dyeing them black, right,
Speaker 1: or they're ripping them out of their gums. And that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna be talking about today. One theory about
Speaker 1: this is that it's a form of costly signaling theory,
Speaker 1: and this theory argues that in certain cultures, individuals employ
Speaker 1: what are usually costly, monetarily wise signals that help one
Speaker 1: receive rewards, and usually that's in the form of a mate. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you this is the kind of thing you would
Speaker 1: see if you went down to the beach and you saw,
Speaker 1: say a dude who has really put in a lot
Speaker 1: of time and money on his zeke, and maybe he's
Speaker 1: covered with a bunch of tattoos to boot exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and even to some Western dentists, these practices that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about today are going to seem totally
Speaker 1: weird and and maybe unhealthy in some situations too. Right,
Speaker 1: But you know, we have to remember that our own
Speaker 1: traditions are considered absolute in our culture, and our ideas
Speaker 1: about teeth are just as culturally determined as say the
Speaker 1: Balinese or the Acadian French Canadian population we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today. So okay, let's let's get into it.
Speaker 1: We've got chipping, filing, staining, banding, jewel inlays. Let's start
Speaker 1: with how human beings modify their teeth, right, So what
Speaker 1: is so? What are some of the earliest known examples
Speaker 1: of this when we look back at the at the
Speaker 1: archaeological data. So the oldest known example are the Etruscans,
Speaker 1: and this is in seventh century b C. They took
Speaker 1: flat gold bands and they would hold their real teeth
Speaker 1: or sometimes fake teeth in place with these gold bands
Speaker 1: in their mouths. Now, only women wore these devices, and
Speaker 1: the surviving pieces have been found in dig sites in
Speaker 1: the Italian region of Lazio. Uh. It's thought that these
Speaker 1: generally denoted wealth in some kind of high status, because
Speaker 1: those were the kind of grave sites that they were
Speaker 1: found in. Um. But there's also been examples from ancient
Speaker 1: cultures of covering your teeth in gold everywhere from Rome
Speaker 1: to China. So that's that's a fairly common thing that
Speaker 1: goes back a while. It's not just like a new
Speaker 1: fat and of course, yeah, and to your point, continues
Speaker 1: on to this day. Yeah. So it's just a perfectly
Speaker 1: human obsessions since time out of mind, right, Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: like the the the current culture of like caps and
Speaker 1: grills is especially like similar to these kinds of things.
Speaker 1: And here in Atlanta, I mean just downtown Atlanta. There's
Speaker 1: several places I used to work down there when I
Speaker 1: was working at the university. There's all kinds of places
Speaker 1: where you can just walk in and get your grills
Speaker 1: set up. Um. So it is a you know, common
Speaker 1: cultural phenomenon today as well. With the golden lays. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the examples of dental modification that that that
Speaker 1: I've found particularly fascinating and have blogged on in the
Speaker 1: past is a Balinese tooth filing. So this takes place
Speaker 1: in the Indian Indonesian island of Bali. And uh, this
Speaker 1: is in in in this particular society. It's those carnivorous
Speaker 1: teeth that we've we've touched on already, the canines and incisors.
Speaker 1: So these are viewed as sort of you know, be
Speaker 1: steel teeth is representing the b steal nature of humanity.
Speaker 1: And so here we find tooth filing is a rite
Speaker 1: of passage into adulthood and a key indicator of social,
Speaker 1: aesthetic and spiritual well being. Okay, and the key here
Speaker 1: is that they're not filing their teeth into points. They're
Speaker 1: actually filing them down to they're flatter, right right, it's
Speaker 1: almost you know, to create a more um you know,
Speaker 1: vegetarian dental arrangement. Yeah. They smooth away the thing like
Speaker 1: qualities of of the human teeth, and in doing so
Speaker 1: they smooth away that the savage aspects of their soul.
Speaker 1: That's the approach here. Uh. And ideally the ritualized procedure
Speaker 1: is performed by a Brahmin priest, though you can actually
Speaker 1: get your local Balinese dentist to manage it as well,
Speaker 1: and if you can't afford to filing this is this
Speaker 1: is amazing. They are charitable organizations or you may be
Speaker 1: able to get a sponsor, an individual to sponsor you
Speaker 1: so that you can receive the procedure. Like that's the
Speaker 1: cultural way that it is. Yeah, so it's that important society.
Speaker 1: And so from what I was reading, my understanding was
Speaker 1: that this is a practice that has both localized traditional history,
Speaker 1: but then it also has some Hindu uh religious qualities
Speaker 1: that got merged into it when Hinduism became popular in
Speaker 1: the region. Yeah, it's a it's an ancient custom predates
Speaker 1: Hinduism's arrival on the island in the fifth century BC. Uh.
Speaker 1: And as often, you know, as the case, the the
Speaker 1: old ways merged with the new ways and it becomes
Speaker 1: this uh, you know, this hugely important things so important
Speaker 1: that if you if you die with un modified teeth,
Speaker 1: then then the teeth of your corpse can even be
Speaker 1: filed down to ensure your passage into the spirit room.
Speaker 1: And you probably don't need a specialist for that at
Speaker 1: that point. They can just you know, like your brother
Speaker 1: can do it. Yeah, I'm guessing maybe it requires a
Speaker 1: little less care and finesse the symbolic power. This is
Speaker 1: pretty crazy too, because if anyone out there is familiar
Speaker 1: with Balinese art, like then I should be able to
Speaker 1: just say, bolly Balinese art and you should get certain
Speaker 1: pictures of they're they're more common motifs in your mind,
Speaker 1: you know, particularly you see this. There's a character named Boma,
Speaker 1: the Son of the Earth, and he's the awards off
Speaker 1: evil uh spirits and uh and and he looks like
Speaker 1: some sort of a demon to sort of Western eyes,
Speaker 1: and he has these big h you know things and all.
Speaker 1: According to British anthropologist Anthony Forge, that's a great name
Speaker 1: for an anthropologist by the Forge of anthropology. Here he's
Speaker 1: noted that this dental obsession manifests itself in the art.
Speaker 1: And so you see the teeth of supernatural entities such
Speaker 1: as the gods and spirits take on exaggerated, uh be
Speaker 1: stual form, you know, giant canines to symbolize the opposite
Speaker 1: of desired human qualities. Okay, I'm thinking of like some
Speaker 1: of the kind of like um tribal masks that I've
Speaker 1: seen from certain Pacific island cultures. Yeah, exactly, that kind
Speaker 1: of you know, like huge things because it's beautiful stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting how in looking at the way that
Speaker 1: the teeth of their spirits are represented in their art. Uh,
Speaker 1: Like that reflects too in their their body modification and
Speaker 1: the the alteration of their teeth for for purely aesthetic
Speaker 1: spiritual and you know, in cultural reasons. Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of other examples that we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in the episode today where that that's
Speaker 1: similar and that the deification of the of the teeth
Speaker 1: shows up in visual representations of gods or myths. Yeah, okay, Well,
Speaker 1: another brief look here at some people who file their
Speaker 1: teeth for dental modification is the I've been people of Borneo, uh,
Speaker 1: and they further beautified their teeth by they both blacken
Speaker 1: and file it. But then what they do is they
Speaker 1: drill a hole in the middle of each tooth and
Speaker 1: then place a brass stud in this hole, so every
Speaker 1: tooth has like a tiny little breast stud in its center. Also,
Speaker 1: the May people of Vietnam, they have their incisors chipped
Speaker 1: and ground down to the gum line. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is something that was deliberately done in in terms of
Speaker 1: like staining back when they were. This is before it
Speaker 1: was Vietnam, when it was referred to as French colonial annam.
Speaker 1: I think I'm saying that right, uh, And every person
Speaker 1: was expected to have their teeth blackened by what was
Speaker 1: quote a very painful process. Um. So for for those
Speaker 1: of us who are afraid of going to the dentist,
Speaker 1: can you imagine just you know, somebody going at you
Speaker 1: with in a lot of cases easier just with like stones.
Speaker 1: That's how they're they're filing their teeth down. And then
Speaker 1: the blackening usually occurs with some some kind of combination
Speaker 1: of like charcoal or plants. Yeah, they're actually one of
Speaker 1: the practices in modern Mayanmar is the the chewing of
Speaker 1: particular um, you know, root substances to to black to
Speaker 1: help black and yeah, well the moy did it as
Speaker 1: like a beautification thing basically, and the idea was that
Speaker 1: if you didn't do it, you weren't an adult and
Speaker 1: you couldn't get married. So nobody again, like it's like
Speaker 1: it's our version of the Hollywood smile, right, Like, like
Speaker 1: they weren't considered on equal level of maturity until they
Speaker 1: had done this, And some tribes even gave their lower
Speaker 1: jaws like a saw shape with the filing combination, so
Speaker 1: that's kind of interesting, and then meso American teeth filing.
Speaker 1: There there was a lot more research on on this
Speaker 1: from what I could find, but basically it's a combination
Speaker 1: of the filing cross hatch designs like carving cross hatches
Speaker 1: into your teeth, and then the jewel inlays as well.
Speaker 1: So this was frequent in young adults in what is
Speaker 1: referred to as late Classic Mayan sights. And I went
Speaker 1: and looked that up to to you know, some kind
Speaker 1: of placement here in history. It's around a D five
Speaker 1: fifty to eight thirty. Okay. Uh. Many investigators believed at
Speaker 1: the time that dental mutilation correlated with high social position,
Speaker 1: So we're seeing a theme here, right. This seems to
Speaker 1: be going along with almost all of these. It's a
Speaker 1: social status. You need to be able to pay a
Speaker 1: doctor slash artisan to transform your teeth into the desired form,
Speaker 1: which is the same thing that we have today. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh So there's a collection actually at the Institute o
Speaker 1: National day Anthropologia a Historia in Mexico City where they
Speaker 1: have a thousand, two hundred and twelve teeth that's a
Speaker 1: very specific ammounity from this period of time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: mainly these were filed down with stones. The cross hatch
Speaker 1: patterns were carved into what's referred to as the labial
Speaker 1: surface of the tooth, and then they would put in
Speaker 1: jewel incrustation or inlays um. They're basically grills that aren't removable. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they would use all kinds of different stones for this.
Speaker 1: They used pyrite, j dite, turquoise, hematite, serpentine, mother of pearl, cinnabar,
Speaker 1: or gold set into the surface of the teeth. The
Speaker 1: most popular and common where the iron pyrite and the jade. Though,
Speaker 1: and the way that they did this, this is the
Speaker 1: part that's crazy to me. Like I normally don't have
Speaker 1: any problems when I go to the dentist. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: cool with them, you know, doing all the stuff in there.
Speaker 1: And they could the little suction host and stare at
Speaker 1: the ceiling. Yeah. The TV, which always bothers me a
Speaker 1: little bit because I don't really want to watch the TV.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want you watching the TV
Speaker 1: exactly while you're working on my mouth. Yeah, I've had
Speaker 1: people like comment like can you believe that? Like, while
Speaker 1: they're working on my mouth, and I'm like trying not
Speaker 1: to pay attention to the TV. But yeah, uh so
Speaker 1: in Misso America Mayan culture, what they would do is
Speaker 1: they didn't of the TV, but they would take a
Speaker 1: rotating fine tube of quartz or some other kind of
Speaker 1: resistant stone and they would rotate it slowly against the
Speaker 1: surface of the enamel of your teeth. They'd add water
Speaker 1: in an abrasive powder or sand to help drill it out.
Speaker 1: For this inlay, they would possibly use what's called a
Speaker 1: bow drill as well, which I looked this up. It
Speaker 1: basically looks like what you would think. It looks like
Speaker 1: a bow for a bow and arrow, and then in
Speaker 1: the middle, instead of having an arrow, there's there's this
Speaker 1: quartz tube thing that kind of spins apart sometimes that
Speaker 1: used as a fire making up. Yeah, exactly, yep. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so this was probably somewhere around seven hundred nine
Speaker 1: d and one theory is that this filing occurred because okay,
Speaker 1: here we go again with the d D thing. The
Speaker 1: Maso Americans were honoring a particular solar deity who is
Speaker 1: depicted as having filed teeth. So this was a way
Speaker 1: to show their admiration for him. Some of the skeletons
Speaker 1: that are found in the archaeological record there show incomplete
Speaker 1: inlays as well. Uh, and they think that this might
Speaker 1: be because the pain was actually so much that some
Speaker 1: people couldn't go through with it, or that the individual
Speaker 1: died before it was finished. And death was also possible
Speaker 1: fairly soon after because there was a high risk of
Speaker 1: bacterial encephalitis after these procedures. So one of the pieces
Speaker 1: that we read for this is a thesis paper by
Speaker 1: a woman named Daniel Barnes, and we're gonna come back
Speaker 1: and cite this a lot, but I want to insert
Speaker 1: this here because the main argument of her thesis was that,
Speaker 1: and I'm quoting her here, since death is a possible
Speaker 1: outcome of intentional dental modification, it should be considered a
Speaker 1: high risk procedure. So her point with all of this
Speaker 1: was she sort of showcases all of the different anthropological
Speaker 1: modifications of teeth and then says, you know, think about
Speaker 1: this in context of today and how we modify her
Speaker 1: teeth today, and that there's some danger involved there. But
Speaker 1: she does point out that things like add and grows
Speaker 1: and caps or modern dental procedures you know that that
Speaker 1: that's not what she's talking about here. She's talking about
Speaker 1: instances like trying to file your teeth down with stone,
Speaker 1: or as we're going to talk about later, you know,
Speaker 1: the extraction of all of the teeth from your lower
Speaker 1: jaw or something like that, which even today you're going
Speaker 1: and get your wisdom teeth removed. They put you under anesthesia.
Speaker 1: There's always that slim possibility that you won't wake up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always have that thing. So I am used to
Speaker 1: be diagnosed with something called a mitro valve pro lapse,
Speaker 1: which is one of the valves in my heart wasn't
Speaker 1: fluttering the right way or something like that. That's why
Speaker 1: you don't love Christmas? Yeah, exactly. So when you have
Speaker 1: a mitro valve prolapse, whenever you go to the dentist.
Speaker 1: You might have heard of this since your dad was
Speaker 1: a dentist. You have to take antibiotics because they're worried
Speaker 1: that the bacteria that they're messing around within your mouth
Speaker 1: is going to go down and somehow infect your your
Speaker 1: heart because the valve apparently makes you more susceptible to infections.
Speaker 1: This is interesting. Uh, we'll put a pin in that
Speaker 1: tidbit will become important later on in the podcast. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course. So okay, so we're wrapping up on the
Speaker 1: meso American Mayans there, but they've really got this, you know,
Speaker 1: beautiful jewelry embedded in their teeth. Uh. And then there's
Speaker 1: the staining of the teeth that we want to come to.
Speaker 1: So there's enemies staining, right, Yeah, First of all, there's
Speaker 1: the the enemies who have already covered. And then I
Speaker 1: believe we also have Japanese practice as well. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so Japanese women used to die this is a specific
Speaker 1: culture called Yaba. I believe they used to dye their
Speaker 1: teeth black with tannin powder and a ferris ascetate solution.
Speaker 1: And they considered this again high fashion and uh it
Speaker 1: signified marital status. It was unknown at the time, but
Speaker 1: they also, uh you know, realized this protected their teeth
Speaker 1: from bacterial colonization. So maybe that's what they should have
Speaker 1: done to me at the dentist instead has just given
Speaker 1: me like a solution of tannin powder or and ferres
Speaker 1: acetate rather than you know, make me take antibiotics. This
Speaker 1: was also done this kind of standing practice in places
Speaker 1: like Peru, Ecuador, Vietnam, as we talked about Laos, Thailand,
Speaker 1: the Philippines, and Africa. In Nigeria, some people stain their
Speaker 1: teeth with something called the solen um in cannum flowers,
Speaker 1: and those are apparently a relative of eggplants, or they
Speaker 1: use something called Nicotania tobaccum, which is, as it sounds,
Speaker 1: an herb containing nicotine that sounds like it would actually
Speaker 1: be kind of cool. It's like it's like, what do
Speaker 1: you call it? Um? Yep? Yeah, yeah, which of course
Speaker 1: can also stain your teeth um. You know, we already
Speaker 1: mentioned the enemies a couple of times, but they had
Speaker 1: an interesting saying that goes along with the staining, and
Speaker 1: that is that any dog can have white teeth, which
Speaker 1: is it puts an interesting twist on it, right, It
Speaker 1: goes back to that whole I am human, and in
Speaker 1: being human, how am I different? Founderstand? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And as I was thinking about this, because I brushed
Speaker 1: my dog's teeth for and I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: that like his obviously his canine teeth are very pronounced, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm just trying to imagine like an anthropological dog,
Speaker 1: like humanized dog kind of culture where they're filing down
Speaker 1: their cane teeth. It gets back to what we talked
Speaker 1: about on our Christmas episode. Remember in Rudolph the Red
Speaker 1: Nose Reindeer, there's the whole thing with that and just
Speaker 1: Elf and he removes all of the yet e the
Speaker 1: bumbles teeth, the Abominable Snowman, he pulls all of his
Speaker 1: teeth out of his head. So there's some ablation practice
Speaker 1: going on there, oh for sure. So definitely keep Rudolf
Speaker 1: the Red Nose Reindeer in your mind when we come
Speaker 1: back from this break and start discussing dental extraction, mental illness,
Speaker 1: and science. All right, we're back. So yeah, you're probably thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've talked about the ways to just change the
Speaker 1: way your teeth look. And I feel like, for the
Speaker 1: most part, that's easier for us to get on board
Speaker 1: with because we look, again, we've already touched on how
Speaker 1: we're always altering the way our teeth appear, uh here
Speaker 1: and in our modern Western civilization, and so we can say,
Speaker 1: all right, I would not personally want to file my
Speaker 1: teeth down or make them into little sharpened points, but
Speaker 1: I can see where that lines up with our existing
Speaker 1: view of things. But then how does it make sense? Right,
Speaker 1: how do we get into the place where one just
Speaker 1: removes the tooth or removes a bunch of teeth for
Speaker 1: seemingly purely supernatural, superstitious or cultural reasons. Right, This isn't
Speaker 1: like you have a bad cavity and the only way
Speaker 1: to take care of it is the yank the tooth.
Speaker 1: That right. In particular, there's deciduous teeth removal that's popular
Speaker 1: in certain African tribal cultures. Uh. And it seems like
Speaker 1: they purposely damage what's referred to as the tooth germ.
Speaker 1: This is sort of like the growing tooth underneath your
Speaker 1: baby teeth, I think, And they damn it's that so
Speaker 1: that uh, you know, it just doesn't grow in. You
Speaker 1: don't have a full tooth there. And in general African ablation,
Speaker 1: it seems like it's kind of common with cultures. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I might get some of these names wrong, but
Speaker 1: these are the tribal cultures Amhara, Azande, Massai, new Air Bakiga,
Speaker 1: a Koli, Baitarros, boogisas uh and that's in Uganda, and
Speaker 1: then the Hia of Tanzania. And so this was one
Speaker 1: of the fascinating things that I read about and I
Speaker 1: think that you saw as well. And it was an
Speaker 1: Eon magazine, right, Yeah, there's a wonderful piece in Ian
Speaker 1: magazine by Brendan Borel. Yeah, it explores what's known as
Speaker 1: a beano or false tooth disease in Uganda. So the
Speaker 1: it's also referred to as a tooth word. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I guess with a lot of things supernatural and uh
Speaker 1: and fulkloric. It seems like it has a There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different versions of what exactly it is.
Speaker 1: I think, so yeah, it seems like well older versions
Speaker 1: of this. I don't think that this is modern culture.
Speaker 1: For them, they believed that the toothworm was a possible
Speaker 1: demonic presence. That was it emerged when they saw pulp
Speaker 1: coming out of damaged teeth. Um. So the tooth nerves
Speaker 1: the nerves inside our teeth. Hopefully none of us have
Speaker 1: actually seen this. I haven't. When they're exposed, they have
Speaker 1: a kind of worm like appearance to them. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so there's evidence that back in two d and fifty
Speaker 1: b c e. Physicians would smoke tooth worms out of
Speaker 1: the teeth by using nanbane seed that was needed into
Speaker 1: bees wax. That doesn't sound like it would be particularly
Speaker 1: fun either. Uh. And then the idea here is that
Speaker 1: it would just destroy the nerves in your tooth, so
Speaker 1: if you had any pain there that would obviously disappear.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're actually getting at the quote unquote toothworm.
Speaker 1: You're just killing the nerves in your teeth, so you
Speaker 1: can't feel anything, right, and in this you know it can't.
Speaker 1: We're kind of getting to the root, if you will,
Speaker 1: of this um of this scenario, because because we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about some of the more you know, elaborate and
Speaker 1: to our eyes, you know, nonsensical versions of it. But
Speaker 1: at heart, you're dealing with somebody in an in an
Speaker 1: older time, with limited resources and understanding, trying to address
Speaker 1: physical pain, trying to deal with anomaly, denal anomalies, and
Speaker 1: and and address them surgically. But as Brendan Barrell points out,
Speaker 1: he just put this wonderfully in the article. Uh. He
Speaker 1: refers to a quote sense of impotence in the face
Speaker 1: of bodily mysteries. And I feel like that comes back
Speaker 1: a time time and time again in this extraction section
Speaker 1: of our podcast. Be here, because you have people trying
Speaker 1: to deal with this illness, deal with this pain, deal
Speaker 1: with this situation, and the best of their understanding seems
Speaker 1: to point towards the removal of the problem tooth, or
Speaker 1: the removal of a problem tooth in hopes of addressing it. Man.
Speaker 1: I mean, I go back to that Tina Fake quote
Speaker 1: that game at the beginning, like feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm closing in on forty here, and I feel like
Speaker 1: I'm just starting to get to that point of these
Speaker 1: bodily mysteries, you know, like it's like, wait, when where
Speaker 1: did this like piece of flesh come from? I don't
Speaker 1: remember this? Or why does this hurt when I wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning. Kyle Canane has this bit about
Speaker 1: how when he wakes up in the morning, his whole
Speaker 1: body sounds like a bag of popcorn just out of
Speaker 1: the microwave because it's all popping and everything like that.
Speaker 1: That's and I'm I'm getting to that point too. And
Speaker 1: you know, I'm no doctor. I don't know, so I
Speaker 1: go into my doctor and I go, hey, what's going on.
Speaker 1: In the same way these people probably went to their
Speaker 1: you know, localized version of a doctor and we're like,
Speaker 1: all right, give it to me with the nanbane seed
Speaker 1: in the bees wax, because I don't know what's happening
Speaker 1: in my mouth now, the false tooth disease, the the abino. Uh.
Speaker 1: It also ends up, you know, applying a lot to children.
Speaker 1: So you have you have an infant, sick, infant, infants complaining,
Speaker 1: and so there's the belief that the child might have
Speaker 1: this worm tooth in their head, this cursed tooth that
Speaker 1: could result in the emergence of gum maggots. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then this is going to you know, just roll out
Speaker 1: of control, and that the causes here can range from
Speaker 1: just you know, infected maze to outright bewitchment. In fact,
Speaker 1: in the the magazine article, they referenced one attributed causes
Speaker 1: just passing a false tooth on the road. Huh. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of superstition that gets rolled up at this,
Speaker 1: and then the only way to deal with it is
Speaker 1: you don't go to the hospital. You go to a
Speaker 1: traditional healer for the tooth removal. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: articles that we referenced for this, they referred to traditional
Speaker 1: healers so many times that the author eventually just started
Speaker 1: calling them thch. It took me a little while. What's
Speaker 1: th h oh, traditional healer. Yeah. One of the papers
Speaker 1: we're looking at two thousand eleven paper published in the
Speaker 1: Journal of eth no Biology and ethno Medicine, and they
Speaker 1: put a lot of this and some interesting context. They
Speaker 1: said that in cameraon, for instance, traditional healers actually do
Speaker 1: a pretty decent job at tooth extracting. And most of
Speaker 1: the the examples they looked at, and again this was
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, you know very much, you know modern times, Uh,
Speaker 1: most of the examples of tooth extraction stemmed from legitimate
Speaker 1: concerns such as tooth pain, looseness of the teeth, or
Speaker 1: or some sort of visible hole in the tooth. And
Speaker 1: so while this paper criticized, of course a lack of
Speaker 1: lack of standard infection control methods and proper dental anatomy
Speaker 1: understanding among the traditional healers, the paper ultimately suggested, like
Speaker 1: the answer here is not to just tell all the
Speaker 1: traditional healers to go away, but try and bridge the
Speaker 1: world between modern dental practices and traditional healers. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that they're communicating with one another and they've sort of
Speaker 1: got a bit of understanding. I remember from that one
Speaker 1: piece that some of the data was surprising, Like one
Speaker 1: of the things they're looking at was like how often
Speaker 1: they wore gloves when they moved between different patients and
Speaker 1: we're like extracting teeth and then but then there was
Speaker 1: other instances. I think they said something like three quarter
Speaker 1: of the traditional healers if it was like a serious
Speaker 1: dental problem, they would recommend you need to go see
Speaker 1: an actual dentist. Like what I'm doing here isn't isn't
Speaker 1: gonna cure your problem here. Yeah, And indeed, to come
Speaker 1: back to the ugantin situation with the false tooth disease,
Speaker 1: the Ian magazine article points out, there, you know a
Speaker 1: number of contributing factors as to why the individual would
Speaker 1: go to the traditional healer versus the modern hospital and
Speaker 1: with their sick child. I would suspect that money is
Speaker 1: one of them. Oh yeah, it's generally cheaper. We're talking
Speaker 1: about an impoverished region where available Western medicine is still distrusted.
Speaker 1: You have high mortality rates in the modern hospital's corruption, expense,
Speaker 1: facility shortcomings. Uh, and it all results, you know, in
Speaker 1: a modern health system that feels alien and maybe even
Speaker 1: a bit dangerous to someone accustomed to that culturally ingrained
Speaker 1: traditional healer system that is also just gonna it's just
Speaker 1: gonna be so much more comfortable, and you're gonna end
Speaker 1: up having more faith in its ability to cure what
Speaker 1: ails you. And to give you an idea of the
Speaker 1: numbers we're talking about here, So this is and day
Speaker 1: in certain villages in Tanzania, sixty percent of people have
Speaker 1: their teeth intentionally removed, sixteen percent in northern Uganda, in
Speaker 1: the Sudan of Ethiopian Jews, and then seventy percent of
Speaker 1: other Ethiopians do this, and then the real high point
Speaker 1: was eight seven percent of the Messia and Kenya do this.
Speaker 1: The Massai say that there there's a medical reason though
Speaker 1: right there there's no longer this demonic toothworm thing um.
Speaker 1: They're removing mandibular central incisors UH, specifically in some situations
Speaker 1: so that they can help feed a person if they
Speaker 1: end up with tetanus and subsequently get locked jaw from that.
Speaker 1: So they want to make sure that there's a way,
Speaker 1: you know, if their jaw is locked shut. In our societies,
Speaker 1: we view the whole thing of the straws and everything,
Speaker 1: or we have I V s or whatever, but you know,
Speaker 1: in this situation they're thinking ahead. Yeah, and then there
Speaker 1: is another thing. I read This is very brief, so
Speaker 1: I don't know how much, uh, there is to this,
Speaker 1: and I'd love to hear if somebody in our audience
Speaker 1: knows a little more about it. But apparently the Demera
Speaker 1: people in South Africa, they say that the reason they
Speaker 1: remove their maxillary anterior teeth is so that they can
Speaker 1: properly speak their language, which has a lisp to it.
Speaker 1: Huh though. That is interesting as well and certainly something
Speaker 1: that stands out from our other examples the idea of
Speaker 1: augmenting your teeth so as to augment speech, because that's
Speaker 1: something we didn't mention earlier. But having a full set
Speaker 1: of teeth also plays an end your ability to to
Speaker 1: to speak. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now another example of dental
Speaker 1: augmentation comes to us. This was actually suggested to us
Speaker 1: to us by one of our South African listeners, Sheldon. Uh.
Speaker 1: Maybe Sheldon knows about the Demorrow thing. Yeah, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: she can throw in on that as well, But in
Speaker 1: this case, she was saying she pointed out what's known
Speaker 1: as the cape flat smile and sometimes kind of erroneously
Speaker 1: referred to as a passion gap. So what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here is the removal of the front teeth, the
Speaker 1: front incisors amongst communities of the Western Cape in South
Speaker 1: Africa specifically, it's something you see among poor male teenagers
Speaker 1: that are wrapped up in gain culture. Uh. And it's
Speaker 1: it's a modern practice. You still see it today, and
Speaker 1: the practice seems to serve it's part of a write
Speaker 1: a passage into adulthood. The passion gap thing. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna get into the details, but that seems to be
Speaker 1: something where outsiders misconstrue or even decide to sort of
Speaker 1: demonize it by saying that has some sort of a
Speaker 1: sexual connotation. But there it doesn't seem to be anything
Speaker 1: to back it up. Now, it's not the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that you would go to the dentist for, or
Speaker 1: apparently you could, but you might have to find a
Speaker 1: dentist that would who would do this procedure. Imagine it's
Speaker 1: like sort of the difference between getting like your friend
Speaker 1: to give you a tattoo and then like going and
Speaker 1: spending like a lot of money at a fancy tattoo parlor.
Speaker 1: And in this case, you you spend all that money,
Speaker 1: you take as much as you can you can actually
Speaker 1: uh dish out, and you go get a partial dental
Speaker 1: insert to fill that gap. And here you see just
Speaker 1: you know, an explosion of gold and bling and whatever
Speaker 1: whatever you can afford. Um, Like some of the accounts
Speaker 1: say that, like basically, whenever you can upgrade to something
Speaker 1: a little fancier, you do. So. So here we see
Speaker 1: a little bit of the modern sort of bling culture.
Speaker 1: We see some of these ancient practice we've already discussed, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, where you're just taking gold or jewels to
Speaker 1: brighten up the teeth, but in this case, it's about
Speaker 1: let's just go ahead and remove those front four teeth
Speaker 1: and just get something fancy and bright up in there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can I mean I'm not familiar with this particular subculture,
Speaker 1: but I can imagine like both how it would denote
Speaker 1: status because you're showing off money in terms of like
Speaker 1: the particular jewel or metal that you're having put in
Speaker 1: your mouth. But then also just like hey, I'm tough
Speaker 1: enough to have somebody just take these teeth out. I
Speaker 1: don't need a gas mask, I don't need laughing gas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems it seems to be a convergence of those
Speaker 1: two to rent forces. And you were just telling me
Speaker 1: before the podcast episode, before we're gonna come in here
Speaker 1: to record it, you've seen some of this in South
Speaker 1: African hip hop, and I feel like, yeah, so, And
Speaker 1: I might be wrong here again, like our listeners in
Speaker 1: South Africa, please correct me. My only familiarity with South
Speaker 1: African hip hop is through Diante Word, which is fairly
Speaker 1: popular internationally. But I really enjoy them. I've seen them
Speaker 1: tour in America and watched a bunch of their videos,
Speaker 1: and I feel like I've seen some of this missing
Speaker 1: front tooth action in those videos, but I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's particular to this subculture. And like with people
Speaker 1: in the background and performers and not the actual members
Speaker 1: of the band, but people who are just performing and
Speaker 1: dancing and stuff in the videos. All Right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take another quick break, and when we come back, I
Speaker 1: know what a lot of you are thinking. You're thinking, Hey,
Speaker 1: where we've talked about you know all these uh these
Speaker 1: other cultures that have that have used you know, ritual
Speaker 1: or unnecessary tooth extraction. Well hold on to your seats,
Speaker 1: because when we come back from the break, we're gonna
Speaker 1: look at examples from Canada in the good old United States. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, so okay, Yeah, we had sort of set
Speaker 1: this up as saying, like, well, there's a Western perception
Speaker 1: of tooth modification that's very different from these other cultures
Speaker 1: that we're talking about, whether it's meso American or African
Speaker 1: or Asian. Right, and even in some cases they are
Speaker 1: Australian tribes where they performed abbelation as well. But we've
Speaker 1: got this going on right in Canada, right north of Maine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we ran across this excellent paper, very intriguing paper
Speaker 1: um titled French Canadian prenuptial dental extractions in Acadian women.
Speaker 1: First report of a cultural tradition uh or Quebec practice. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was yeah, this was really interesting. Uh and apparently
Speaker 1: you know, it has has occurred in modern times among Acadians.
Speaker 1: These are a descendants of seventeenth or eighteenth century French
Speaker 1: colonists in regions of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick,
Speaker 1: Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. And what was interesting
Speaker 1: about this paper was the author's goal was essentially to
Speaker 1: interview dentists in the region to find out if simply
Speaker 1: if they had ever been asked to perform this procedure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as well as some interviews with with people who knew
Speaker 1: or or have this procedure, just to see, like to
Speaker 1: what extent is this a thing and not just a
Speaker 1: matter of like anan case, there's an urban myth um
Speaker 1: and it's and it's it's not it. It turns out
Speaker 1: like her results were pretty positive. It turns out that
Speaker 1: this is a thing. Yeah. In these cases, the women
Speaker 1: undergo or in some cases they seek to undergo because
Speaker 1: they talked to Dennis too said turned down right, turned down, um,
Speaker 1: But they're seeking the extraction of all upper and or
Speaker 1: lower uh teeth to in order to obtain dentures prior
Speaker 1: to marry. Right. So the dentures are a dowry right
Speaker 1: from one family to another, and so they have to
Speaker 1: have their teeth removed to receive the dowry. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: uh you know. And again we kind of get back
Speaker 1: to some of these cases we talked about earlier, like
Speaker 1: at what at what point is there like a medical
Speaker 1: concern here, and then at what point does it become
Speaker 1: uh more complicated in terms of cultural uh you know
Speaker 1: aesthetic values and made selection. Uh. There's at least one
Speaker 1: account in the paper, and it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: little dubious, but I still want to mention it that
Speaker 1: alleges that this was a British practice by which a
Speaker 1: colonists prepared for the wilds of the New World and
Speaker 1: its lack of dental care by simply removing one's teeth
Speaker 1: and replacing them with dentures. That's ironic given how many
Speaker 1: jokes are made about British dental practice and in present
Speaker 1: day society. Although yeah, I don't know how much stock
Speaker 1: I put into that. Yeah, I mean to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: based on what we've been reading about about the the
Speaker 1: acknowledged link between uh any of dental infection and how
Speaker 1: that could know and and and other health problems. I
Speaker 1: could imagine a scenario in which someone might think, or
Speaker 1: might be convinced, Hey, you've got some some tooth teeth
Speaker 1: issues going on already, you don't have the best dental health.
Speaker 1: You're about to go to the wilds of Canada, whether
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have a dentist. Why don't you go
Speaker 1: ahead and get this out of the way. Why don't
Speaker 1: we go ahead and remove the problem teeth. Maybe just
Speaker 1: remove all those teeth, get some sort of dental um,
Speaker 1: you know, insert and they get some get some some
Speaker 1: some dentures in place, and then the only thing you
Speaker 1: have to worry about is cleaning those things in a
Speaker 1: stream somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's fair. Well. One of
Speaker 1: the things that I thought was really fascinating about this
Speaker 1: particular article was some of the dentists are at least
Speaker 1: one of the dentist she interviewed was a Kadian was
Speaker 1: from this culture and was like, I've never heard of
Speaker 1: this before, and thought that they were joking, and then realized, oh, no,
Speaker 1: this is an actual practice. It's just I'm removed from
Speaker 1: this particular it's like a niche subculture within the Akadian people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a small, rare thing. But but when they poked around,
Speaker 1: they found that, yes, it did occur with enough frequency
Speaker 1: to suggest that it that it was an actual thing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just you know, a few individuals here and there.
Speaker 1: So the author's core argument here is that this all
Speaker 1: may come down to just an uncertain grasp of those
Speaker 1: connections between oral health problems, pregnancy, and just overall health
Speaker 1: in general. Because certainly before the advent of antibiotics, various
Speaker 1: medical medical conditions were blamed on chronic tooth infections. So
Speaker 1: if you can't figure out the source of en ailment
Speaker 1: and you know that there's a troublesome tooth, well then
Speaker 1: you just go ahead and yank it to be sure. Right,
Speaker 1: So what might have begun is a half blind attempt
Speaker 1: to ensure mother and child's survival in a harsh environment
Speaker 1: may have become a brutal social norm. Okay. So the
Speaker 1: next example that you have here is actually another thing
Speaker 1: that we ended up talking about during that Christmas Listener
Speaker 1: mail episode, uh, in relation to the the Abominable Snowman
Speaker 1: having his teeth ripped out. Right, Because you're a big
Speaker 1: fan of the TV show The Nick, Yeah, I really
Speaker 1: love The Nick directed by Steven Soderberg. Clive Owens is
Speaker 1: in it. Uh just a great look, fictionalized look at
Speaker 1: cutting edge medicine, like the frontier of medicine and just
Speaker 1: the ins and outs of running a hospital um in
Speaker 1: turn of the century in New York City. And if
Speaker 1: you're a viewer of the show, you might remember that
Speaker 1: there's a character that pops up by the name of
Speaker 1: Dr Henry Cotton, and he's played fabulously by John Hodgman, Like,
Speaker 1: once you see this, you may find John Hodgmen less
Speaker 1: funny in real life like that, And I mean that
Speaker 1: is a compliment that's he does such a fine could
Speaker 1: see Yeah, I could see Hodgemen performing like a particularly
Speaker 1: kind of creepy uh doctor type. Yeah, and he he
Speaker 1: but he manages the creepy in a way where it
Speaker 1: it's the most natural Hodgman performance I've ever seen. Like,
Speaker 1: he just does a great jobs. What's notable in the
Speaker 1: show is that he goes around basically prescribing full dental
Speaker 1: extraction for not only his mental patients, but also for
Speaker 1: his own children. Wow, okay, okay. And this isn't because
Speaker 1: like he's marrying them off and they need dowry dentures
Speaker 1: or because of any particular cultural reason. Now, it seems
Speaker 1: to be a situation where it's like those teeth are
Speaker 1: gonna cause all sorts of horrible infections. They're just gonna
Speaker 1: it's gonna lead to madness. Better to just pull them
Speaker 1: all out now. And while fictionalized this, the writers of
Speaker 1: the nick actually basis character on a real guy, the
Speaker 1: real Dr Henry Cotton, who lived eighteen seventy six through
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three, was a respected academic psychiatrist, and he
Speaker 1: served as superintendent of New Jersey's Trenton State Hospital. And
Speaker 1: he was a huge proponent of modern medical practices. But
Speaker 1: when he when established methods proved ineffective in the physical
Speaker 1: treatment of mental illness, he turned to the bacteriological theory
Speaker 1: of disease. Okay. And so this was like a general
Speaker 1: idea at the time that was, you know, depression or
Speaker 1: other mental illness stemmed from something going in the on
Speaker 1: in the body, some Oregon problem, right in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases like that I I had read about in
Speaker 1: relation to this, it was the colon was being removed. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll get to that, but it's yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean basically, this was a there was a lot
Speaker 1: of big games going on in medicine, and we were
Speaker 1: figuring out what the biological roots of things like cholera
Speaker 1: and malaria were. So it seeing that the sky was
Speaker 1: the limit and that we could just we we barreled down,
Speaker 1: we could find these problems and we could just completely
Speaker 1: take care of it. So yeah, Cotton decides to give
Speaker 1: it a go. Uh, and in his day, there was
Speaker 1: a prominent theory from a fair of British surgeons that
Speaker 1: linked untreated infections in the gums and in the intestines
Speaker 1: to your point, uh and that, and the idea was
Speaker 1: that these untreated infections were toxifying the blood and this
Speaker 1: could result in pathological brain alterations. So Cotton took this
Speaker 1: theory ran with It's in nineteen he extracted the infected
Speaker 1: teeth from fifty mental patients. So these are just the
Speaker 1: infected teeth. Uh. And then he takes a step back,
Speaker 1: but this doesn't seem to be doing any good, so
Speaker 1: then he goes back in and has to just all
Speaker 1: their teeth removed and uh. Then this doesn't work, so
Speaker 1: he continues to chase the decay as I've heard, I've
Speaker 1: heard the term thrown around and among dentists. Um. So
Speaker 1: the patients have clearly swallowed painted saliva stemming from their
Speaker 1: oral infections. So he systematically removes tonsils, spleens, stomachs, colon's,
Speaker 1: the cervix, and amid all this butchery, he's reporting reporting
Speaker 1: curate from mental illness. But have any of his patients
Speaker 1: lived seizures? Jesus, that's the thing. Because at first everybody's like, oh,
Speaker 1: this huge access rate, this guy's doing good work, and
Speaker 1: he's smell pressed. Can you remove my stomach please? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's obviously I can see the sort of
Speaker 1: correlation there. There's obviously a long history of and we
Speaker 1: talk we think about today with people who talk about
Speaker 1: ib s between you know, the mental connection to the
Speaker 1: digestive system. But I don't know that one necessitates the
Speaker 1: removal of the ride. I mean, the connections are there,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's just what do you do about those
Speaker 1: connections and what kind of assumptions do you jump to?
Speaker 1: Because to your point about about you know, how many
Speaker 1: of these individuals are surviving, Uh, the mortality rate was
Speaker 1: thirty and so when that starts to get out, the
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for Cotton's cure here kind of you know, Peter's
Speaker 1: out a little bit and eventually psycho now psychoanalysis gained steam.
Speaker 1: But these procedures, particularly the surgeries and the removal of
Speaker 1: you know, intestinal material. This continues at Trenton Asylum until Cotton.
Speaker 1: Cotton dies of a heart attack in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: This actually reminds me of something that I'd like us
Speaker 1: to do an episode about is coffee animals, because I
Speaker 1: think that there's there's somewhat of a connection there, right that,
Speaker 1: like the fat of coffee animals that you feel better,
Speaker 1: you feel mentally better after you've kind of flushed your
Speaker 1: stem out this way again, the connection between the digestive
Speaker 1: system and the mental process. Oh yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: can get into the topic of rectal feeding, which Mary
Speaker 1: Roach explores in her book Gulp, which I highly recommend
Speaker 1: if you have your at all, into a bunch of
Speaker 1: weird digestive data about how the body actually works and
Speaker 1: some of the stuff we've done and exploring it. That's
Speaker 1: a great book to Jack and my wife's read it,
Speaker 1: and I know that it's come up on the show
Speaker 1: frequently in the past. I need to get on that.
Speaker 1: So we're winding down here, but it is important to
Speaker 1: to bring things back around and touch on some of
Speaker 1: the the the the actual science, some of what current
Speaker 1: science is saying about the effects of tooth extraction on
Speaker 1: brain functionality. So, according to a two thousand fourteen paper
Speaker 1: from University College London published in Journal of the American
Speaker 1: Geriatric Society, memory and walking speeds of adults who have
Speaker 1: lost all of their teeth decline more rapidly than those
Speaker 1: who still have some of their own teeth. Huh, that's interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, if we'll break down here, it's a
Speaker 1: little more problematically. I would imagine that. Yeah, I imagine
Speaker 1: that there's not a direct connection between those things, but
Speaker 1: that there's the aging process in itself is related to
Speaker 1: those Yeah, because you have to ask questions, why why
Speaker 1: did this individual loser teeth? You know, what the socioeconomic
Speaker 1: situations are going on here? What, how's that factoring in?
Speaker 1: How is pre existing mental illness factoring into lack of hygiene?
Speaker 1: That sort of thing. But the study looked at over
Speaker 1: three thousand adults age sixty or over. Uh, And then
Speaker 1: they compared their performance in tests of memory and walking speed,
Speaker 1: and people with none of their own teeth performed approximately
Speaker 1: temperacent worth in both memory and walking speed tests than
Speaker 1: people with their teeth. And they adjusted this for a
Speaker 1: wide variety of factors, you know, socio demographic characteristics, existing
Speaker 1: health problems, physical health health behaviors, did they smoke, did
Speaker 1: they drink, do they have you know, episodes of depression
Speaker 1: in their life? Applied all of this and they still
Speaker 1: found a definite gap. So the theory here is that
Speaker 1: tooth loss could be used as an early marker of
Speaker 1: mental and physical decline in older age. Now, a two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen study, uh takes things a little, a little further. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was published in the European Journal of Oral Sciences
Speaker 1: and it explores sort of the hypothetical effects of tooth
Speaker 1: loss here. The research was carried out by the by
Speaker 1: universities in Norway and Sweden, and they looked at two
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy three participants with missing teeth aged fifty
Speaker 1: to eighty, and then they gave them memory tests and
Speaker 1: they found that the number of teeth in an individual's
Speaker 1: head quote positively associated with performance on episodic memory recall
Speaker 1: as well as recognition. Okay, okay, well, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: visualize maybe our listeners are doing this too. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to visualize a biological connection between your teeth in the
Speaker 1: memory centers and your brain. And I suppose that's part
Speaker 1: of it. But there's also, you know, sort of the
Speaker 1: external factors of not having your teeth and the acceleration
Speaker 1: of memory loss. Yeah, so a lot of this seems
Speaker 1: to come down a lot of the theory here seems
Speaker 1: to come down to the fact that the movement of
Speaker 1: our jaw and and teeth send sensory input data to
Speaker 1: the hippocampus, the area of the brain that forms and
Speaker 1: retrieves memories. So one hypothesis is that, so we have
Speaker 1: reduced sensory input from those missing teeth that could be
Speaker 1: damaging our memory. Implants could help, but they're never going
Speaker 1: to replace all of those loss sensations. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is like a mastication type of thing that like as
Speaker 1: you chew, your receivering sensory input. Uh okay, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like you have all these dead phone lines and
Speaker 1: that could be affecting the phone bank in your in
Speaker 1: your head. To put it very simply, Yeah, I wonder well,
Speaker 1: this is maybe unrelated, but I wonder if there's a
Speaker 1: connection between ringing ear and and and memory loss as well,
Speaker 1: because that's sort of a similar fun amenon in which,
Speaker 1: like the dead phone line analogy is a good one
Speaker 1: that your brains not receiving the right signals anyway, what's
Speaker 1: what's the other high second hypothesis is that it could
Speaker 1: come down more to chewing, so it chewing increases blood
Speaker 1: flow flow in the brain, and it has been shown
Speaker 1: to increase activity in numerous brain areas. Even with dentures.
Speaker 1: An individual with lost teeth is going to maybe avoid
Speaker 1: certain foods. They're gonna chew less, so there's gonna be
Speaker 1: less chewing action and uh, and then that's gonna mean
Speaker 1: less blood flow in portions of the brain. Possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my grandmother was recently sick in the hospital and they,
Speaker 1: I am assuming this must be like a fairly standard
Speaker 1: practice for hospitals, but they purde everything that she ate,
Speaker 1: so everything that she received was purade so that she
Speaker 1: didn't have to chew as much because she was so
Speaker 1: weak from the illness that she had had, which was pneumonia. Now, finally,
Speaker 1: it's also possible that people lacking teeth uh and denture
Speaker 1: wears that they end up avoiding certain foods, leading to
Speaker 1: lower intakes of key vitamins, proteins, and just calories in general,
Speaker 1: which in turn impacts brain performance. Huh. Well, I'm most
Speaker 1: curious about hypothesis one, and I wonder if there's any connection.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is just like where I'm going. But I
Speaker 1: wrote an episode about ringing your uh for our video
Speaker 1: series brain Stuff one time, and it's very similar kind
Speaker 1: of kind of missing sensory signals there. So yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: curious about that. Now. There have been other studies that
Speaker 1: have explored correlation between dimple hygiene and various health conditions.
Speaker 1: There seems to be a connection between gum health and
Speaker 1: heart health, between gum disease and dementia. Uh, some even
Speaker 1: suggesting that gum disease bacteria might get into the brain,
Speaker 1: causing inflammation and brain damage. Well, that sounds very similar
Speaker 1: to the heart thing I was talking about, earl. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it all comes back to, uh, you know Brendan
Speaker 1: Burrel's quote about that that sense of impotence in the
Speaker 1: face of bodily mysteries. Like, I feel like we we
Speaker 1: end up coming back in that same place of just
Speaker 1: being not completely sure how biological factor A influences biological
Speaker 1: factor B. We're not as far ahead of the curve
Speaker 1: with our own biology as we like to think that
Speaker 1: we are. Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's fair to say.
Speaker 1: But so I guess I guess the question is, like, uh,
Speaker 1: let's say, like we're in a situation where, you know,
Speaker 1: civilized society has fallen apart and you've got a toothache.
Speaker 1: Would you go ahead and just have somebody yank your
Speaker 1: tooth out and then like use like a hot knife
Speaker 1: to burn out the any tooth germ that was remaining behind.
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing about any kind of dental pain
Speaker 1: is you can you can imagine yourself getting to that
Speaker 1: point where you say, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go to this traditional healer, I'm gonna go to this
Speaker 1: guy down the street. I'm going to try something myself,
Speaker 1: because when when stuff starts going awry in there, you're
Speaker 1: gonna do whatever it takes. You're gonna even further connection
Speaker 1: between you know, the mouth and the in the brain
Speaker 1: and the mind and the I I think that there's
Speaker 1: like a large connection there, because yeah, any kind of
Speaker 1: tooth pain that I've ever had before, it's just utterly
Speaker 1: distracting for anything else that's going on. Yeah, and certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, any kind of dental infect and if it's
Speaker 1: not treated, if it gets out of control, that can
Speaker 1: have dire consequences on your overall health. So it's not
Speaker 1: just as there's not necessarily a layer of mystery between
Speaker 1: dental health and overall health. Yeah, So there you have it.
Speaker 1: Dental extraction, dental modification. We've taken you through a number
Speaker 1: of different cultures. We've taken you across time here and
Speaker 1: hopefully landed in a place of curiosity, wonder, and maybe
Speaker 1: a little horror. Yeah, so I'm curious out there. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you have spent time amongst some of the cultures
Speaker 1: we're talking about, whether it's the Acadians in Canada, or
Speaker 1: you're in Uganda or maybe meso America. You've done some
Speaker 1: archaeological digs in in Mayan cultures before. What experience do
Speaker 1: you have with this teeth modification that goes on in
Speaker 1: other societies, or you know, what kind of experience have
Speaker 1: you had in our own sort of Western you know,
Speaker 1: general dentistry. Yeah, and hey, in the meantime, checks out
Speaker 1: of stuff to blow your mind dot com that's the mothership.
Speaker 1: That's we'll find all the blog posts, the podcast episodes
Speaker 1: of the deals links out of those social media accounts
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Hey, if
Speaker 1: people want to get in touch with us the old
Speaker 1: fashioned way, how can they do that? Well, they can
Speaker 1: write us on the email and that is blow the
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