- A historical guide to FOIA.
- Oil platform workers rescue a dog in a mindbendingly unbelievable place and take wonderful care of it. (H/T MtK)
- This dog rescue, on the other hand, evokes Stephen King. (Also H/T MtK)
- And since we’ve already added a creepy factor to our “lite” links, consider this: Dentistry is much less scientific than we’ve learned to think.
- Well, we now know the cause of Catholic priests diddling little boys and girls. The “swinging 60s” are to blame, pronounces ex-pope Benedict. And that’s not even the most bizarre of his pronouncements.
- Some background on unicorns — both the horsey kind and the billion-dollar kind. (H/T owed, but I can’t recall who sent the link! Sorry.)
- Interesting new book: A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher — Review and Amazon link. (Not to be confused with “A Boy and His Dog” by the excruciating Harlan Ellison.)
- Some celebrities treat dogs as mere photo fodder. Patrick Stewart and his wife take their pit bulls seriously.
On dentists: I suspect a lot of them are either incompetent or crooks. I know I have had unnecessary fillings done, and as a result of too much drilling and tooth removal on them as they needed replacement, I have lost several molars, which weakened and cracked..
As a child, I was told I had “basket weave decay” on an incisor. Which, of course, needed a filling. Now these white spots are considered normal calcification, no fillings needed.
Another dentist, when I was 16, told me and my mother the fillings in my molars were badly decayed around them, and needed replacement, with natural-looking resin fillings. Which didn’t last and wore down. When replacing one of them, the (new) dentist was astonished to find the original, amalgam filling was partially left in the tooth. That’s how “badly decayed” it was, right?
And I am thankful my mother was too cheap to agree with the impacted wisdom teeth racket. (They came in later,)
I no longer go to dentists, and I suspect I would have been better off if I never had gone to them. If/when I lose all the teeth in a jaw, I will just get dentures. Not an ideal situation, I know, but better than letting these butchers loose in my mouth. In fact, I am wondering if I can make my own dentures and avoid the b@stards entirely.
Quick note. Thanks for your past casual mention of having been gifted The Guerilla Gunfighter. I got the book and it is an interesting combination of discussion of kinship society and how to shoot, just getting to the applied part. Well read dude.
I came up with the Unicorns.
When Harvey hit, one of the things we did up here is open a pet shelter. We had more volunteers to work there than we did the people shelters. Besides dogs and cats, we ended up with horses and a bearded dragon.
I can’t say that I was taken advantage of by my last dentist. After all, I entered in terrible pain and ultimately the pain was taken away, but I was a bit disconcerted by the numerous crowns she wanted to install, and the amount of time I spent with the gal who explained all of the financing options, set me up with a dental credit card, and sold me and electric tooth brush. I realized afterwards that I’d have agreed to darn near anything so I wouldn’t have to sit up at night and pop Tylenol in order to sleep for a couple of hours.
Once the pain disappeared, I never went back. I hope that doesn’t end up costing me more pain and money in the future. And now I wonder if I escaped being taken for a ride.
[…] Claire Wolfe of Living Freedom Blog makes a surprise return with A lite little links post for a sunny Saturday. […]
Buyer beware with dentists like everything else.
I’m sure when some of them look into a mouth their thoughts are not as much of doing good as it is of their retirement fund
I had a dentist who flat-out insisted that the tooth that looked like it had a marble in the gum near it was fine, but that every other tooth in my head needed a crown. At one point while we were arguing, I poked at the abscess with my finger.
It squirted him in the face!
He finally admitted that there might be a problem and fixed it, but I never went back to him. And the work he did was bad enough that it’ll have to be replaced, but at least the infection hasn’t come back.
I’ve been seeing the same dentist for 30 years. As far as I can tell, he’s never done any unnecessary work. He has always been opposed to amalgam fillings so, over the years, he has replaced all of my old ones with ceramic. Only one of his fillings has ever broken (after 25 years).
Last summer I was in pain but he was on vacation (out of the country). Left a message with his answering service, then went to see another (highly recommended dentist) who insisted I needed a root canal. I declined. Dr. Engleman called me an hour later and spent twenty minutes discussing options with me. I decided to take ibuprofen for five days till he returned.
After probing the tooth he agreed with me on an extraction. The tooth was too bad for a root canal to work.
Amazingly, the internal decay had never showed up an x-ray.
He does like to push crowns for aesthetic reasons, but is very upfront that they are purely for looks. After I declined, he stopped suggesting them.
I go in three times a year for tooth cleanings and haven’t needed any other work in over a decade.
I’m not looking forward to his retirement!
Dental rant, part 2
More scams, IMO: orthodontics. Now every kid needs braces, and some adults too!
Cosmetic dentistry. To me, teeth are for chewing. Not dazzling other people. And so many of the sheeple want this crap, if you don’t the dentist looks at you like your’re from Mars.
I suspect the newest craze, dental implants, will also be a crock of crap. Foreign objects implanted in the body tend to be a magnet for bacteria.
Dentists can be deadly. I have seen at least 2 news accounts of toddlers who have died from general anesthesia in dental offices. General anesthesia isn’t something to fool with.
I think it’s a bad idea to take very young children to dentists, for this reason, and to avoid radiation exposure from X-rays.
Ionizing radiation kills, albeit with a delayed effect. Two examples:
Roger Ebert. The reason he got the cancer that disfigured and ultimately killed him was he was given radiation treatments for ear infections as a child. He revealed this in his book Life Itself. That should have been the big story when his book came out. It wasn’t; the MSM big story was he admitted he was an alcoholic. Really, that was a huge surprise? He was a newspaperman, and the alcoholic news reporter is a cliche.
Howard Frank Mosher. I recently read his book The Great Northern Express, which describes a book tour he took in 2007 after he had radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Naturally, I wondered how he is now, medically. Google revealed he died in 2017, of cancer that was induced by the radiation treatments for the prostate cancer. I have to wonder if he really needed aggressive treatment for the prostate cancer, or if he really had cancer (a high PSA reading was the diagnosis).
Doctors and dentists, my motto is avoid them as much as possible.