Oh bugger!
I’d forgotten that you are not resident. Have you tried the " this is too expensive, what can you do it for?" Tactics yet? Mine came down by over 1k when I did that…
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Sorry Peter but I have to totally disagree with you, I have a life long history of dental issues,none of which are my ‘fault ‘ A combination of gene pool and birth injuries means I have all 4 possible bite problems. Cross bite,Over bite, Crowding and missing teeth I have had surgery,braces a mouth guard and spent my teenage years between fax max and orthodontics I was fortunate that for all my problems it has never looked too bad but as a younger woman I would not have wanted to look like a crackhead as Cat says.
Also the ongoing issues have has my dentist put it “ You’ve got a wacky bite and it’s knocking the heck out of that joint “. The TMJ problems have led to pain ,stiffness,clicking etc so it isn’t just about vanity
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And also, having broken my jaw last year I am hopeful that some new better positioned teeth will help with the slurring of sss’s
Not good when you are teaching!!
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Exactly, we are not meant to be vegetarians.
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I had TMJ problems too. Made worse by stress. I had an operation as I was only able to open my mouth wide enough for a teaspoon. Fortunately it worked, but I now have a goutiere, which was free and which I wear from time to time and which helps enormously.
Sorry to read about your early dental woes, Mary, my post was supposed to be taken not too seriously, but I do understand your being sore about it, and you’re absolutely right, dentistry isn’t all about “the smile”, it’s also a healing art.
When I opened a nursing school in a copper mining company’s hospital in Zambia, the company twisted my arm to get all the trainees ( who had perfect teeth and had never heard of dentistry) to get their teeth checked by the mine dentist, as ‘policy’…
Of course, he “found incipient caries” in enough of the cohort to justify his salary, and filled dozens of pristine teeth, one of which belonged to my wife-to-be! She has never let me forget that bit of colonialist exploitation: nearly fifty years later she has never had an extraction and her teeth are still pearly white and strong.
Virtually no-one in black Africa knows a dentist. Only a very few need corrective surgery on the jaw or teeth, caries is virtually unknown there. People clean their teeth with a chewed twig from a particular toothbrush tree.
Only in the sense of saying “it’s not happening at that price”, I was actually too shocked to try bargaining - unfortunately I can only really tackle that sort of thing if I have planned for the possibility in advance (I might previously have mentioned I’m fairly convinced I have Asperger’s - I don’t always have the mental agility to cope with sudden plan changes).
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Agreed, and we were not meant not to be vegetarians either.
What we eat’s a matter of evolution, surely: ‘meaning’ is an after-the-fact inference, and hardly well- founded, I think.
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I always thought we evolved to be omnivores
We are! Where did vegetarian come into this?
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A synthetic teeth protection device to protect your teeth when sleeping from grinding, bit like a gum shield when playing rugby or any other contact sports.
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Of course we evolved to be capable of eating everything, including meat!
But we also evolved the capability, the brain-power, to choose what foods, amongst the scope of everything eatable, we actually want to eat! And the judgement necessary to select for ourselves the foods that would do us good, within the range available.
Hundreds of millions of people world-wide live and thrive on a vegetable- based diet, supplemented sometimes by milk and ghee.
We got to diet via the topic of teeth. Not a great leap of imagination needed there, @Wozza, surely 
Good grief, I’ve got one of those somewhere… sits on either upper or lower but I can’t remember which, it’s been so long since I used it… never realised it was a goutiere…
Must be 30 years old… now an heirloom, possibly … 
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What’s a heirloom? Is it a kind of gumshield? 
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I was talking purely physiology
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Ha ha… well at 30 years it might be vintage - or collectible…for someone… it’s quite amazing what gets offered for sale on e-bay…
It’s not actually a gumshield it just evens-up a couple of my out-of-kilter teeth, that’s all…
by the sound of things, Jane and Mary have had a worse “tooth” situation than I ever did.
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So was I, Mary. Brains are as physioligical as the alimentary system, digestion and metabolism.
And we haven’t evolved just to chew and chomp, but to perceive, reason and choose, awarely and consciously.
Try putting it up for sale, a unique SF collectors item from the most appreciated & star of SF member & moderator, must be worth a few bob. You could always give the proceeds to a worthy cause.
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