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Teeth, jaws and the like
I had my first dental checkup in three years, and my teeth remain fine. Tech level has advanced again: I was given a small plastic-wrapped CCD imager to hold in my mouth for the X-rays, rather than a film holder, and my teeth were on a laptop screen within moments.
If I read the notes on the X-ray source correctly, it's 65keV; hc/E is then about 0.2 angstroms, which seems a surprisingly hard X-ray - I'm used to CuKa sources at 1.54A and synchrotrons that run at 1.00A. Does anyone have a reference for the X-ray absorption spectrum of air?
The toothache-like thing that has afflicted me for the last month is not tooth-related, but inflammation of the socket of the ball-and-socket joint at the right-hand side of my jaw; I'm told a major cause of this is grinding one's teeth together at night out of stress. I can take ibuprofen and hope it goes away, I can meditate constantly on the need to keep my teeth slightly apart when doing anything other than eating, or I can get the dentist to have made for me a small plastic cap to keep my teeth from grinding.
Generic ibuprofen costs 10p a tablet, and I should take three tablets a day. The custom-made small plastic cap costs three hundred pounds; it appears to be patented in such a way that it has to be manufactured by American dentists at USAnian-health-care costs.
If I read the notes on the X-ray source correctly, it's 65keV; hc/E is then about 0.2 angstroms, which seems a surprisingly hard X-ray - I'm used to CuKa sources at 1.54A and synchrotrons that run at 1.00A. Does anyone have a reference for the X-ray absorption spectrum of air?
The toothache-like thing that has afflicted me for the last month is not tooth-related, but inflammation of the socket of the ball-and-socket joint at the right-hand side of my jaw; I'm told a major cause of this is grinding one's teeth together at night out of stress. I can take ibuprofen and hope it goes away, I can meditate constantly on the need to keep my teeth slightly apart when doing anything other than eating, or I can get the dentist to have made for me a small plastic cap to keep my teeth from grinding.
Generic ibuprofen costs 10p a tablet, and I should take three tablets a day. The custom-made small plastic cap costs three hundred pounds; it appears to be patented in such a way that it has to be manufactured by American dentists at USAnian-health-care costs.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-05-22 01:39 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2006-05-22 01:45 pm (UTC)(link)I was slightly surprised how silent the system was, since the X-ray generators I read about at work have heavy-duty cooling and motors for rotating the anode so that it doesn't melt; on the other hand, it may well be that crystallography requires rather higher energies for rather longer than dentistry desires. People being more susceptible to radiation damage even than protein crystals, and less amenable to cryoprotection.