For over 7,000 years, people had perfect mouths, until 1986 when the WHO officially recommended that people do not chew on sticks. It wasn’t a joke! In clinical trials these “miswak sticks” outperformed toothbrushes. A preventive health researcher spent two years asking why ancient peoples had 0.09% cavities while modern man had 92%. There are […]
Essential oils were doing their quiet, leafy work centuries before antibiotics swaggered in with their white coats and miracle promises. These plant brews, distilled forests really, can unsettle microbes without teaching them new tricks, which is a rare courtesy in a bacterial world addicted to adaptation. In integrative dentistry and medicine, the ambition isn’t a […]
We come equipped, straight out of the box, with five senses. A modest toolkit, really, when you think about it, but we behave as though it were comprehensive. Sight: the small, curated cinema playing constantly behind the eyes.Sound: the endless soundtrack, much of it unwanted.Touch: the sense that reminds us we have bodies and that […]
Sleep, it turns out, is not a lifestyle accessory. It is not a wellness choice, like chia seeds or standing desks. It is closer to sanitation. You can ignore it for a while, but eventually the pipes begin to clog, the drains start to breathe ominously, and something unspeakable rises to the surface. Researchers, peering […]
He changed the subject in the way some men change trains: not because they’ve arrived, but because they can’t bear the upholstery any longer. The previous carriage had been crowded with jabbering podcasts and professional outrage, all elbows and opinions, and he had sat there dutifully, watching the numbers climb like ivy on a bombed […]
Nutrition, like religion, is crowded with prophets and pamphlets. Everyone is selling salvation in capsule form, usually at a markup. Yet beneath the clatter of wellness jargon lies an awkward truth: we are underfed in an age of plenty. Overfed and undernourished is the better-known phrase. And the missing pieces are not protein shakes or […]
Dentistry, that small, brightly lit principality of the human body, has spent the last decades busily polishing its credentials. We’ve invented ever more baroque filling materials, perfected the art of embalming dead teeth with root canals, and installed zirconia implants like tiny kitchen worktops. Dentists now have training courses for everything except, it seems, remembering […]
Let us begin with your mouth, an orifice we generally think of as a polite conversational instrument, a conduit for pasta, proclamations and the odd ill-judged gin. But this shimmering cavern is, in fact, a densely populated metropolis of microorganisms: billions of them, gossiping, breeding, squabbling and negotiating invisible truces. More than 700 kinds of […]
W Let’s start with a little glittering truth wedged between your molars: that silvery filling, the one you’ve had since you were twelve, is made of mercury. Yes, mercury. The same toxic metal that once sent hat-makers barmy and poisoned Victorian children in their rattles. And yet, here we are in the 21st century, still […]
Toothache. The very word feels like a wince. A syllabic shudder that begins in the jaw and ends somewhere behind the eyes. It is among the smallest pains with the largest ambitions. It colonises your face, your thoughts, your very mood. It is the nagging tyrant of pains – not fatal, but determined to make […]
