[Thanks, I'll stick with coffee.]
Dentists: Beware 'meth mouth'
New York Times News Service Jun. 10, 2005 07:30 PM
CHICAGO - From the moment when the young man sat down in Dr. Richard Stein's dental chair in southwestern Kansas and opened his mouth, Stein says, he recognized the enemy. This had to be the work, Stein concluded, of methamphetamine, a drug that is leaving its mark, especially in the rural regions of the Midwest and the South, on families, crime rates, economies, legislatures - and teeth.
Unlike other drugs or candies or vices in most dentists' memories, methamphetamine seems to be taking a unique and horrific toll inside its users' mouths. In short stretches of time, sometimes just months, a perfectly healthy set of teeth can turn a grayish-brown, twist and begin to fall out, and take on a peculiar texture less like that of hard enamel and more like a piece of ripened fruit.
The condition, known to some as "meth mouth," has been studied little in academic circles and is unknown to many urban and suburban dentists, whose patients are increasingly focused on cosmetic issues, the bleaching and perfect veneers of television's makeover shows. But other dentists, especially those in the open, empty swaths of land where methamphetamine is being manufactured in homemade laboratories, say they are seeing a growing number of such cases.
These are the same towns, in some cases, that have wrestled in recent years with shortages of dentists. They are places where dentists have struggled to sell their practices as populations shrink, where new dentists have been reluctant to settle out of fear that they will not get enough business to make ends meet; and where political leaders have offered financial incentives to lure young dentists to town. For good or ill, meth mouth is creating more business.
With the exception of a few formal studies, including one beginning in New Mexico, meth mouth has so far been less a topic of academic analysis in the dental industry than a matter for casual phone conversations and e-mail exchanges between dentists in small places.
"The truth is, very little is known yet," said Dr. Stephen Wagner, who specializes in dentures and implants in his private practice and who will be studying 20 afflicted patients with Tatlock in the coming months at the University of New Mexico. "What I can tell you is what I have seen: It looks like someone has taken a hammer to these teeth and shattered them."
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Carl