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Fillings are preferable to extractions because it leaves
the patient with a useful tooth instead of a useless gap.
Prevention of decay is however preferable to either expediency
and another instance that it is practicable to reduce
the onset of caries is provided by the Wright-Kingsford
Home.
The children of this Home attending the Finchley
Schools have for the first time been brought into the dental
scheme. On inspection it at once became apparent that
these children are comparatively free from dental caries. By
courtesy of the Matron an enquiry and re-inspection was
made at the Home. Of the children of school age only onethird
have ever had need of dental treatment. The general
estimate of persons affected by dental decay in this country
is 95% and of this number nearly 80% require treatment
annually. There is of course a reason for this wide difference,
and it is no other than the use of fine white flour confections
and other soft sticky foods on the one hand and the use of
brown bread, fruit and self-cleansing foods on the other.
If only it were possible to induce parents to buy more
wholemeal bread, to make sweets, cake and biscuits the exception
rather than the rule by substituting fruit, however
little, particularly at the conclusion of a meal which is
otherwise sticky, then much of their dental troubles would
be avoided. Where a parent knows its value it is easy
enough to teach the child to clean his teeth last thing at
night; it should not, in addition, be too difficult to transfer
his liking for sweets to that of fruit.
The latest menace to teeth is the new rage for making
milk sticky with easily fermentable carbo-hydrates which their