Teeth Quotes

“Pallone spoke of a “fragmented health system” failing children. And he ended his remarks with a quote from Nobel laureate and poet Gabriela Mistral: “Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time. His bones are being formed. His blood is being made, his mind is being developed. To him, we cannot say tomorrow. His name is today.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

“The nation will never drill, fill and extract its way out of what amounts to a public health crisis among some populations. Throwing more ‘treaters’ into the mix amounts to digging a hole in an ocean of disease.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

“The teeth are made from stern stuff. They can withstand floods, fires, even centuries in the grave. But the teeth are no match for the slow-motion catastrophe that is a life of poverty: its burdens, distractions, diseases, privations, low expectations, transience, the addictive antidotes that offer temporary relief at usurious rates. Others”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

“Ever since the days of Hippocrates, it has been considered an axiom of medicine, that the first step to be taken in the treatment of disease, is the removal of all the primary causes,” Harris wrote.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

“If this craze for violent removal goes on, it will come to pass that we will have a gutless, glandless, toothless and I am not sure that we may not have, thanks to false psychology and surgery, a witless race,” warned a speaker at a meeting of the Philadelphia County Medical Society.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America

“Medicare, the federal health care program that currently provides benefits to more than 55 million aged and disabled people, has never included coverage for routine dental care.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth

“For more than a century, experiments by innovators and studies and reports produced by nonprofits, learned academies, universities, and federal agencies have continued to suggest that dental hygienists, particularly with additional training, could be more widely used to help address the unmet dental needs of millions of Americans. Hygienist leaders agree.”
― Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America