Dina tänder sitter inte i din kropp, dom sitter i munnen och munnen har ingenting med resten av kroppen att göra. Vilket är vad sjukvården alltid har ansett. Fram tills nu när vi vet att dina tandsjukdomar mycket väl kan sprida sig till resten av kroppen. Så varför inte sluta med den helt konstgjorda brandväggen mellan tandvården och sjukvården? Och låta sjukförsäkringen också täcka tandvården?

Olga Kazan skriver i The Atlantic: Why Don’t We Treat Teeth Like the Rest of Our Bodies? Dental care is excluded from most insurance plans for a bizarre and antiquated reason, and millions of people suffer as a result.

About a third of people in the U.S. don’t visit the dentist every year, and more than 800,000 annual ER visits arise from preventable dental problems. A fifth of Maryland residents have not visited a dentist in the past five years. Despite the fact that dental procedures are some of the most expensive office visits, dental coverage is treated like a garnish—the parsley of the insurance world.

“Medicaid doesn’t acknowledge that you have teeth unless you’re a child,” said Thomas Ritter, a dentist who was volunteering at the event.

One reason for this is that since the beginning of time, dentistry and medicine have been considered inherently distinct practices. The two have never been treated the same way by either the medical system or public insurance programs. But as we learn more about how diseases that start in our mouths can ravage the rest of our bodies, it’s a separation that’s increasingly hard to rationalize.

The partition between dentistry and the rest of medicine dates back to the dental profession’s roots as an offshoot of hairdressing. Until the 1800s, barbers served as rudimentary dentists, pulling painful teeth and lancing abscesses after they finished trimming whiskers.

Ett bra exempel på hur ålderdomligt vårt tänkande kring sjukvården fortfarande är i dagens USA – och Sverige.

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[tags]Tandläkare och läkare, dentists and doctors [/tags]