Oral Microbes Linked to 3-Fold Increased Risk of Pancreatic Cancer

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6503789/

tl;dr > The oral microbiome usually exists in the form of a biofilm. It plays a crucial role in maintaining oral homeostasis, protecting the oral cavity, and preventing disease development.

That NIH article also refers to some fields that are experiencing wide recent advances: the gut/brain axis, and communication from the skin microbiota that stimulates the first immune responses to pathogenic organisms.

This link describes some aspects of the skin microbiome:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250402/How-your-skine280...

I up-voted your post. I don't think there should be a penalty for asking for a reference. Although, I'm not always in the mood to dig up _good_ links on subjects that I've read enough to form an opinion.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9076720/

Once that's true it does seem there's a lot of host and microbiome interactions we've only begun to explore, but it shouldn't be surprising that co-evolution of the microbiome and host begins to take over as soon as you have one. One great example is short-chain-fatty-acid (SCFA) producing bacteria in the human gut. [1] These seem to be essential, and if there was a general takeaway to improve health, it would be to eat your roughage so they can do their job.

This is also why high alpha-diversity (community richness in particular) is such a dead-ringer for healthy vs diseased states. And frustratingly, is often exactly where the story ends for a lot of observational studies.

Also, in case you are curious, artificially sterile mice (gnotobiotic mice) tend to act differently than other mice, which is pretty odd to be honest, and why the gut-brain axis is a plausible mechanism to research further. [2]

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10180739/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...

There are plenty of good reasons to give people medical care. Clean mouths may be beneficial in many other ways other than allowing me to be within 5' of you when your mouth is open. Militant advocacy for innumeracy is a worse disease than pancreatic cancer, though.

I once had a gum infection so bad that the uncontrollable diarrhea it gave me had me so dehydrated, I was afraid I was going to pass out and die alone in my apartment (as has happened to many, many people.) I went to the emergency room and I had to beg them to pay attention to me at all. They recommended a dentist appointment. I could barely stand. Finally, one that wasn't mentally disabled recognized my distress and gave me an IV. Do you think this would change if I said that it might triple my risk of pancreatic cancer from nearly nothing to nearly nothing?

No. This study is something to add a completely spurious and inconsequential fact to toothpaste commercials, that's it. It reaches no conclusion that could help anyone with anything. If they intend to isolate the particular microbes that are more associated, and if those have an association with something that may also have an association with pancreatic cancer; or anything other than the p-hacking that this sounds like, it would be a different story.

Dentistry evolved relatively late compared to regular medicine, and early oral procedures were mostly tooth extractions, which ended up being predominantly done by barbers, who would also do surgery (!). These procedures were often considered crude and beneath that of a trained doctor, and they were generally performed by self-trained practitioners. There were several attempts in the 1800s to integrate dentistry into mainstream medicine, but they failed, both because the doctors of the time didn't think of dentistry as being a real science, but also because, as dentistry started to legitimize itself, the dentists themselves preferred being separate.

For some reason the same separation also evolved in the U.K., but it's more integrated in other countries. For example, basic dental coverage is part of national healthcare in Germany and Japan. In the U.S., dentists have their own schools and licensing boards and so on, which isn't the case in the rest of the world, where dentistry is usually accepted as a regular branch of medicine and taught at the same universities.

Seems like the status quo is just fine for a whole bunch of folks that make enough to buy regulatory capture.

Proper civilized countries do provide free to the consumer dental services, at least for children and poor people.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/reason-your-dental-wor...

And many people will require regular teeth cleanings to avoid gum pockets and consequent gingivitis despite their best efforts at brushing and flossing.

There are other situations where tooth infections can move to the brain in a matter of days, risking death if left untreated. Regular checkups reduce that risk considerably.

The other side of your argument would imply that the existence of toothpaste renders the entire field of dentistry inessential.

This isn't happening, this is you starting from a solipsist axiom that you're smarter than everyone else, who comparatively must be automatons about receiving information.