Plastic is used across oral care and dental treatments, including toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, composite fillings, acrylic nightguards, aligners, and retainers. Some plastic applications are medically necessary, such as fillings that prevent further damage and avoid mercury exposure from older silver amalgams. Cosmetic uses like aligners introduce trade-offs between convenience and potential harms. Aligners and retainers can shed micro- and nanoplastics in the mouth. Chemical compounds that leach from plastics have been associated with hormone disruption, developmental abnormalities, and cancer. Repeated wear and prolonged contact increase potential particle release and chemical migration.
If you are like me, you brush your teeth-too vigorously, I'm told-with a plastic rack of plastic bristles. You use your plastic brush to lather a paste pushed from a plastic tube. When you have a cavity, you go to a dentist who might
fill the hole with a plastic composite then sand it flush right there in your mouth. Say you grind your teeth at night. Your dentist might prescribe you a fitted piece of cured acrylic to grind into instead, the surface of which eventually gets visibly rough and worn. Perhaps your teeth are not very straight, so you contemplate getting aligners-thin sheets of thermoplastic that would be heated and then molded to the contours of your mouth and
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