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Comment by beenBoutIT | Hacker News Reader

If this can effectively regrow replacement teeth it seems that the dentist will want more than anything to suppress or somehow monopolize the technology in order to maintain their role as "fixers of teeth".

Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before any doctor (or layman) will be able to pull damaged teeth and then easily regrow them, avoiding the endless thousands that would be otherwise charged for dental repairs.

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>Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before any doctor (or layman) will be able to pull damaged teeth and then easily regrow them

I'd sure like to know that the person pulling my tooth knows how to evaluate it with an x-ray to see if it really needs to be pulled (and to see if the bone structure beneath it is healthy enough to regrow a tooth), and is trained to administer appropriate dental painkillers. If I asked my primary care physician to do it, I'd expect him to refer me to a dentist.

I agree - even though these things are generally really easy to do (second year dental students successfully do all of this under supervision), the reason a dentist is needed is for when something goes wrong.

At least in my area, teeth removal is at least 10x cheaper than root canal. I don't think GP meant there will be 0 dentists, it would be just that lot of preventative care and tooth repair work will be gone, which I were to guess will reduce dentists quantity and quality requirement significantly.

Yeah I never hold out any hope for new miracle medical or dental treatments because there are far more profits to be made from treating symptoms.

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