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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I find it fascinating that just over a hundred years ago proactive teeth removal was a standard practice. Women would get all their teeth removed to save money for the prospective husband. And left untreated for too long, rotten teeth will definitely kill you through infection.

These days, women are getting proactive mastectomies, not so much because of the costs involved in treatment, but because cancer is a much scarier disease than teeth rot. At least to us. To us proactively removing your teeth is a bad joke.

In 100 to 150 years, will people think about a proactive mastectomy as a bad joke? I sure hope so.

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She makes one point in her piece that struck me as novel:

"Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful."

Can proactive mastectomies double as cosmetic surgery? That would be an interesting wrinkle in the cost/benefit analysis.

I wonder if that also wasn't one of the reasons proactive teeth removal (replaced with dentures) was once so popular.

They can, and I guarantee you the insurance companies will look at it that way. Hers is leaving out a huge chunk of the story: money.

It will probably be called an "elective procedure" and especially if there is anything cosmetic about it.

My mom had a melanoma removed from her eyelid and the costs were staggering. She had some cosmetic reconstructive surgery done to allow her face to continue to look normal. That's all: normal.

They had to fight for weeks to get a good percentage of it covered—or any percentage of the cosmetic portion.

I don't know entirely what the case is for a preventative mastectomy, maybe if your cancer risk is high enough your insurance will see it as a overall benefit to them, but it can't be easy or cheap to deal with at all.

It's all obviously dependent on your plan - but many plans do in fact cover 100% of a mastectomy and reconstruction. Which of course makes financial sense to them if the same plan requires them to cover substantial amounts of cancer treatment and the patient has such a high risk profile.

I'd need to find more sources but for one this is Aetna's policy, which it seems like Jolie would fit under due to family history and the results of her genetic testing.

http://www.aetna.com/cpb/medical/data/200_299/0227.html

Or maybe in 20 years we'll be used to removing parts and replacing them with vat-grown improved variations. I'd be totally down for getting a superhuman liver.

I think I could use a superhuman liver ... it would help with my drinking.

My grandparents both had all their teeth out in their 20s as a proactive health move. This was in Edinburgh. They are in their 80s now, so I guess this was 60 years ago.

I was chatting to my mid-80's grandmother only recently when she casually mentioned that she had all her (still relatively healthy) teeth removed before her wedding, essentially as a benefit to her husband-to-be as the above post suggests.

My grandmother made it sound like it was a standard thing to do here in Australia in the 1930s/40s - whereas I'm still shaking my head.

What is the nationality of your grandparents? Was this a Scottish/UK thing? While the practices seems crazy and very painful, I suspect that over a life time it is quite cost effective. I wonder if anyone with a dental background hangs around here who knows a bit about this arcane seeming practice

I find it fascinating that just over a hundred years ago proactive teeth removal was a standard practice.

What would people eat then? Smoothies, cream of wheat?

They used false teeth.

Hmm, I guess that makes sense. Seems so primitive compared to modern dentistry though.

I expect they used dentures, which have been made for hundreds of years out of a variety of materials, often by skilled goldsmiths/jewelers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentures#History

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