folk tale!?! what do all the vagina dentists do then…
She doesn’t look like the picture of health and alraeady had denchers. Could they have been very loose due to dental issues and easily knocked out accidentally?
Were they definitely even there in the first place? Claiming otherwise would be a decent way to get some new ones for free…
I suspect there is another for more sane story entirely behind this that isn’t some people took her teeth out deliberately but failed to mention it and pretended not to notice (because you would notice if it happened during a surgery slot),
Another reason to think they wouldn’t have deliberately taken them out, possibly the main one is simply that they’d have probably billed the CCG for their removal.
Also would they even allow a surgeon from a non-max fax/dental specialism to take teeth out?
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+1 knocked out on intubation. the laryngoscope used to insert the tube is a big heavy chunk of stainless steel. Loose teeth are no match. The hospital knows full well what is going on but the extra time is there for all the bureaucrats and lawyers to put together their statements.
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Haha yeah that was my other thought. They wouldn’t take them out for FREE now would they? At no point during any of my surgeries have they failed to bill me for something!
My mom just had a hysterectomy this month and I was with her for “check in”. Both the aneasthetist and the assistant anaesthetist asked her about the state of her teeth: any false teeth, loose teeth, loose fillings, etc,. Apparently things can get a bit difficult with the tube insertion. Neither Mom, nor I had considered that before and we both just turned more and more green with each question.
With all the talk of intubation knocking teeth out, that has me a little weirded out.
I mean, presuming that intubation poses a risk for knocking a healthy tooth out, it makes me worry about what all that force could be doing to my trachea and significantly squishier than bone-embedded-in-bone bits.
I’m pretty sure the vagina dentists are just in it for the nitrous.
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I think it’s the unhealthy teeth (in diseased gums), old falsies, etc. which are sometimes knocked loose.
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@LDoBe, et al
To use a laryngoscope perfectly, you stand behind the patient’s head and insert it into the oral pharynx and sort of lift it away from you. This lifts the tongue and lower jaw.
But the world isn’t always perfect, and it is easy to accidentally “rotate” it, using the patient as the fulcrum. This can chip a tooth or knock a tooth out.
You use the laryngoscope to lift the tongue out of the way so you can see the airway and place the breating tube in the proper place. Most of the force is on the tongue, a nice strong muscle
Of course, things go wrong, and this is not the easiest procedure under perfect circumstances.
I remember one night we intubated a patient in the ER who had suffered facial trauma. Later that night we had to fish their tongue ring out of the right lung. Did we knock it there? Hard to know, but we made sure it was all charted and in the patient’s record. Odd that the hospital in the article can’t igure out where here teeth went…
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Thank you for the edification.
The poor state of the rest of her teeth was what I noticed too. If the removal was deliberate it wouldn’t have been the surgeon who did it though, it would have been the anaesthetist/anaesthesiologist. Sometimes loose teeth are a hazard to the airway and better plucked out. Although if deliberately removed it’s good practice to tell the patient … I make a point of giving prior warning to patients with bad teeth that I might have to do some amateur dentistry as well as give an anaesthetic if they have a particularly loose one.
I suspect the likely cause is that she went to Recovery (Post Anaesthesia Care Unit) with a guedel airway in to maintain her airway and bit down on it hard in delirium as she woke. The teeth came out and were swallowed and so disappeared … Not directly anyone’s fault (well, maybe hers for not brushing) and easy to miss if that was the case.
Yeesh. The more I see and read of airway maintenance devices/Naso-gastric tubes and the like, the luckier I feel for only having had them put in under general anesthesia. And the less I’m annoyed with having to use a CPAP. Sure it’s uncomfortable, but it’s not threading a feeding tube through the nose uncomfortable.
That’s not so bad. I’ve put one of these things in myself while fully conscious to demonstrate its use:
It goes down the nose and throat, into the oesophagus and connects up to a monitor that measures cardiac output. Bigger and stiffer than an nasogastric tube and it’s eminently bearable.
This though, this is hardcore:
I’ve not yet done this to myself. Plenty of times to other people though … 
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At least the guy in the video has a sense of humor about it. I suppose if I were comfortable enough to demonstrate an tracheal intubation on myself, I’d be tempted to ham it up with the vocal cords.
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