Definitely a post for dentists.
I am in line to get a bunch of fillings it seems. And then today I woke up with a thought: why not get all the molars fused into long teeth? Lots of animals have those. Would they be bad in humans?
IANAD but if I were I would love to have you for a patient. One long molar to do root canal$ on, or make expen$ive porcelan inlay$ for, etc.
Bad for a human? Not good, but worse for your wallet!
Bridges (a smaller-scale version of what the OP proposes) need cleaning underneath - this would be a real chore for bridges that extended along all of the molars, and I don’t think there’s any way to seat them seamlessly against the gum.
The closest approximation to this would be implant-supported dentures - which are a single unit that removably fits over several implant posts anchored in the jaw.
Title edited for clarity.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
What would the advantage be?
Less area between teeth to develop all of those nasty gum problems and stuff you get from not flossing?
I’m still unclear on what the OP is actually talking about - whether it’s that dentists should somehow fuse the molars into solid units (impossible because they’re *more *separate below the gum than they are above - fusing them above the gum would create spaces that are difficult to clean, propagating bacteria, which would attack the real tooth material at the gumline, whereas fusing them below the gum would just be hugely injurious, because it would essentially involve chiselling a channel through a mixture of tooth, flesh and jawbone.
Or are we talking about altering humans in such a way that their molars develop as a single unit?
That’s also problematic, because it’s a huge, non-adjustable chunk of tooth that somehow has to grow to full size in the right shape, at the point when the owner’s jaw has finished growing, then it has to emerge all at once (I don’t fancy nursing someone through that process).
Also, I suspect that a single, long molar would be more difficult for the gum to tightly ‘wrap’ than individual molars - slack gums against the long edges would permit ingress of debris etc.
From the evolutionary standpoint my guess is it allows for back-up if one molar is damaged and rots away. You’d still have enough to chew with.
If you had one big molar and lost the whole thing, you couldn’t chew on that side at all.