5 ms·

Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

63 points by Petiver 2y ago

lynx23 2y ago
Rather longwinded personal intro, followed by due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school! YAY! What a horror story.
- watt 2y ago
  That explains quite a lot about dentistry in USSR
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    It explains your bias and preconceived notions. One could read the story as "people had to do what they had to in order to survive and help their fellow humans". But no, you choose to focus on "Soviet dentistry hurrr" without knowing a thing about it. The article is also guilty. It talks at length about this book with a story of horrible torture that is entirely made up. Essentially that book is a collection of every stereotype and conspiracy mashed into one. The modern-day equivalent would be a book about how QAnon and Pizzagate are real. But no, the author says "the book is a lie, but Russia is bad so it's justified", missing the obvious: the book is trash.
  - throw3638 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Moomoomoo309 2y ago
      I've often heard this claim touted - that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job - do you have any statistics showing it? It always sounded to me like an "obvious conclusion" that was never proven, just assumed to be true, but I'm interested to see how the numbers play out, if any exist.
      - krageon 2y ago
        Having been part of many such hiring initiatives, it hasn't ever panned out in any of my data. It means that everyone needs to be less of a shithead (because folks are no longer broadly homogenous), which makes everything a lot more bearable. The work is the same, but the people are better to each other. It's not that surprising everything ends up working better a year or two later.
      - throw3638 2y ago
        Well, president mentioned some time ago "pregnancy flight suits" for fighter jet pilots. I have no data how pregnancy and 10G are compatible. Also there are no physiological differences. So I guess you are right!
        Urist-Green 2y ago
        The truth is less exciting. The flight suits are for air crew. The air force has a wide array of craft that need plenty of crew on board that will not go through the stresses of fighter combat.
        throw3638 2y ago
        Or more likely they will never get deployed.
      - myrmidon 2y ago
        > that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job I think this is a strawman. The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first (which is much harder to refute than the straw-man "all DEI hires are incompetent"). You could make an argument for DEI-hiring being possibly helpful against nepotism, though. Personally, I think that DEI efforts (especially quota-driven hiring) just paper over underlying problems while being actively unethical on their own (discriminating against the majority, basically).
        pyrale 2y ago
  - supermatt 2y ago
    Clearly you didn't read the article. The grandmother was in Poland.
    - throw3638 2y ago
      It is called holocaust denial, and crime in many countries including Poland. A#hole!
      - supermatt 2y ago
        What are you on about? The GP said that it explains dentistry in the USSR - Poland wasn't in the USSR.
        eadmund 2y ago
        Well, roughly a third of pre-WWII Poland ended up in the USSR and remains part of Russia today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
        jhbadger 2y ago
        And a fair chunk of pre-WWII Germany ended up in Poland. Poland basically moved westward, losing parts in the east and gaining territory in the west.
        throw3638 2y ago
        [flagged]
        aguaviva 2y ago
        Poland wasn't in the USSR But large chunks of it did become part of the USSR, as the article points out very clearly: Zosia grew up fatherless in Vilnius, which between the wars belonged to Poland and was called Wilno. On 1 September 1939, she was just about to start her first year of medical school when Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union joined in, and quickly took Wilno, along with most of Poland’s east. A month later, the Soviets gave the city to Lithuania, which had coveted it since the end of the previous war. As the sibling comment also points out, though it is mistaken in the implication that these lands were inherited by Russia after the fall of the USSR. In fact they went to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania (first as Republics within the USSR, then as independent countries).
- tombert 2y ago
  Very tangential, but interesting enough story: My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces. After a few months, she "borrowed" the materials required for braces, and installed them on my dad, and removed them about a year later. Apparently it worked out fine, my dad's teeth are alright. Obviously, things going "alright" is more a matter of luck than anything else: there's a reason that people go to dental school, and they were fortunate that there weren't any complications, but I always thought it was amusing that that's how my dad got his teeth straightened.
  - mncharity 2y ago
    > they were fortunate that there weren't any complications I long ago saw a proposal for a country-scale medical training system designed for graceful upgrading. A highly experienced nurse, wishing to become a doctor, just learns the delta, rather than restarting from scratch. Similarly for a community heath worker moving into nursing, etc. And a different proposal, for automated support and oversight of community health workers' hard-to-take-well cervical-cancer screening photos, integrated with ai-filtered city-based expert consults. And then there's patients who become single-disease domain experts. So looking forward, perhaps we could imagine a human-computer-hybrid setup where a grandma training and executing with oversight was gracefully supported? Especially if haptic vr becomes widely available.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Ask an experienced cosmetologist at a salon how many of their clients come in, wearing a hat or scarf, asking them to rescue a home project going awry. And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.
Hnrobert42 2y ago
WARNING: article is only tangential related to teeth. I gave up skimming halfway through. There were a few mentions of the effects of jail and torture on teeth.

63 points by Petiver 2y ago

Rather longwinded personal intro, followed by due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school! YAY! What a horror story.

watt 2y ago
That explains quite a lot about dentistry in USSR
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  It explains your bias and preconceived notions. One could read the story as "people had to do what they had to in order to survive and help their fellow humans". But no, you choose to focus on "Soviet dentistry hurrr" without knowing a thing about it. The article is also guilty. It talks at length about this book with a story of horrible torture that is entirely made up. Essentially that book is a collection of every stereotype and conspiracy mashed into one. The modern-day equivalent would be a book about how QAnon and Pizzagate are real. But no, the author says "the book is a lie, but Russia is bad so it's justified", missing the obvious: the book is trash.
- throw3638 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Moomoomoo309 2y ago
    I've often heard this claim touted - that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job - do you have any statistics showing it? It always sounded to me like an "obvious conclusion" that was never proven, just assumed to be true, but I'm interested to see how the numbers play out, if any exist.
    - krageon 2y ago
      Having been part of many such hiring initiatives, it hasn't ever panned out in any of my data. It means that everyone needs to be less of a shithead (because folks are no longer broadly homogenous), which makes everything a lot more bearable. The work is the same, but the people are better to each other. It's not that surprising everything ends up working better a year or two later.
    - throw3638 2y ago
      Well, president mentioned some time ago "pregnancy flight suits" for fighter jet pilots. I have no data how pregnancy and 10G are compatible. Also there are no physiological differences. So I guess you are right!
      - Urist-Green 2y ago
        The truth is less exciting. The flight suits are for air crew. The air force has a wide array of craft that need plenty of crew on board that will not go through the stresses of fighter combat.
        throw3638 2y ago
        Or more likely they will never get deployed.
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      > that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job I think this is a strawman. The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first (which is much harder to refute than the straw-man "all DEI hires are incompetent"). You could make an argument for DEI-hiring being possibly helpful against nepotism, though. Personally, I think that DEI efforts (especially quota-driven hiring) just paper over underlying problems while being actively unethical on their own (discriminating against the majority, basically).
      - pyrale 2y ago
- supermatt 2y ago
  Clearly you didn't read the article. The grandmother was in Poland.
  - throw3638 2y ago
    It is called holocaust denial, and crime in many countries including Poland. A#hole!
    - supermatt 2y ago
      What are you on about? The GP said that it explains dentistry in the USSR - Poland wasn't in the USSR.
      - eadmund 2y ago
        Well, roughly a third of pre-WWII Poland ended up in the USSR and remains part of Russia today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
        jhbadger 2y ago
        And a fair chunk of pre-WWII Germany ended up in Poland. Poland basically moved westward, losing parts in the east and gaining territory in the west.
      - throw3638 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - aguaviva 2y ago
        Poland wasn't in the USSR But large chunks of it did become part of the USSR, as the article points out very clearly: Zosia grew up fatherless in Vilnius, which between the wars belonged to Poland and was called Wilno. On 1 September 1939, she was just about to start her first year of medical school when Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union joined in, and quickly took Wilno, along with most of Poland’s east. A month later, the Soviets gave the city to Lithuania, which had coveted it since the end of the previous war. As the sibling comment also points out, though it is mistaken in the implication that these lands were inherited by Russia after the fall of the USSR. In fact they went to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania (first as Republics within the USSR, then as independent countries).
tombert 2y ago
Very tangential, but interesting enough story: My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces. After a few months, she "borrowed" the materials required for braces, and installed them on my dad, and removed them about a year later. Apparently it worked out fine, my dad's teeth are alright. Obviously, things going "alright" is more a matter of luck than anything else: there's a reason that people go to dental school, and they were fortunate that there weren't any complications, but I always thought it was amusing that that's how my dad got his teeth straightened.
- mncharity 2y ago
  > they were fortunate that there weren't any complications I long ago saw a proposal for a country-scale medical training system designed for graceful upgrading. A highly experienced nurse, wishing to become a doctor, just learns the delta, rather than restarting from scratch. Similarly for a community heath worker moving into nursing, etc. And a different proposal, for automated support and oversight of community health workers' hard-to-take-well cervical-cancer screening photos, integrated with ai-filtered city-based expert consults. And then there's patients who become single-disease domain experts. So looking forward, perhaps we could imagine a human-computer-hybrid setup where a grandma training and executing with oversight was gracefully supported? Especially if haptic vr becomes widely available.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  Ask an experienced cosmetologist at a salon how many of their clients come in, wearing a hat or scarf, asking them to rescue a home project going awry. And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.

Hnrobert42 2y ago

WARNING: article is only tangential related to teeth. I gave up skimming halfway through. There were a few mentions of the effects of jail and torture on teeth.