Do any of you well-prepared trippers carry a dental kit in your first aid supplies?
http://www.landfallnavigation.com/sfa36.html
Jim
Yessiree
a tube of epoxy for repairs and a pair of glasses to help me find my teeth should they be misplaced.
good idea
oil of clove, wax candle, or if you look small kits that provide similar items.
best of all though thorough dental care prior to trips, and a good understanding of what constitutes a dental emergency, i.e. replacing a tooth, nerve exposure, infection and the consequences, etc.
Wilderness Medical Course is great way to learn it!!!
Yup! Right next ta de…
– Last Updated: Jun-18-09 9:47 AM EST –
bone saw an' de hot tar (me specialty be civil war soogery, yer know). Also, a couple o' hunks o' hornbeam an' a knife ta whittle out a nice set a fake choppers.
FE
wax candle?
What’s that for? I mean, besides the obvious.
Thanks to this thread, I’ll be thinking of Tom Hanks in “Castaway” for the rest of the day. Aaack!
Does a Gerber multi-tool and a
bottle of scotch count?
I bring 2 things
temporary cavity filling material (bought at pharmacy), and glue to reattach crowns (got from dentist).
Dental pain is a great way to have a trip ruined.
Good point about crowns.
I will have to ask my dentist.
Jim
I go one step better, and take
my son-in law, the dentist with me.
He has a Carolina, but I am also getting him hooked on canoeing.
Cheers,
jackL
I’ve always like this one
– Last Updated: Jun-18-09 6:32 PM EST –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sstCC7T0Do4
Edit: Sorry..."liked" this one....
Dental kits
I stuck one of these from Adventure Medical in my first aid kit a few years ago:
http://www.rutabaga.com/product.asp?pid=1006398
I just hate the idea of a dental emergency while “way out there.”
It’s a good thing
it has instructions, I couldn’t begin to guess what to do with the tea bag.
A little bit of
cocaine will work faster than the scotch.
excessive prep
I dunno, seems a bit excessive to me for anything short of a month-long 3rd-world excursion, except for maybe the pain relief item if it has a good reputation (never heard of eugenol oil of cloves). After all the stuff I’ve left at home in the name of travelling lightly, it seems a waste of space to begin with. Then the $35 price seems a lot. Finally, doing any sort of dental operation under camp conditions sounds potentiallly dangerous to me, if the alternative is to stabilize the condition with home remedies and rush back to civilization for professional treatment.
Yeah, I know I’ve set myself up for a terribly painful accident on my next trip. 
Oil of clove
Anyone remember “Marathon Man”?
cloves
always bring a few cloves on the trip, strictly as an analgesic…
dental?
Just how long a trip are you planning that you’d have to do your own dental work?
Bill H.
yes! and the trip doesn’t have to be…
– Last Updated: Jun-22-09 1:00 PM EST –
that long... i like the dental medic kit...
some river trips may only be a few days, but with no access to/from roads for that time period...
imagine if on day 1 of a 3 or 4 day trip, you dump and bash your teeth on a rock, losing a crown or filling... or you lose a crown eating dinner... by the time you get out you may have one serious and painful infection... by using a temp. filling or temp. crown, you can close off the hole, possibly releaving pain due to nerve exposure, and prevent the infection...
this way a potentially very bad condition becomes a minor nuisance and the trip is still enjoyable...
edit:
with that said, i carry one because i have a ton of fillings and crowns in my mouth... i have had several fall out over the years already... so, i guess i am slightly prejudical about carrying one... i've had them fall out eating ham sandwiches, of all things!
Yes, I remember Marathon Man
"Is it safe?"
Does anyone remember “Bite the Bullet”? Now there was some emergency dental work. Along with Gene Hackman’s soliloquy, Assaulto!
non-quantified long odds
Yes, but what about all of the other, equally likely potential disasters that you AREN’T prepared for? Preparing for just one long-odds threat usually doesn’t make sense if you can’t take care of enough of them to significantly increase your odds of having no disasters interrupt your trip.
In statistics, it’s called something like the “non-quantified long odds problem”. The example I recall from college is cancer insurance, which used to be (maybe still is) a very big business with most of the customers being poor and uneducated. The insurance companies were selling these elaborate multi-million dollar benefit policies to peple who had no other health insurance. The trick, of course, was that cancer represented only a very small proportion of an average person’s total health care bill, but it was easy to scare people with stories about what might happen to you if you came down with cancer.