Metal Mouth Message Board

You know, I don't think using recycled stuff would bother me. (I didnt have recycled parts, though).... I'm a medical assisting student and I just think about all the other stuff that gets "recycled"... scalpels, forceps, hemostats, etc... you don't expect the doc to buy a new one of those for ya... you just sterilize them and use them again. So long as they work the same as they should, it wouldnt make any difference to me.

BUT, then again.... as a medical person, I don't have the aversions to body fluids as much as normal people do... it just doesn't bother me.

If I had gone to an ortho and he'd said, "Ok, here we have our regular sterilized parts, and here we have the 'fresh from the factory parts', and the 'fresh' ones cost $1000 more than the regular ones"... I would have chosen the "recycled" ones.

Isn't everything recycled anyway? The water you drink used to be dinosaur piss.

.vf

My ortho's pffice has a sign posted that says they never use recycled brackets.

I have read all the posts for this topic and I am kinda unsure as to how I really feel...I mean it is good to recycle and reduce waste in a world where that is a major problem .... However it seems kind of gross to think that the braces that are going on my teeth have been on how many others?

I picked my ortho because he was helpful, personable and very reasonable in pricing..when I am getting braced on Wed I will be sure to ask if I am getting new or recycled parts for sure...and then I guess I will really know how I feel!! Thanks for making me aware of this!

Actually asked him today and he does not use them cause he didn;t want to have to answer the many questions and concerns that would come up. Glad that I asked and was made aware of it from this post! Thanks

yuck that's pretty gross. but jay tee, just so you know, you can't pass HIV through spit, it needs t-cells to survive. lol just thought you should know

Being in the medical field, the thought of recycled brackets doesn't gross me out. I used to sterilize surgical stuff and items are cleaned a few times in different solutions to kill all the coodies and then heated up supper hot to cook anything else. It as good way for someone lacking in funds to have their teeth fixed.

I don't think orthodontists should be able to recycle them, much less even keep them...since we are paying for them, shouldn't we get to keep them afterwards?? ...at least then we can properly discard them or donate them to a dental school or whatever....in any case, I REALLY hope mine aren't recycled, mine are ceramics though, so hopefully those are pt much impossible to recycle right?

Well, obviously new brackets would emotionally feel much less icky then recycled brackets...

But, bottom line, if my ortho was only using recycled brackets I would probably just deal with it as another unfortunate thing that comes with the braces package... like needing to use wax, or having a TPA, or having food stuck in my braces.

It seems that there is a lot of stuff that in a non-braces environment would seem just wrong, but since I signed up for the orthodontic gig I have had to deal with it... and I think recycled braces, if it came up, would fall under this catagory.

I think I have recycled braces. I was told to keep my molar brackets incase they fell out. When I knocked out two of my molar brackets I brought them in, and I overheard the ortho telling the assisstants that he couldn't put the same one's back in my mouth, because it takes half hour to clean and take the glue off. So I got "new" molar brackets.

When I first heard about this on a news program some ten years ago I was rather shocked. Now that I am ten years wiser and these things are on -me- now, I suppose I wouldn't really care. They are certainly clean and probably nuked.

Someone else pointed out that EVERYTHING is recycled anyway. This is SO true. The water in whatever you are drinking has likely been through several digestive systems, a radiator, a few toilets, a ship's bilge water laden with diesel and possibly even someone's other bodily secretions including but not limited to sweat. We are all drinking recycled penguin pee. But it's clean now. Mostly.

Now, on that topic, it is likely that we are currently drinking more fresh water than our parents due to global warming. But who's to say just what is in the water that has been frozen for ten plus million years? Maybe there was a nuclear war between people on this planet back then? Alas, I digress. Back to the topic at hand......

As long as the brackets were intact, I could care less. It would be kind of cool to know where they have been, though!

I believe that mine are new, but you never know. My brackets are a fairly new design and there are not likely to be alot of them out in circulation just yet. My opinion: What we do not know, generally, can not hurt us!