why can’t our teeth heal or fix itself unlike most bones in our body?

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If it’s truly the strongest why can’t it have self healing properties ?

In: Biology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Most of the body — including the rest of our skeleton — is safely sheltered behind other systems that do a pretty good job of keeping out potential pathogens that could hurt them. The surfaces that are constantly exposed to potentially harmful bacteria, like the skin and the digestive lining, are constantly renewing themselves. So, unlike teeth, they’re already safer to begin with. If you have cavities, it is because the bacterial infection has been sitting on the tooth for a pretty long time in cellular terms — much longer than you’d ever expect an internal infection to be safely in contact with bone.

In addition, the bones in your body aren’t actually solid “bone” material. They are living parts of your body that have an extensive network of blood vessels running through and around them. This supplies the material necessary for bones to heal themselves — slowly — over time. In contrast, that outer enamel surface on your tooth is just formed once and is there for life (or not, as the case may be). It’s not living tissue, and there’s no blood supply to fix it. This isn’t a matter of “how strong it is.” It’s a matter of being just different.

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