Dental Health For Vegans

Maybe this is a good time to read out the Vegan Society's view on this, and this is on our website at vegansociety.com, um, if you go to the medicines page.

So the Vegan Society's definition of veganism recognizes that it's not always possible or practicable to avoid animal use in a non-vegan world.

Sometimes you may have no alternative to medication manufactured using animal products.

Even if other medications are available, they may be less effective, have more side effects, or be unsuitable for your healthcare needs.

While it can be upsetting to compromise our vegan beliefs, we encourage vegans to look after their health and that of others, enabling them to be effective advocates for veganism.

While you were reading that out, I remembered a patient of mine.

He's, uh, um, he's a very well-known vegan advocate here in Melbourne, and he came to me once and he needed a tooth removed, and he had an infection.

And I said to him, "Look, I can remove the tooth, but when you go to put the implant in, you're not gonna have enough bone because infection has resorb- resorb- dissolved some of your bone.

You've got two options.

We either remove it and don't use any animal products, and then we face the issue of grafting the area down the track to regenerate bone, which might involve animal materials, or I put a, um, two millimeter by two millimeter collagen membrane into the socket, and that'll minimize the chance of you having to have additional bone grafting down the track." And he said, he said these words to me, "I do a lot of advocacy.

I guess if you put it to me this way, I understand what you're saying.

I think I might accept that tiny little bit of collagen, and I'll just do extra advocacy [laughs] to compensate for that."

That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach to me.

Okay.