介绍:
Lincoln: A new study shows that professional footballers' teeth are not in the best state. A study on players at eight football clubs in the UK showed that nearly four out of 10 footballers surveyed had cavities, compared with an average of three in ten across the entire UK population. Michael, so what exactly is the story there?
Michael: Well, nearly half the players surveyed said they had been bothered by poor tooth and gum health, while 7 per cent said that bad oral hygiene had actually directly adversely affected their training. Now, there's several possible reasons for this. The first one is that they're perhaps drinking too many of these sugary sports drinks. Now, nearly two-thirds of the players surveyed said they consumed these drinks at least three times a week, and, you know, as you can imagine, in a professional sporting environment, you want to get ahead, and recover and replenish your fluids and energy as best you can, and often, these sugary drinks are the best way of doing that. Another possibility is that, for some of these footballers, maybe they've grown up in developing countries where they've had access to, you know, not much in the way of education or dental care as children, and that they’ve been snapped up, maybe, by English clubs from quite a young age, so when they get to England, they maybe still have these long-standing medical problems, or that they simply don’t have an adequate knowledge of how to take care of their teeth. It does seem really strange. You know, you have all these incredibly fit, young athletes, who have access to all the wealth that they could want in the world. How is it that they've got such bad teeth? I mean, no matter how much you have in the world, do you just need somebody to remind you to do this?
Lincoln: That's interesting.
Michael: A player called Ravel Morrison, who was playing for the Premier League club West Ham at the time, he was actually sent home from a pre-season tour to have seven teeth removed. (WY: Wow!) Now, club officials were initially preparing to fine him for having missed a training session. He didn't want to have to miss it, but it got to the point where he was in such great pain that he couldn't train any more.
WY: When you're talking about the pain, I mean, the tooth pain is much more serious than the usual one, because we always know that for the sports athletes, even though they have got some wounds during the daily training or exercises, it is not that serious, and you can be cured within two days. But if you've got a tooth pain, that is quite serious, and sometimes you cannot really stand it for even one minute. That's really like "an ant can kill an elephant".
Lincoln: That's very true, and I know some professional sportsmen as well, and a lot is always made about making sure they become full human beings holistically, so they don't just look at your performance on the pitch. They look at your financial wealth, or they look at your physical health and things like that, so that you make good long-term decisions. They try and make sure that you are, overall, a more fully-developed person, and one of these things that I would think they have to start looking at now is actually making sure that people take care of their teeth.
WY: Do you think that when they are recruiting players, do you think they need to do those kinds of teeth checks before they enroll them?
Michael: Well, that's an interesting point, because, you know, obviously, there's so much at stake, there's a lot of money changing hands these days, you know, whenever professional sportsmen, footballers join big clubs in the Premier League, and clubs like that. They often go through a very thorough medical, making sure there's nothing wrong with their joints or muscles or bones or anything like that, but I wonder, maybe, if oral hygiene has up to now been neglected somewhat.
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