✭ The Dentist Will See You Now

Mr Gilmore is one of those patronising dentists who just doesn’t understand that some people like coffee, cigarettes, Coca Cola and all things sweet. He’s the type that flinches at the mention of a strawberry bonbon or fizzy cola bottle. And don’t get him started on orange squash! But credit where credit’s due, he’s a good dentist.

Over the holiday, I visited Mr Gilmore for a regular check up. I’ve always loved the bi-annual family trip to the dentist, because I’m the lucky sibling who has always had good teeth. Unlike my younger sister, I made it through secondary school without having to worry if my braces would get caught in someone else’s. Can that really happen? I’ve been careful with my teeth too, I’m loyal to my electric Philips Sonicare and a keen flosser. Careful, it seems, until I started university.

As Mr Gilmore prodded away at my teeth, I presumed everything was fine, and then he said, “Lower left 7 cavity damage.” As my brace faced sister tutted away in the background, Mr Gilmore made it clear, just in case I hadn’t understood, that my lower left 7 had some decay damage and a filling would be in order.

“Well, do you eat a lot of sweets?” he asked.
Hardly!

“What about sugar in your tea or coffee?”
Not guilty.

“So you’re a university student, that’s right isn’t it Kirsty, what do you drink then?”
I knew exactly what he was hinting at.

“Well, water, juice and when I go out vodka, Diet Coke.”

Well that would explain it, Mr Gilmore told me. All that Diet Coke that I’ve been sipping away at has been rotting my teeth, and it could very well be rotting yours too. If your drink of choice is a spirit with a fizzy mixer or some form of sugar-filled alcopop, then you’re giving your teeth an express ticket to Rottsville. Tooth decay is one of the most widespread health problems in the UK, but it is becoming more and more of a problem amongst university students. I’m by no means putting every LSE student into that bracket, but I’m told that my problem is absolutely typical of university students, particularly first years and especially girls.

A poor diet is the primary cause of tooth decay. Of course fizzy drinks are not the only things contributing to a ‘poor diet’, but they are one of the most significant dietary causes of tooth decay. When your mouth bacterium mixes with small food particles and saliva it forms plaque. The acid in the plaque breaks down the enamel surface of your teeth. Acids and acidic sugar byproducts in fizzy drinks are particularly good at softening your tooth enamel, which leads to the formation of cavities. Although sugar free drinks are less harmful, they are still highly acidic and will cause damage.

All this time, the fluoride in your mouth is trying to fight the plaque, but it takes about an hour to get going. This means that if you’re drinking throughout the night, the fluoride doesn’t really get the chance to start fighting back. When we’ve finished boogieing and come home, we tend to be drunk and, dare I say it, we ‘forget’ to brush out teeth, or brush improperly. This again gives the plaque the upper hand. So if this happens once, twice, three times a week we really are speeding up the decay process.

Trips to the dentist turn out to be a rather expensive hangover. A regular filling will set you back £47, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to be signed up to an NHS dentist. If you’re on a private plan it could end up costing you a lot more than that. A friend recently forked out £358 for root canal treatment. University students can get exemption certificates for some treatments, but most of the time you will find that you’ve got little choice but to pay up!

You may well be thinking that this all makes perfect sense, everybody knows that fizzy, sugary drinks are bad for their teeth. But it’s a bit worrying when you’ve only been at university for 10 weeks and your peggies are already taking the punch.

I’ve been asking myself if this is a somewhat under publicised problem. Mr Gilmore could certainly convince you that teenage tooth decay is practically an epidemic. Shouldn’t students be more aware of this? We are bombarded with information about other health issues, in particular sexual health, but what about dental health? There is little information about the subject online, yet a quick search on ‘student sexual heath’ and you are bombarded with results. Including, by the way, a University Sex League table. LSE ranks 25th.

This is beside the point, but maintaining your pearly whites is surely just as important as taking care of your private parts. I’m sure you will all agree that the idea of kissing someone with black rotting nashers is about as attractive as going down on someone with pussing herpes sores. Slight exaggeration, but it’s true.

As I sit here writing, bottom left half of my face still numb from this morning’s procedure, I’m wondering what can we do to save our choppers from developing cavities? Brushing with fluoride toothpaste and using mouth rinse twice a day, every day, will strengthen your tooth enamel, but we all knew that already. Mr Gilmore would also recommend cutting down on the fizzy mixers, and the alcohol that goes with them. He might suggest switching to a less sugar filled drink, beer or dry whites perhaps. Other than that, things get a bit impractical; I can’t see many people rinsing their mouths’ out with water after every drink to get rid of vestiges.

So, I’m afraid that I can offer nothing more than common sense, but please take this a word of warning. I do hope that you don’t find yourself sat in the dreaded chair with a drill in your mouth any time soon, but if you do, don’t tell me you weren’t warned!

✭ Social Enterprise – A New Business Model?

The financial crisis has stripped the global system of its clothes, exposing its horrible imperfections for the entire world to see. By every indicator the ramifications of the crisis have been bleak, with impacts rippling across the world. Alongside the crises that have unfolded, the persistence of poverty and diverging levels of equality in every country is evidence that something isn’t quite right. In other words, the stubbornness of social problems highlights the deception of capitalism as an all-together good guy.

Yet, I am sure that there is not a single problem, which we face, that human imagination and ingenuity couldn’t solve. Indeed, where the state, private and third sectors fail, a relatively new concept is winning. Enter social entrepreneurship. Social businesses or enterprises are profit-making organisations with a ‘do-good’ rather than ‘do-well’ ethos; they adapt the conventional business model to help solve the social and environmental problems that surround us. The entire existence of a social business is built on charitable objectives; where we delink business with dollar bills, human creativity and problem-solving flourishes.

Looking at it another way, social businesses strike the balance between our individual greedy desires and everyone else’s collective needs. As business people, these change-makers still want to run companies efficiently and sustainably. This unique model takes all profits, but rather than paying dividends, ploughs them back into the organisation to upgrade their products and services. Unlike non-governmental organisations (NGOs), this special breed of entrepreneur is changing the system by spreading the solution through the market. What’s more, often outdoing state initiatives, social businesses are dynamic and not limited by poor innovative capacity and a slow approach to change.

Like all business leaders, social entrepreneurs are often possessed by their ideas, but what makes social entrepreneurs most unique is their ability to take innate human benevolence and use it to sustainably tackle the most pressing problems. With my cheese factor rising, just think about the endless opportunities to make a life, and make other peoples’ lives out of your own passions. As an institution full of bright young things, the LSE could produce some incredible, practical, solutions if only you were to give up on the Goldman Sachs dream.

Social enterprises come in all shapes and sizes, from the individual innovators working hard at the local level to giants with global reach. I’d like to share the stories of two of my favourite, very different, social entrepreneurs. Bart Weetjens is a Zen Priest living in Tanzania, who started a business that trains giant pouched rats to detect explosives, and uncover landmines. More recently, he has taught the rats to sniff out tuberculosis; perhaps surprisingly they work quicker than pathologists. In a funny way, the solution to the problem was there long before the problem itself, it just took the creativity of one man to find it.

By contrast, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammed Yunus, who graced the LSE’s Old Theatre last year, is the genius behind the Grameen Bank and Grameen Foundation. These banks provide microcredit, at the local level, to millions of women in Bangladesh. Since Grameen Banks was started, several offshoot companies have been borne out of its goal to serve the world’s poorest.

What unites these two very different stories is the importance of local people, local cultures and local systems. Where large scale NGOs and multi-national corporations are forever criticised for building solutions in the West and shipping them around the world, social entrepreneurs are often much better at working at the local level.

Many predict the differences between what outsiders see as solutions to problems and what people on the ground think should be done are only going to widen. This applies here in London, the UK, Europe and beyond. And, with more and more people graduating with degrees in technological subjects globally, there is a bigger place than ever for the newly empowered to find innovative solutions to local problems. Technology is liberating individuals to apply their imagination and creativity, taking ownership of all sorts of issues.

While of course technology will play a central role in the rise of social enterprise, we do not always need grand inventions to formulate brilliant solutions. It is the obsessive fascination to problem solve that is really the linchpin. Inventors will always invent, but only a few will revolutionise our lives. Inventions are often at first luxuries, later needs, and finally necessities. What drives social enterprise therefore are those small incremental innovations and random creative solutions that are just as able to take on social and environmental challenges.

For me, the idea of a world where human beings create sustainable, dynamic businesses driven by altruism is uplifting and exciting. So I encourage you to think about the pressing problems around you, and think creatively and innovatively about how to solve them. We are all capable of change, sometimes we just have to let ourselves go!