About

This is a small personal site about teeth and sport, written by one person with no professional qualification in either field. I am Ivo Brandsma. I taught kitesurfing and wakeboarding for twelve seasons, mostly in the Netherlands with a few winters teaching snowboard, and these days I ride at weekends like everybody else.

I started reading about all this after a handle came back at me on a flat Tuesday evening in 2019 and chipped a front tooth. The chip itself was nothing. The nerve died about eighteen months later and I ended up with root canal treatment, a crown, and a pile of questions I could not find plain answers to. Most of what is written about sports dentistry is either a clinical paper or an advert. I wanted the version in between: what actually happens, what actually helps, and what the real trade-offs are.

Let me be as clear as I can about what this site is not. I am not a dentist, a doctor, a dental nurse, or any kind of medical professional. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a treatment plan, and nothing here replaces seeing a real dentist who can look in your actual mouth. If something hurts, bleeds, has changed shape or has been knocked loose, go and get it looked at by someone qualified. I have written down what I know from experience and from reading, and I have tried to be honest about the edges of that, including the parts where I am unsure and the parts where the evidence is thinner than people pretend.

There is nothing for sale here. No products, no affiliate arrangements, no business behind it. It is a set of notes I would have found useful ten years ago, published in case somebody else finds them useful now.