If you enjoy going to the dentist, you don’t need to read this. On the other hand, if you look upon appointments with the dentist as akin to dates with the devil, then I want your support.
My dentist is a nice guy, and I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing. I mean, since I opted not to go to dental school, I generally have no idea what he’s talking about and trust him implicitly–sort of like I trust my mechanic when I’m told that my car’s differential needs to be recalibrated.
For the life of me, I don’t know why anyone would want to spend his life poking around in people’s mouths and usually causing them mild discomfort on a good day and agony on a bad one. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was possessed by a calling he was unable to resist.
My beef isn’t with my dentist, anyway; he’s merely a cog in the overall insult we live with that is called dentistry.
Some perspective: I’m writing this on a computer. The letters and symbols appear almost instantaneously with my little taps and clicks of buttons and keys. With a couple of more taps, I can Email this article to a friend on the other side of the world, or I can print it out and fax it to selected graduate schools. I can go on line and import text, photos, music, and videos. I can play simulated games on my television that sometimes seem more real than reality itself.
In the past 100 years, we’ve invented the telephone and the airplane and the automobile and the radio and the Internet. In the past 50 years, we’ve communicated with astronauts on the moon and cured polio and built nuclear power plants and developed a machine that can see through your clothes at airports.
So why is it that my dentist is currently using tools that were developed around the time of the mastodon?
He’s wielding a drill! He’s using curved, pointy blades to scrape things from around my gums! He’s sticking a needle in me to numb my mouth so he can use even more primitive weapons! What is wrong with this picture? You mean to tell me that after a thousand years, we can’t come up with some liquid I could gargle with and remove plaque? some pill I could swallow that would prevent tooth decay?
Do you know what dentists use to remove teeth? Pliers! Pliers! Og probably used a form of pliers when his mate, Yog, had a problem with a tooth. Aren’t dentists plain embarrassed at the lack of progress their profession has made over the past several millennia?
I don’t want to hear, oh, but we can do amazing things with tooth implants and gum disease and bridges and partials. I’m talking about the common dental visit, where you might get a cleaning, might get a cavity filled, might even get a tooth pulled. Is it really asking so much to mute the drill? to figure out a way to apply anesthetic without a needle that’s too heavy for the hygienist to lift by herself? When my dentist unfolds the packet that contains all the picks and pokers and other instruments he’s going to use on me, the only thing missing is a curly moustache, a gleeful rubbing together of the hands, and a maniacal “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!”
I want to start a revolution. I want us to demand more from dentists, from dental schools, and from whoever makes stuff that dentists use, whether it’s the torture picks or the water tubes they hang from your mouth or the drill that sounds as if it’s going to bore through metal or the needles that substitute one pain for another. I want us to bring dentistry into the 21st century, or at least the 18th; we can start small.
Aborigines in the Amazon rain forest or the deserts of Australia or the tiny villages of northern Alaska or the jungles of Africa have progressed more than dentistry has. Shame, I say. Shame on the part of our civilization that is wallowing in the far distant past. It’s time for action.
And until then, may you never have a toothache.