On Dentists

On Sunday, I will turn another year older. This gives me another opportunity to be grateful I am alive during a time that would have been a technological wonder to even a few recent ancestors. Should I receive a birthday card that can play "Happy Birthday" when opened, that card contains more computing power than existed in the entire world when my father was born. I am not too old to pretend not to enjoy my birthday anymore but I am old enough to point out in Debbie Downer fashion that a person is 14% more likely to die on their birthday than on any other day. In that spirit, I find that my birthday has increasingly been marked by two depressing obligations; my annual physical and my semi-annual trip to the dentist. 

Part of becoming an adult is using your birthday as reminders for these mundane tasks. My wife, for example, uses other people's birthdays as an opportunity to cull the ranks of her Facebook friends. If she gets a notification that its your birthday and feels nothing she unfriends them coldly, Marie Kondo style. For me, I've chosen to celebrate another trip around the sun with a check on my physical and toothly health. 

I remember last year that I entered into check-up season in a precarious way—sluggish, lethargic and out of shape following a post-Halloween candy binge that was extreme even to my standards. I recall anticipating a diagnosis of pre-diabetes to go with a couple dozen cavities and telling myself that whatever the verdict from my doctor and dentist that it was time to straighten up, start that diet and begin working out regularly because my metabolism could simply no longer handle the M&M, Swedish Fish, nougat-of-all-kinds cocktail I was brutally subjecting it too. In the span of a week I was told I was healthy as an ox and cavity free. I don't think I need to tell you that I did not start dieting and exercising. The voice of caution that was so persuasive as I was walking into the doctor's office was replaced with a different voice as I was walking out and that one said "You cannot die. All the Swedish Fish are yours to consume for they are the key to your virility." I used this antidote as a reason against reelecting the president all last year. 

I enjoy going to the doctor. Despite what you might have read here, I am an optimist and it is reassuring to find out that I have all my parts in the right places. I am reasonably healthy, my youth, such as it is, continues to underpin my bad dietary habits, and I have all the workings of the average American male. I don’t mean to toot my own horn or anything but I will produce enough sperm in the next two weeks to impregnate every woman on earth. Mostly, however, I relish visiting the doctor because it's an opportunity to come face to face with genuine expertise, a quality that is under increasing attack in our society. 

On average, American doctors interrupt their patients within 14 seconds of their examination. This feels like a damning statistic but I admire their restraint given that too many patients come into their appointments armed with whatever WebMD or Gwyneth Paltrow tells them they have. The doctor-patient relationship is not one in which the customer is always right. The customer is sick, and the doctor is the expert, so maybe it's time for the customer to shut up for a second and stick his tongue out and cough. Public trust in medical experts has eroded further during the pandemic (both by certain doctors' unwillingness to be frank about the risks of large protests during a public health crisis and by the, uh, suspicious handling of information about the president's health during his hospitalization with COVID) but I've been pleased to see Goop-style new age healing has been a little less ascendent in the face of dangerous disease. The democratization of information has led to a mistaken belief that all information is equal and that the act of practicing medicine is the act of scouring the web for a diagnosis or treatment that you like. Surely, doctors make mistakes (if you're looking for an actual damning statistic about medical professionals, consider that 7,000 Americans die each year due to a doctor's poor handwriting) and it can benefit a patient to be their own advocate but championing edge cases where expert opinion has failed isn't a sign that the establishment is wrong as much as a sign that complex problems are difficult even for the most learned professionals who take extraordinary risks by courting the most risky issues in the face of public potshots from those who think they are Doogie Howser after listening to two alternative medicine podcasts. It's fun to think that the fancy schools and the rigorous training can be replicated by a library card and an internet connection—until you need surgery. 

Dentists are experts too, of course, though, I must admit, I don't enjoy visiting them as much. It gives me no pleasure to write this as my dentist is lovely, a good friend and an excellent professional. However, she puts sharp things in my mouth, which is not my favorite. I have sensitive gums, they bleed (which I'm sure is unpleasant for both me and the dentist [and, now, you]). I often tell the story of a traumatic visit to the dentist to get my final child's molar removed. I was in 7th or 8th grade and my memory tells me I required an excruciating amount of novocaine shots for the procedure to proceed. The true number is lost to history but it has increased in my telling of the story every time, I believe it was 17 shots at the moment. I texted my mom to try and unearth the truth but she doesn't even remember the incident which is distressing because its practically all I think about. I particularly remember being driven home in a state of quiet trauma, changed forever, a little of bit of innocence ripped out of me like so much enamel robbed from the back of my mouth. 

Still, we live in a relatively felicitous time tooth-health-wise. Before the dentist chair was invented in 1790, patients would have their heads clenched between the surgeon's knees. Because of the advances in dentistry, I am very likely to keep all of my teeth. I'm getting mine cleaned around my birthday but if I were born 200 or 300 years ago, it is likely that I would have already received new ones, false teeth being a popular 21st-birthday present in the 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, we know that the world's most famous wearer of false teeth—George Washington—didn't have wooden ones but the teeth of hippopotami, cows and, ominously, his slaves (though he paid them for them [though not market rates]). Human teeth were the preferred material for dentures until the invention of the synthetic materials. Battlefields proved good places to find healthy teeth that were done serving their original hosts. False teeth were known as "Waterloo teeth" for years after the 50,000 men who fell at that battle supplied wares for the greedy market. Celluloid was one of the first materials to be used for modern dentures but they melted if you drank hot liquids. Today, most of the world's dentures come from Lichtenstein, the planet's sixth smallest nation, proving that it isn't the size of the bark in the dog but the bite.

Dentists are too often demonized as sadistic torturers or careerist flakes but I refuse to do that. Yes, it makes perfect sense to me that the electric chair was invented by a dentist but I recognize that any animosity I feel is caused by the necessary unpleasantness required in the deep cleaning of human teeth, a process that becomes both more effective and tolerable every year. I certainly wouldn't want to do it. Besides, clean teeth and a white smile are the epitome of presentation being more important than actuality. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde, who once wrote that "health" is the silliest word in our language, who puts it so beautifully in The Importance of Being Earnest:

Jack: My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression.

Algernon: Well, that is exactly what dentists always do.