The Tooth Hurts

Dear Dentists,

Yes, after enduring cut-price emergency dental repair in France, and some extortionate London-based sanctioned torture that would make the Marquis de Sade blush, it’s high time someone pulled the rug out from under your feet. As Cosmo Kramer would say, I’m a rabid anti-dentite, and I’m alright with that.

Your name says it all – “dent” from the French, meaning ‘tooth’ and “ist” meaning ‘one who has no friends’. Trust the French to create an air of sophistication around something that didn’t previously possess it (take fermented fizzy grape juice made with the feet of peasants, get champagne). Before Pierre Fauchard started playing with fillings and instruments, dentistry was done by barbers, along with cutting hair and other simple medical procedures such as the quadruple coronary bypass. I’m fairly sure those cats didn’t need 4-5 years of post-graduate study to learn how to tie string around a tooth and a door handle and slam that bitch into next decade.

What would ever possess someone to enter dentistry? Surely, the same things that lure one to become a parking inspector: sadomasochistic leanings, serious physical insecurities plus a pre-requisite level of intelligence*.

Now you have created a world for yourselves, much to the delight of the rest of us. You have your own schools, gated communities where you are free to flash your veneers at one another in the manner of Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka. You have special equipment reminiscent of that alien abduction “dream” we’ve all had with the bright lights and probing and so forth. Can you not at least put an Escher or Where’s Wally on the ceiling to distract from the squeal of the drill, the face-paralysing pain, the drool, the cackling of the dental nurse and that child in the waiting room who just won’t shut the f*&k up! 

You seek to remove all that is sweet and delicious from the diets of children and adults and you prescribe the most bizarre rituals broadly termed “dental hygene”. Observant patients will notice you shiver a little when you tell them “floss” and they agree. Though you make flossing sound like something Bo Peep does on her day off, this shiver is the nervous current of pleasure travelling down your spine, which sits outside your skin, as you imagine the self flagellation your patient has just agreed to. If you sense gingivitis might be on the cards you may have to leave the room to disguise a more violent shake. Oh and here’s something for nothing - guess what, Oral B? We don’t CARE which brand dentists use. That’s like flogging Vaseline Intensive Care on the basis Ted Bundy used it to keep his hands supple.

Not surprisingly, studies show that dentists have a higher than average suicide rate compared with other professions including anaesthetists, rock stars, emo kids and suicide bombers. And one can understand why really. Many of you wish to escape your trade once the glamour of receding gums and root canal wears off, but the only way out of dentistry, like any gang, is death, as you recognise the only community that will accept you would be the parking inspectors and even a dentist will draw the line there.

I hope this gauntlet knocks out a few of your no doubt perfectly straight pearly whites, I really do, so you may experience the pain and indignity of your own trade. Let’s bring dentistry back to where it belongs – the barbershop, where at least they have decent magazines. We know you’ve got laughing gas too - please stop hogging it.

Kyrani

* Not found in parking inspectors