Tuesday, July 27, 2004

And Now, a Brief Interlude

Before I get back to the convention reporting, I must explain why my distaste for dentists has been reinforced yet again today.  The root of my dentist issues lies partially in the fact that I find the state of dentistry and dental hygiene to be absolutely barbaric.  Have you ever just looked at the implements your dentist and hygenist uses?  Metal hooks and string (yeah, it sounds better calling it floss, but it's still string).  How many millennia of human evolution and the best we can come up with are pieces of string and metal hooks?  For goodness sakes, we stopped drilling holes in people's heads to release the evil spirits.  Can't we progress beyond Paleolithic dentistry?  And while we're on the subject of cleanings, I'm still waiting for some proponent of Intelligent Design theory of human origins to please explain to me what sort of intelligence designs so many hard-to-reach crannies in the most bacteria- and dirt-laden part of the human anatomy.  I've also never had a hygenist explain how they got into the wonderful field of scraping other people's plaque, but that is another story.

I brush, floss and Waterpik with diluted Listerine daily, so my dental issues cannot be the product of bad in-home oral hygeine.  Still, my dental hygenist will not be happy until one hand is doing nothing but flossing 24 hours a day.  Again, that is not the problem.  I have the kind of teeth that dentists look at and have a "Eureka!" moment, having solved the problem of how to send their kids through graduate school.  Today at the dentist, I found out two very disturbing things.  First, my dentist wants me to have my wisdom teeth removed and to get braces, in spite of the fact that neither my wisdom teeth nor my crooked tooth give me any problem and that I have agreed to the work if any health problems arise.  Second and more distressing, though, I found out that I have 8 composite enamel fillings.  I 'd lost count of the exact number of fillings I have (every dentist I've ever been to has found at least one tooth to drill and fill).  Nonetheless, I am positive that at one point at least two of them were silver.  The hygenist says that the silver fillings must have been in baby teeth, which I am sure is not the case.  My parents seem to think it slipped their minds to tell me my fillings had been replaced.  However it happened, I find it very upsetting that someone did something in my mouth without telling me.  Shouldn't one be aware of what is going on in one's own bodily orifices?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To answer to your final question, NO! After giving birth to your niece, I feel there is a definate reason your eyes are on your head and any orifice you can not see is best left to the experts! However I would wonder too if they came up with a material that metamorphes in the mouth!

Anonymous said...

Brandi is thinking about becoming a dental hygentist. I'll have to ask her the reasoning behind it!