Seems like the medical industry would be quite happy for us to revert back to the days when George Washington had wooden teeth and Michael Bakunin didn’t have any. He probably ended up having some kind of teeth — I don’t know what kind — after he lost them from scurvy in the infamous Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg, as he went on to marry a young woman when exiled to Siberia and enjoy a long career as an anarchist after his return to Europe. Hardly anyone’s health insurance policy covers dental, so when you go into the dentist’s office for a simple filling: $300. Need a root canal, which probably won’t work anyway and you’ll end up losing the tooth: $1,500. A tooth implant or bridge? I don’t even know because you lost me back at the $1,500 for the root canal. I just have them pulled and leave a space. So far, those spaces have been at the back of my mouth, but I’m sure the day will come when it’s one of my front teeth and I will be consigned to being either a toothless old hag or bankrupt.
When Mark had an appointment with his urologist, who, by the way, is a very nice man and a very competent doctor, I started wondering why anyone would want to be a urologist. Or a proctologist. Or even a gynecologist who gets to deliver babies as a bonus. But I know why someone wants to be a dentist: money! I recently had fillings put across the top of my three bottom teeth, worn down by wear and tear. No Novocain was administered, I was in the dental chair for half an hour tops, and bingo, I owned $575. A few customers like that every day, even with the office overhead, and you’re taking home a big bundle.
I suppose some of this dentist vitriol also comes from the fact that they hurt you — almost all the time. During one of those great root canal experiences where I ended up losing the tooth anyway, the dentist injected Novocain into a nerve that went all the way up into my cheek and had the entire side of my face tingling for months. Or they’re drilling away and suddenly hit a nerve that wasn’t deadened by the Novocain and you’re Dustin Hoffman being tortured by Lawrence Olivier. And every time they put those rubber blockers into my mouth to isolate teeth for x-rays my gag reflex makes me spit the thing out of my mouth and then they make me do it all over again.
Why isn’t dental care covered by insurance? Do they figure the rich people are just going to pay for it no matter how much it costs out of vanity, and the poor people will, after enormous pain and suffering, go to Juarez for a set of false teeth they can afford? In a time when the advertising industry has everyone convinced that the path to success requires a set of big teeth — remember those big white smiles of Hilary Clinton and Barach Obama plastered across our TV screens for months — we’ve come up with an entire category of haves and have-nots: the ones who can afford to buy the veneers and the rest of us with the crooked, slightly yellow teeth of character. Before advertising I never particularly noticed teeth. Now I see that all my friends are in the same character category as me, and it’s comforting, really. Except that none of us want to be hags.
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