Dark Ages dentistry

Monday, July 9th, 2007

There’s something about going to the dentist that has always scared me. Maybe it’s the smell of anaesthetics and disinfectants, or the fact that a masked oral terrorist tells me to open wide, then starts poking around inside me muttering strings of letters and numbers that sound to me like a1b…. h2i upper… while they map my gob.

I used to go to see a dentist regularly, every six months like clockwork, despite my fear and mistrust. Then the government, always progressive, started making it harder and harder to get NHS dental treatment. It made the payback for dentists so piss-poor that the majority stopped handling NHS patients and went exclusively private, and private dental work is prohibitively expensive for many. It wasn’t all the government’s fault; many dentists get their training through the NHS only to go private as soon as they can. They effectively get their training through partial subsidy (they still have to fund a lot of it themselves, and as students have the same loans and fees to deal with) and then don’t feel inclined to give anything back to the nation.

There are, of course, honourable exceptions but there aren’t enough. These days people can form massive queues outside a dental surgery when it announces it is taking on new NHS patients. They travel for miles just for the chance to get on a dentist’s books. When I called the NHS Direct helpline last year, I was told my nearest NHS dentist at the time was in Sheffield. To give readers a sense of the scandalous situation, Sheffield is about an hour-and-a-half drive away from where I live and about the same by train, with several changes along the way.

Only last week, my beloved and I discovered a dentist in a nearby town that was taking on NHS patients and we signed up. We’ve lived in our current location for two years and it’s been three years since I last saw a dentist, a little longer for my partner. Unless you can afford to go private, you don’t try to seek out a dentist these days in England until you are in pain and this often means you’re in extreme pain for some time. Often people have to go to A&E departments before they can get temporarily patched up, only to later receive a bill and get told they still need to travel miles to find a dentist.

So I guess you could say we’ve had a bit of luck, finding one not too far away, although we don’t feel lucky because we know the system stinks and is in dire need of government intervention. Yet politicians are pressed on Iraq, interest rates, who they’re having affairs with, where they like to go on holiday… The conspiracy of silence where dental care is concerned is partly down to the media failing to focus on the issue and a publicity-sensitive government which simply doesn’t care to address anything that the media doesn’t bring to its attention.

The last time I went to a dentist was in London, where I nearly walked out after having instructed the man doing the work that I was under no circumstances to be given a root canal. In my view root canals are disastrous for everyone I know who has ever had one. I did some background reading of admittedly tagged ‘alternative’ health care books (let’s face it, my whole life is alternative) and found that there is at least some evidence to suggest root canals lock bacteria into the gum where antibiotics cannot effectively reach. So the bacteria stay put, and grow, and travel. Root canal infections that go unnoticed are claimed to lead to everything from lower resistance to colds through to cancer. The body is left in a state of constant warfare, fighting battles it cannot win and, over time, tiring.

Those people I know with root canals go on to have more, and more; they need the root canals they already have worked on time and time again. On balance it is better, in my view, and it is my mouth, to have a tooth removed altogether and let the hole heal rather than have a root canal. Dentists will, however, admit their priority is to save teeth whatever it takes. I don’t think propping up a tooth that’s past its prime is any different to redecorating a house that really needs all the plaster and floorboards ripping out and redoing.

So I’d explained my view to the dentist, he seemed to accept it but thought me very strange in not allowing him carte blanche where my mouth was concerned. I made an appointment for the tooth removal and when I turned up, he started work and referenced the root canal he was about to perform. I had to be very firm and threaten to walk out before he acquiesced and did what I wanted rather than what he thought was right for me.

I’ve never regretted forcing my decision on the man, especially as the tooth in question also contained a shard of needle that the dentist had previously broken off and couldn’t remove. He’d told me not to worry, that it wouldn’t cause any harm. Yeah, right. That’s why we all evolved with pins in our teeth, isn’t it? If I’d had the money and will at the time, I’d have sued his ass for malpractice. Oh, and as if all this wasn’t enough, I had an extreme adrenalin reaction to the anaesthetic used and very nearly died, my heart banging for hours like I was about to give birth to Ripley’s child from Alien.

It wasn’t the best experience for helping a person overcome a fear of dentists and their work.

The British, I was long ago told, have a reputation in the US for having bad teeth. Were this true, the only reason could be the quality of dental service provision and the lack of emphasis on the importance of oral hygiene and maintenance by successive governments. I know that while my partner and I floss regularly, most people in this country don’t. That’s a problem in itself, while aggressive flossing or brushing incorrectly can themselves lead to problems. And now, following the US fashion lead, we have people rushing to dentists and beauty parlours to get professionals to pour bleach into their gobs to get that totally unnatural and enamel-eroding white smile.

I’m sure some idiots will be trying to get the effect with a bottle of Domestos and a paintbrush…

If it is true that Americans, who eat on average more sugary or highly processed crap in a day than most Brits can handle in six months, can have a better overall rating on oral health than the British, then it’s a situation that came about through negligence and bad planning by our New Labour overlords. Moreover, the rest of the EU has a better record when it comes to teeth.

Across the EU mercury has been banned from use in fillings, white amalgam being the advocated material. Time and again, the evidence shows that mercury, a highly toxic metal, leads to all manner of illnesses and disorders while a toxic cloud of mercury vapour is present all the time in any mouth that has even one mercury filling. Most Brits have at least three fillings. My own mysterious balance disorder is said, by some, to potentially have its source or at least aggravated symptoms in mercury fillings being present in my head. I’ve had some, not all, removed, because you can only do so privately. The NHS will not fund white amalgam fillings. You have mercury or nothing.

If you’re rich enough to afford it an industry of ‘ethical dentists’ has sprung up, professionals who will literally rework your mouth, undoing the Dark Ages barbarism of what has been done to your mouth in years gone by. They combine the physical work with dietary advice and medicines, often herbal, to leach the mercury from your body as it accumulates everywhere. I’d love to be able to afford to go sign up with one, though they’re even harder to locate than NHS dentists. The results, by all accounts, can be amazing—people with all kinds of conditions find them going away, or at least the symptoms lose some of their bite. I spend my life in part wondering if there’s some way I can rid myself of my balance disability and get back to a 100 per cent normal life, whatever normal is. So I’d try anything. Only a lack of money stops me.

We’re both going to see this new dentist today. The signs are good that we at least have found good people, in so far as they are willing to take on NHS patients despite the government making it not at all lucrative to do so. The thing is, though, by not going to see a dentist regularly, whether by wilful negligence or, in our case, a lack of money to pay for private treatment, you just know that when you do finally find yourself sitting in a dentist’s chair, the dentist is going to find much work that needs doing.

If prevention is better than cure, as it surely is, it’s time our government addressed the situation and backed up our right to free NHS dental work with the means to actually get it done without trying for years to find a dentist, or having to travel hundreds of miles. The politicians are duplicitous; they say we can all get NHS dental work done if we can’t afford to go private. Sure. We could all fly, we’re all free to fly. If only we had wings…

categories: healthy planet