Ancient Greek scholars Hippocrates and Aristotle wrote about dentistry, including treating decayed teeth (kill the worm first, I suppose) and gum disease, extracting teeth with forceps, and using wires to stabilize loose teeth and fractured jaws. And that is before we invented anesthesia! Of course we have good reasons to be afraid of dentists, who all go through the Marquis de Sade Dental Training School. Have you ever looked at the length of the needles they use? I swear it comes out through the top of my head when it goes in with that sickening ‘crunch’ and when they are extracting the nerve from a tooth they detach it from the underside of your brain and pull. Except that it is still attached and bits of your brain come out through the tooth canal, joined to a long white stringy thing, which they jovially tell you was once a nerve. Last time I left my fingerprints on the arms of the dental chair.
I was idly picking my teeth the other evening. As I didn’t have any floss at hand (despite having, somewhere in the house, those natty little business card dispensers that Stuart Saunders produces) and I was attacking the spaces with a bent pin. Now bent pins are great for removing scale, using the head of the pin to scrape the tooth barnacles off. You know that extremely gritty stuff that adheres to the teeth, which when you remove it reveals several cubic centimeters of incredibly smelly material. Oh, let’s not go there either! It’s better to let the real dentists have the fun!
However, I notice that we currently have some dental specials on offer and will give you a dental examination and a couple of special X Rays to check for dental caries hidden between the teeth (probably looking for the worm) and full mouth scaling for a little over 1,000 THB. Beats bent pins!
