Dental fear…

Sounds like a bad horror film doesn’t it? But it’s not; it actually refers to the official terminology of odontophobia, the fear of dentists or dentistry. Like most sane-minded people I have a pathological aversion to dentists and their subject matter. For starters dentist waiting rooms always have the smell of death about them; it’s that disinfectant odour that somehow gets ingrained into the very fabric of the seats, even into the magazines no matter how new they are. Secondly, having had my front two teeth broken on my 22nd birthday in a drunken stumble, I know find myself hating anyone who wants to mess about with my incisors. Of course this causes even more problems when the composite breaks and you have to go back and back and then back again to get them fixed. It’s like some sort of horrendous eternal revolving nightmare with some guy wearing Professor Doom like mini-binoculars. I think a large part of my fear or dislike comes from having watched Little Shop of Horrors at an early age, instead of getting a pathological fear of talking space plants, I ended up with an aversion to Steve Martin films (thou they may have something to do with the films themselves) and became terrified of dentistry.

So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, my big gripe comes down to the astronomical prices that they charge and the complete ass-backwards method that NHS uses. Now if you’re lucky enough to have a registered NHS dentists then technically your treatment is free, it’s not always the best or the most cosmetic, but at least it’s free. However, the government has cottoned onto a genius plan. It’s simple, effective and revolves around the public’s dislike of forms. The whole idea is that you pay for your treatment and then you claim it back. Quite simply what is the point… Why not just make it free and pay dentists out of the NHS budget, why all this malarkey of paying and then claiming it back? Personally I’m confused, but not actually that interested in their rationale, perhaps someone will enlighten me at a later date.

My final fear is this; never trust anyone who carries around a similar toolkit to an Iraqi torturer. I’m sure there are quicker and better ways to torture someone and retrieve intelligence, but nothing as horrifically graphical as watching someone have a tooth extracted without anaesthetic. I think if I saw that I would tell the nasty man with the tweezers and that little scraper pick thing anything they wanted to know no matter whether it was true or not. Screw water torture, try dentistry…