Winning Smile: The latest in dentistry and orthodontics
In this month’s Health Matters, VERNE MAREE turns her contemplation to teeth – dreams about losing them, dental visit phobia, and how to keep your pearly whites for as long as you possibly can.
In the 1976 suspense-thriller Marathon Man, Laurence Olivier plays Szell, an evil Nazi dentist who tortures Dustin Hoffman’s character by using a dental probe on a cavity. That scene gave me bad dreams for years.
In some of my worst nightmares, my teeth actually crack and fall apart. According to Freud, this indicates anxiety about sexual repression, or that you’re going through a period of transition. Dreams about broken teeth are also said to reflect guilt over breaking a promise, concerns with trust or reliability, fear of loss, and so on. Someone who dreams about their teeth crumbling may fear that they’re ageing, that things are literally falling apart; no surprises there!
Cracking Up
I’m going to go out on a limb here and ask the question: could a dream about one’s teeth breaking not simply be due to a fear of one’s teeth breaking? It’s not so unusual an event, after all – especially if you’ve got a mouth full of porcelain crowns. Take my husband. Just last month, innocently munching his Tesco breakfast granola, he crunched down on and shattered a lateral incisor crown that had come loose. What were we to do, stuck in the middle of the English countryside, far, far away from civilisation as we knew it?
In the end, we sent a carrier pigeon to a wonderful orthodontist friend in South Africa who recommended a marvellous ex-colleague of his who happened to have a practice less than 10 kilometres from where we were staying. No, Dr X could not see Roy immediately, even as a private patient. (His receptionist seemed aghast at the very thought.) So, after we’d managed to beat her down from three weeks to just one, poor Roy had to walk around for seven days looking like a pirate until he could be fitted with a temporary crown – the first stage in replacing a broken one.
He wasn’t a happy chappie, as those who know my husband can imagine. That would never have happened in Singapore. I fear that Singapore’s incredible service standards – where we’re more likely than not to get an appointment to see our dentist, doctor, hairdresser, plumber or whatever on the same day we call, especially for an emergency – have forever spoilt us for the rest of the world. But I digress.
Two days after receiving the temporary crown, we woke up one morning to see that it had turned the most fearful fluorescent yellow – apparently due to the high turmeric count in last night’s feast at the local curry house. It can’t be the first time that that’s happened; curry has become Britain’s national dish. The virulent yellow gradually faded, just in time for the fitting of the permanent crown.
Dental Phobias?
In medieval times, the closest thing you’d find to dentists were “tooth- drawers”, the word itself pretty good evidence that they weren’t primarily focused on saving your teeth – unless it was on a string tied around their own necks, like the one in this 14th-century illustration. It’s therefore unsurprising if our medieval ancestors were less than keen on their six-monthly check-ups. A phobia being by definition an unreasonable or unfounded fear, it’s pretty clear that dental phobia did not exist back then.
Another Dentist Story
Everyone has a dentist story. My sister’s story – many years ago, now – was getting free dental treatment from the NHS by claiming to be a chronically “nervous patient”. (She may well have been, but that was the first I’d heard of it.) This is an actual established category of patient, and the NHS still gives special treatment to these cowardy custards. There’s even a Dental Fear Central app that the pusillanimous can get from dentalfearcentral.org.
On that same site, you’ll see a list of accepted dentistry-related phobias. And in case you were wondering the same thing I was wondering, the answer is yes. Near the bottom of the list is the single-word entry: “Cost”.