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The ignorance of hating a dentist
17th May 2010
Last August, The Times ran an article with some interesting statistics on the state of our nation's teeth:
• ‘Children have had nearly one million teeth pulled out in a year as sugary diets and poor dental care took their toll'
• ‘The number of extractions carried out on under 18s has risen 12% in five years' (NHS Information Centre)
• ‘There were two million extractions carried out on adults in 2008-09, a rise of 220,000 on 2003-04.
My mother-in-law had all her teeth out when her youngest son was born in 1956. She was 34 years old. This, she insists almost proudly, was her choice because dentistry was ‘free' when you had a baby and it would save time and money later on.
Losing all your teeth, and having dentures, was apparently a foregone conclusion, at least to her. My mother-in-law was never sorry about her decision and always regarded teeth as a time-consuming and potentially expensive nuisance.
This was a woman who preferred mince to steak because she ‘couldn't stand all the chewing'!
Fifty years later, I am not sure much has changed for some people. I work for social services and am daily in the company of people, some half my age, whose mouths are full of visibly rotted teeth and usually with most missing.
A 40-year-old woman, I know quite well, had a full set of dentures fitted recently as all her teeth had become so loose she was unable to eat properly.
Even the young, who appear to otherwise take some pride in their appearance, with makeup, coloured hair and supposedly fashionable clothes, find no shame in revealing decayed or missing teeth.
I have seen a teenage mother empty the milk out of her baby's bottle and fill it with
cola. Parents give their children constant supplies of sweets and sugary drinks, in front of so-called professionals like myself, and seem to expect, and accept, that their children will have fillings, if they bother to take them to the dentist at all.
Parents do not hesitate to tell their children that they hate the dentist and will never go. A 24-year-old man, with wisdom tooth pain, told me he would rather pull his own tooth out with a wrench than go to a dentist, and this, he said, with amusement in front of his two small children.
I think that this ignorance, or manifestation of an underclass culture that clearly exists in this country, is a sad indictment on our society.
National Smile Month begins this week and with 'Teeth4Life' as the tagline for this year's campaign, let's hope the message reaches those most in need…
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