The Greatest Terror of All What is one of the greatest terrors which face humanity? Some say it is the fear someone will set off a nuke. Yes, it is a worry, but I don’t think it is the scariest. Others say it is the fear an asteroid will strike the earth wiping out millions of human lives. Yeah that would not be nice, but again it is not the one thing which scares most of us. Then there is the threat of some type of disease which will become an epidemic and kill millions of us. No that is not it. The scariest thing for many of us is going to the dentist. The fear is so bad it is believed up to fifteen percent of Americans avoid going to the dentist all together. We are talking about forty million people. These are just the ones who won’t go and this does not count those who do go but are scared out of their gourd. One of the most common fears is dental anxiety and phobia. It has been defined as an intense, unreasonable fear. Let me start by saying it is probably not unreasonable at all. Those of us who have had bad experiences with a dental procedure know this even if we still continue to go to the dentist. My bad dental experiences began when I was about eight or nine years old. In those days the dentist had a much slower drill which didn’t cool your teeth with water while drilling. There was a dentist about a block away and my mother told me to go there because I had a tooth ache. She was not able to go with me at the time and I remember walking into the dental office and being the only patient there. The dentist came out, said hello and walked me to the dental chair. I felt like a condemned man looking at the electric chair where he was going to be strapped into. I got into the chair slowly and the dentist began to drill. He told me he didn’t believe in anesthesia and this scared the heck out of me. As he drilled the pain was intense for a young boy. Finally, he said I have something to show you and proceeded to hold up this thin wormlike thing and said, “This is the nerve from your tooth which was hurting you.” This maniac had pulled a nerve out of my tooth without sedation. When I was finished I ran home and told my mother what happened and she was very upset and apologized for sending me there and said she would never send me there again. This was not the only bad dental experience I had. The next bad experience actually happened to me only a few years ago. I have been going to my dentist for about twenty years and he is a good dentist, but even good dentists can have a problem. I had a bad tooth and it was supposed to be a simple extraction. The tooth was below the gum line and the dentist numbed me up and proceeded to pull the tooth but couldn’t seem to get a good grip on it. He tried and tried and time ticked away until the Novocaine started to wear off. It seemed like this extraction was going on forever and finally he got it out. He apologized to me and said during his entire career as a dentist which was forty plus years he never had an extraction which was this much trouble. You would think I would never want to see a dentist again and if you thought this you would be right, but I realize we need to go to the dentist when necessary so I do. I am not the only one who has had bad things happen to them at the dentist. There was a person who went to the dentist for routine dental work. The dentist helped them into the chair and told the patient he would have to do some drilling. He gave the patient Novocain and then proceeded to drill through the patient’s cheek. It seems the dentist had gone insane. Having an insane dentist is truly a scary thing. When I was in the US Army and in basic training I had made up my mind never to go to the army dentists. I had seen others go there and at that time if they had a tooth problem is was common for the army dentists to pull all their teeth at once. There was no scarier sight than seeing a soldier with a mouth full of teeth go to the dentist and come back without a tooth in his head. These poor guys would come back traumatized. They looked like something from an episode of the Walking Dead. When it comes to dental negligence one dentist who has evaluated dental negligence states the five greatest causes are negligence in extractions, followed by endodontic procedures, dental implants, substandard crown and bridge treatment and periodontal disease. This means when you get bad dental work these are the most likely areas for it to happen in. Sometimes something can go wrong not because you have a bad dentist, but because of an accident during a procedure. Many people are very worried about sneezing during a dental procedure, while in fact it is very rare and if you feel a sneeze coming one just tap the dentist on the arm. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, to stay in good health and one of those things is good dental health. It is also important to select a dentist you trust and if he or she does something you don’t think was correct, it is also important to find another dentist. I remember one dentist who used to be quite good and then one day began to tell his patients he would charge them by the number of roots a tooth had when he extracted it. It turned out he had a gambling problem and was trying to raise money for it. I also suspect he might have been pulling good teeth to get that money. |
