On dentists and professionalism

This is another extract from forthcoming (years away) autobiography.

This is a post in my Ethics, Lazy Management, and Flawed Thinking series - see https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/11/ethics-lazy-management-and-flawed.html.

***

While I was living in Queensland, in my mid-20s, I started having problems with my wisdom teeth. Decades later I was to discover that this was a family problem - or at least one shared with my birth sister, but at the time, all I knew was: it hurt: it ached, and wouldn’t go away.

I was moving around with work (and Uni - I think the problem started when I was at Uni still) a little, so what would happen is I’d see a dentist, they’d say my wisdom teeth were impacted and infected and had to come out (the X-rays showed the teeth growing out sort of wideways, and eroding the back of the teeth in front of them), give me a script for antibiotics, and tell me to make a booking after I’d taken the script. However, in the meantime, I would get moved somewhere else, so I’d naively wander into the nearest dentist and say “hey, my wisdom teeth need to come out.” Dentist would say “I’ll be the judge of that”, repeat the test the previous dentist had done, and say “well, yes, they need to come out, but we’ll wait for the moment”. 

Did they have their knickers in a twist over a patient being right? Or maybe they didn’t like admitting any other dentist could be correct?

Professional responsibility is one thing; behaving like a slighted adolescent is another. This was an early and literally painful illustration for me of the stupidity, incompetence, and unprofessionalism of people who are arrogant about being what they (wrongly) consider to be professional.

After that, the teeth would become infected, the idiot dentist would give me a script, and I’d get moved and the cycle would repeat.

It took two years before I could get my wisdom teeth extracted - and that was largely because my (adoptive) father told his dentist of the sorry saga, and that dentist was sensible enough to listen and believe, instead of considering everyone who didn’t have a degree in dentistry to be either a moron or a liar.

Each of my wisdom teeth had to be broken into four pieces for the extraction; I had the teeth on one side done, then, a couple of weeks later, the teeth on the other. The dentist told me to try not to work at the stitches but I would, and they were all out before I got off the train back 😊

The manner of that final dentist was reasonable, and I had one friend at Uni who was studying dentistry - I knew there was a change in attitude coming through.

Later, I came across people who had been left with a lifelong fear of dentists by the childhood experience of a rough impatience of a dentist - and, in a couple of cases, what was frankly abusive at the hands of alcoholic dentists; the change in attitude was long overdue.

The ending of arrogance is something that other medical staff - and other “professionals” - need to learn, and I’ll come back to that later. At that pre-personal computer and way before the internet time, it would have helped me if there was a way to transfer information from one dentist to another.

I also had similar problems with doctors as I moved around, but learned I could ask for my records. Where that fell down was with a particular doctor who refused to provide his records when I asked the clinic for my records. At that time, I lost all my childhood medical records. Up until that moment, I had thought the doctor was a decent person - interested in meditation and alternatives (he ran a meditation group for cancer patients in the 80s), but he turned to be just as arrogant a bastard as the others (and was utterly inflexible about transition, to the point of being both transphobic and hypocritical, as he would change the name on records for women who got married and took on their husbands name, but not for my legal change of name).

An online medical system would be a good way to get over that problem, but the utterly screwed up attempt in 2019 in Australia to introduce something like that by a bunch of old, white, “male & stale”, computer illiterate to the point of being incompetent fogeys who also tried to subvert that to their nasty, small-minded distrust of social security recipients.

That also wasn’t helped by police trying to get into the act and get access to those records.

Now, as with public CCTVs, online surveillance, and other such measures:

(1)  there is NO doubt that they can potentially help police who are NOT in the bent or authoritarian copper category to perform a successful investigation, including potentially clearing suspect;

(2)  there is NO doubt that they can potentially be suborned by police who ARE in the bent or authoritarian copper category to set people up, invade privacy, and belittle people who have different world views than those bent or authoritarian copper category - which is contrary to the necessity of establishing community trust for policing, and is an act of totalitarianism (see Chapter One of Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (pub. The Bodley Head, London, 2017, ISBN 9781473549296);

(3)  BOTH the preceding miss the point that police SERVE THE COMMUNITY - it is US who determine what level of surveillance is acceptable, NOT police - and yes, that may mean we have to accept that some crimes may not be solved, but that is a determination for the community, NOT the police.

The latter point is one that applies to many engineers as well - particularly engineers who are driven by the erroneous view that expenditure must predominate in deliberations.

Oddly enough, despite the “let me make your teeth beautiful” trope that turns me off most current dentists, dentistry as a profession fares well against others on the matter of consideration for and service of the community, although that is controversial: fluoridation of water supplies.

Now, I am very aware that excessive fluoridation can be a problem: one the engineering projects I worked on in China in the mid-90s was in Kaifeng, where a water treatment plant (not a wastewater treatment plant) was being provided to treat water from the Huang He (Yellow River) to dilute the groundwater which had been used for that city’s water supply until then. The reason for this was that the groundwater was naturally high in fluoride, and that was causing painful problems with “mottled” teeth and bones. 

But going back to the dentists, and thinking of how fortunate I was with my teeth as a child while my mother and sister weren’t, fluoride also DOES help prevent (it won’t counteract loads of sugar, for instance) cavities. Despite that, dentistry as a profession advocated for what they knew - or, at the very least, critics have to concede “genuinely believed” - would reduce their business. 

They showed genuine professional consideration for the community they served, at the expense of their own personal interests. 

That should be acknowledged and admired, in my opinion, irrespective of one' views on fluoridation.