The national health care debate can never be complete unless we include dental care in the equation. Dental care relates not only to teeth but more importantly to overall health for every man, woman and child who is alive today! Leading researchers have discovered links between a healthy mouth and prevention of heart disease, diabetes, liver and pancreatic cancer.
Our mouths serve many functions including nutritional, health, communication, happiness and relatedness. The primary function of the mouth is to take in and process food and liquids for a healthy body. Our mouths also serve as a conduit for expressing our selves. We communicate with words that radiate from our lungs and vocal chords. The sounds are shaped by our lips, teeth and tongue. Without a full set of teeth clear communication becomes problematic and difficult. What would we do without smiles? When someone with a beautiful set of teeth smiles at you, how do you feel? We all light up when we see a beautiful smile. We also communicate even more intimately and relate to our loved ones via our mouth by kissing our children, spouses and family members. Who can live without a healthy mouth. NO ONE! Can you make the same claim for any other part of the body?
It’s time dentists got their due, for treating problems no one can see and are often asymptomatic until an advanced stage.
Good oral care means successful management and stabilization of the bacteria that calls your mouth its home. Without proper dental care, we’re threatening our overall health. With a healthy mouth, we break down our food properly and put less stress on the digestive system.
When was the last time you saw a movie with a hot, sexy dentist as the hero? Never????
That’s because they don’t make those kind of movies about dentists. There’s a list of 17 movies featuring dentists on amazon.com (who had the time to put that together?) and not one features a dentist in an especially positive light.
Let’s face it—in our world, dentists do not get the respect and honor they deserve. Instead Dentists are famous for having high suicide rates, failed affairs with their hygienists, and serving as a metaphor for the thing you’d least like to do in life…as in, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. I could be at the dentist. “The lack of sex appeal in dentistry is not a surface issue. It’s at the core of the self-doubt and low expectation that lead to dentists and dentistry often being after thoughts to global public.
To reduce this argument to a businesslike bottom line, we aren’t getting remotely serious about healthcare cost-containment until we examine the benefits of dental care for every living person.
Think about it. Most people have no dental coverage, vision, or mental health coverage.
We have been trained not to expect dental coverage from our employers. Generally the reasons is ‘too expensive’ but what it the expense long-term for poor teeth? The Mayo Clinic Staff has an article on the website that gives a very good summary of some of the links between oral health and other diseases like cardiovascular disease, premature births, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, osteoporosis, certain cancers and other conditions. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/dental/DE00001
You’re lucky if you have medical coverage. That said, if people need glasses, they get them and there is something sexy about wearing the right glasses, fashionable even. And eye doctors are easy. From the time we’re school children, we know that going to the eye doctor requires little more than us looking at a chart and calling out the letters we see. Not so with dentistry.
Mental health. That industry turned a corner. There are people who can’t afford rent but wouldn’t miss a therapy session if their life depended on it. People are willing to invest money on talk-therapy, never mind the medical therapy, out of pocket, for years, every week, sometimes many times a week. The same people that may or may not visit their dentist even once a year.
Dental health, the health of the mouth in general is just as important, if not more important than anything else we can do for our bodies. This includes making sure we have a smile worth sharing. Like in the matter of how poor dental care leads to bad breath, and we all know what bad breath leads to: nothing. If your breath stinks, so does your career, your bank account, and your love life. People who don’t think about their pancreas more than once or twice a decade are acutely aware (or should be!) of how their breath affects the parts of their lives involving romance and finance.
Most kids growing up play “doctor” and “nurse”, not dentist and hygienist. So most don’t think they will be a dentist or in my case the advocate for dentistry, an industry that’s important yet constantly marginalized. Every other profession, from Realtors to cattle farmers, takes pains to protect their individual reputations and that of their industry.
Make all the dentist jokes you want and not one dentist in a 1000 will write an email, post on a blog, make a phone call, or otherwise call you to task for trashing their field. They are busy being a dentist and running a business they were never educated to run.
On top of that, dentists are widely perceived as working with archaic equipment, long needles, and cranky staffs, all of which adds up to pain…in your mouth and in your wallet. Dentists need to keep on drillin’ and keep their very challenging business solvent and most have little time and attention to inform the public that dentists and dentistry is legitimate and trustworthy.
And the technology today is radically different from years gone by. If you haven’t been to the dentist in the last five years, first of all, you’re not alone. Most people take better care of their cars than their teeth, which makes no sense, because it’s tough to eat corn with a Honda.
More important, dentists now serve their patients with a stunning range of high-tech, cutting edge technologies that minimize the pain and invasiveness of traditional dental practices, cutting down the time factor and creating better, healthier results.
But how many people are aware of that fact?
It’s time for Americans to realize that the dental community exists to serve us, keep our mouths healthy and clean, our bodies disease-free, and our kisses long and lingering.
Don’t get me wrong. Like most people who value a great smile, I’d rather be snorkeling in the Caribbean than lying back and getting a root canal. But it’s time we made a societal shift and recognize that dentistry is more than a punchline for a nightclub comic or the negative metaphors Madison Ave uses over and over.
It’s time we recognized the value that dentists provide. They are highly trained healthcare professionals who truly care about their patients. The services they offer make a huge difference as we seek to untangle our snarled healthcare delivery system.
D.D.S. is the term that dentists place after their names. It stands for Doctor of Dental Surgery. Today, it ought to have a second meaning—Dentists Deserve Success!
The old maxim is just as applicable as ever – ignore your teeth and they’ll go away. So let’s give dentists the love and respect they deserve. My desire is that we see dentists as trusted health practitioners and that a trip to the dentist is considered a privilege and not a form of torture. Dentists are on the frontlines of the battle to provide America with fundamental healthcare.
And then get ready for a romantic comedy…dentists in love.
Okay, maybe that’s a bridge too far. You can rinse now.
Gary Kadi serves the dental community through his website, www.GaryKadi.com
