Why Brits have the worst teeth in the developed world?

It’s not true, of course.  Making a generalization about an entire culture is never going to work.  Besides which, those who can afford to go travelling to other places in the world  have usually managed to fork out the odd few thousand in order not to make  children in foreign climes run from them in terror  when they open their mouth to say Bonjour. So it’s not travelling Brits who gave rise to our reputation as having the worst teeth in the world. (And yes.  We STILL have it.)

It’s those one encounters inside the country that present sights not usually seen in developed countries. People with one lone, yellow fang dangling down from their jaw; those with mouths like old pianos – yellow-brown with black spaces in between; people you would hate to sit across from at a dining table; and those whose gnarled and twisted teeth seem to defy all logic and give rise to acute curiosity about whether they actually ingest all food through a feeding tube?

And me.

A scant few years ago I went to a Dentist in Australia for a routine check-up and was not only congratulated on my standards of oral hygiene, but reassured that, like everyone else in my family, my gnashers would accompany me to the coffin.

Now, I’ve been here three years and at times wish I could get away with wearing a hygiene mask as so many people do in China.

Because teeth appear to be looked upon as optional extras for the poor, the marginalized, and all those on Benefits. NHS dentist perform two function only – yank ‘em  or fill ‘em up.  If one requires neither of those services the world of dentistry is a distant pleasure-ground where people who can open wide, do so at the blink of a camera shutter. Or throw their heads back in order to laugh; or crunch their way through all the fruit, nuts and roughage their body requires.

I’d lost the last of my molars before it dawned upon me that the more I kept seeing NHS dentists, the more teeth would be yanked from my protesting head. Since that last visit I’ve been saving myself from choking each time I eat by a complicated manoeuvre involving crushing whatever I can between my bottom two teeth and the top two.  Entire droves of Wait-staff have been known to fall asleep standing up at restaurants while people leave; lights are turned off, and I am still trying to get the Starter down my gullet in such a way as to gain nourishment rather than a lingering death by asphyxiation.

An entire teen age spent giving metallic smiles through my railway tracks; painful and complicated root-canal work; hugely expensive bridgework; 6 monthly check-ups since the age of 3…..to the NHS this is immaterial. If you don’t need yanking or filling then you don’t need dental work. And as for the “perfect smile’ private dentists base their practices on?  Well NHS realizes that the poor, the needy, the marginalized and those on Benefits don’t have too much to smile about anyway so the subject of a smile is never brought up in NHS surgeries.

Just as well: I currently express amusement with a lop-sided sneer that HAS been known to set small children crying. Not even the fact that dental neglect has led to gum disease fazes the NHS. Yet any private dentist I’ve ever been to has held the threat of gum disease to probably be the most sore affliction ever visited upon humankind.  Avoiding it is the reason for check-ups, monitoring, reconstructions. 

But it’s entirely reasonable that the NHS regards gingivitus almost as a pre-requisite for poor people – it gives one an opportunity to avail oneself of the yank ‘em out option of dentistry.  Which is really lucky as the other, fill ‘er up  option, gets a little messy when combined with gum and bone decay.

Whether because of 3 years of non-stop abscesses,  swelling, and antibiotics (gave THOSE up 18 months ago as I couldn’t bear to imagine what they were doing to the rest of me!); or because they were working overtime performing the tasks usually performed by about 30 of their fellows; my two bottom front teeth have recently taken to waving gracefully in the breeze, often reviving in me a long-ago desire to tie a string to them, attach string to door-knob, and slam it in protest against NHS dentistry practice.

It took over 10 months for me to get an appointment to a London Hospital where the specialist, accompanied by wide-eyed students, played Cap-The-Line  as we delved into obscure English Literature together, and seemed to place more value in aural expertise rather than oral.  No treatment plan ensued – merely an injunction to march in to “those lazy Brighton dentists” and tell them to get on with it.

 

I’ve never actually read How to Make Friends and Influence People – but am prepared to wager that it doesn’t embrace such courses of action. In fact, for those on benefits, it’s probably against the law

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 So I could perhaps ask for another appointment.  But in another 10 months I assume the teeth in question will have bowed to ill-winds and wafted right out of my mouth leaving me to die a slow lingering death due to malnutrition.

And in the interim, tourists who stop me to ask directions will go back to their countries to give new life to the Brits-and-their-teeth meme for yet another generation.

n.