Last week I had a filling in one of my back upper teeth. I had originally thought that it was a cracked tooth, but it turns out that it was a cavity. Fine. I've had fillings before--not so much fun--but fine.
Just in case though, they did some poking and "tooth sleuthing" both of which have various amounts of pain associated with them. In fact, the whole thing was started by the doctor saying...
"I'm going to tap (BANG) on some of your teeth. Tell me if this hurts."
(The doctor says "tap" but I insert "BANG" because that's what it feels like to my skull sometimes.)
In the middle of all the "tapping" however, it started to occur to me that this was an absolutely Byzantine method of determining whether or not something was wrong. We have put a man on the moon, we have discovered that in a group of matter and antimatter--more matter will survive in the Universe, we have electricity and hybrid cars and phones that take pictures and play music. We as a society are healthy and wealthy enough to pay people exorbitant amounts of money to sing songs that they didn't write, and to play games and pretend to be other people for a living...and yet the best way we can come up with to determine if your tooth is dying is to keep banging on it until it hurts.
And it's also a terrible method because it doesn't work. I was in such excruciating pain after this "standard" procedure that I went back to the dentist on Tuesday (Where they banged on my teeth again) and told me that maybe I DO have a cracked tooth. Then I went back today and they did stage 1 of a root canal! Thank goodness really. I was feeling so terrible. But believe it or not, that meeting started by the doctor saying,
"I'm going to tap (BANG) on a few teeth and you tell me if it hurts."
You've got to be kidding me.
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