Is it ok to admit that I haven’t seen a dentist in years? Not on purpose anyway. I may well have seen a plain clothes dentist in a crowd of people trying to navigate Tottenham Court Road tube station, or perhaps even met one at a social occasion that I have entirely skipped the vocational steps in a conversation, as is my prerogative. I had a moment in my recent past that drove me to contact health professionals and the journey I was sent on resulted in almost having to break my streak.
I had this odd pain in my left jaw when I chewed. It wasn’t a toothache, but it was definitely something in my head. I called the doctors surgery for an initial consultation. Here’s the immediate pit of despair that is experienced by the medical profession these days: specialism. There are specialists for everything. Knees, bladders, skin.
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Every element of the body is chopped up into chunks for consultants to focus to the extreme in their study. There is highly likely a thumb specialist that I will surely be contacting at some point. We are are flat pack furniture with a penchant for praline.
I get that we need to go deep in everything to make sure we properly fix things. I understand cancer and other serious conditions require specialists to properly navigate these difficulties. That is acceptable. But as I was going through triage, if you can call it that, it became very quickly clear that the health care system has dissected humanity so ultimately that triage is not really a worthy term for what I went through.
“I have a pain in my jaw.”
“Go see a dentist.”
“You’re not going to ask when it started, if it’s inside out or outside my mouth, any other possible lifestyle factors that could be causing it?”
“No. Goodbye.”
That’s that then, I now accept.
There is no other option anyway. And this is causing all kinds of pain that is impossible to avoid. You start with a bit of tiredness and get sent to a neurologist and then some head specialist, then over to an MRI to be viewed by an imaging specialist, and each thing takes triage and repetition and the hand over to the next is like the path crumbling behind you as you venture further into an ancient cave system. You are the Indiana Jones of the system. No going back. You must venture deeper until you reach an eventual void which, finally, is that the thing just kind of cleared up on its own. Or you’re dead. Both of which are considered acceptable.
I could have gone to see the dentist, yes, but it was not a dental thing. The whole process, I have come to see, is to deal with the immediate symptom and solve it. The most often recommendation is: “take some paracetamol.” But no one thought to take a step back. Holistic views in the world of health services don’t really feel like a thing. GPs are generalists, but if we have PTs (personal trainers) who make you feel guilty about sleeping, or SCs (sleep consultants) who make you feel guilty about not-sleeping, why not add PHCs to the list? Personal Health Curators. Own the whole thing and make me a better and more healthy human being. This should come out of the council tax budget.
Slightly tangentially, let me explain what I don’t want:
To be drawn down the rabbit hole of multivitamins or other nutritional supplements that get jammed into my instagram feed between the video of cats on holiday in Tuscany and a kitchen appliance walkthrough. My health should not depend on the strange vertical screen lecture from yet another Dr. Gone Private and his cronies. There are at least five different adverts I’ve seen that are purporting to be full-blown businesses that have ‘cracked’ the food system by putting everything you need into a bullet sized pill. This is bullying by another name. It’s insane to listen to these people monologue and then just bypass the whole food thing to think that you can get nutrients from a button. A plastic button.
We’re not astronauts. We don’t need to be astronauts. We won’t need ultra efficient food intake strategies for a picnic. There are versions of a futuristic world where meal deals are a series of packets and everyone absolutely loves it. I am already wholly against the paradigm of efficiency. Perhaps it is too late and we’re already careening towards a world where we can get 10g of protein from a granola bar and consider this progress. At least, for the sake of the Mediterranean diet, replace this with biting chunks out of a block of Parmesan.
Just listen. I know you care.
The pain in my jaw just kind of went away and I think it was probably stress related. I might have been grinding my teeth in the night or something, but I know that seeing a dentist wouldn’t have helped.
Of course, knowing that now, knowing that the body can be a barometer for the broader episodes of life that are thrown at us, I don’t know that me calling the doctor would have been a good experience if the response from the receptionist was going to be:
“Get a grip.”
Maybe therapy? No thanks. Apparently.
Still haven’t seen a dentist.
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