Our Worst Dental Nightmares

The dentist’s chair can be a frightful place.

It doesn’t matter if you’re under anesthesia or not: You are pretty much helpless, lying there with a bib on and bright lights shining in your eyes. You’re at the mercy of someone armed with sharp implements. Is this a scene out of James Bond, or are we getting our teeth fixed?

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There are many excellent dentists all across the country, of course. We need dentists throughout our lifetimes to keep our teeth and gums healthy. But a fear of dentists is real (it’s called odontophobia) and it was played on frightfully in the movie “Marathon Man,” with Laurence Olivier using dental tools to torture Dustin Hoffman: “Relief, or discomfort? The decision is yours.”

Actually, the decision is really up to the dentist, who we hope is competent and compassionate. Or at least not distracted by calls from an interior decorator. This actually happened to a mother of three.

“I heard my dentist discussing fabrics with his decorator as blood leaked down my throat.”

“I was lying in a periodontal chair, and my periodontist had already started a process known as ‘scaling,’ a deep cleaning of the gums. Then, he received a call from his decorator. I knew because his receptionist announced it. And he took the call!” said a woman from Reading, Massachusetts. “I heard him discussing fabrics as blood leaked down my throat. The nurse attending to me was horrified and made him end the call. I heard him say: ‘She’s just so hard to get a hold of.’ I was sick for a full day. I called him and complained, and he didn’t charge me for the visit. But the memory remained. I switched periodontists.”

Do you have dental insurance? Maybe you should, as Will Freeman, a freelance marketer from Santa Monica, California, relayed in a tale about cut-rate dental work that sets our teeth on edge.

Ouch! Freeman left the cut-rate clinic hurt and humbled.

“I woke up one morning with an excruciating toothache, of course just a few weeks out from parting ways with my dental insurance,” Freeman said. “Not knowing what to do, I heard that you can receive ‘discounted’ dental work at one of the local universities. How bad could it be? I soon learned.

“Turns out my tooth had an infection in its root and needed to be pulled,” he continued. “This tooth extraction would serve as an on-site lesson to a total of eight dental students crowding around me, while the professional did a slow-paced play-by-play of what he was doing. It’s one thing to have a tooth pulled. It’s another to hear about how they aim to do it over the course of an hour — before it’s actually performed.”

Ouch! Freeman left the cut-rate clinic hurt and humbled.

“I paid three more dentists to look at my teeth and all said I didn’t need a thing, especially a root canal.”

Sometimes the pain inflicted isn’t emotional or physical, but financial.

Joni Casimiro is an Orange County, California, resident who had a narrow escape that still cost her dearly.

“So I go to my (ex) dentist, she looks into my mouth and says, ‘Oh! You need a root canal. I’ll have to refer you to a specialist.’ Well, my tooth didn’t hurt and I wondered how she could tell by barely looking at it. As I was leaving, I happened to glance into the office break room and saw in large letters on the whiteboard: ‘More Specialist Referrals!!'”

“Really? I paid three more dentists to look at my teeth and all said I didn’t need a thing, especially a root canal,” Casimiro said.

Nancy Hastings recently moved from Los Angeles back to Massachusetts, but remembers surviving a money-oriented orthodontist.

“I brush my teeth way too vigorously, so in my older years I had worn down the enamel along the top of three of my teeth. This exposes the nerve and makes it highly susceptible to changes in hot (and) cold temps,” she said.

“My super high-tech ‘Mr. Awesome’ dentist was attempting to strong-arm me into getting all three of the teeth done, and I was trying to explain that on my nonprofit environmentalist salary, I would have to do one tooth at a time over a year or two,” Hastings said.

“So while I have all kinds of Edward Scissorhands-type metal machinery in my mouth, the dentist launched into a lecture about how I should stop making excuses about my job, income, blah, blah, blah. All this while I can’t say a word.”

In the end, Hastings agreed to do two of the three teeth after being assured the work would be “covered” by her dental plan. It wasn’t. The cost was $750.

The majority of dentists by far do good work and truly care about their patients, who, truth be told, aren’t always reasonable, grateful, or frankly that concerned about dental hygiene.

Dentistry is a stressful job. No wonder it’s rated second on a mentalhealthdaily.com list of Top 11 Professions with Highest Suicide Rates (medical doctors were first). Long hours, financial stress, competition and perfectionism all contribute to the stress of the job.

Let’s at least brush our teeth before we go to the dentist, or at least pop a breath mint. Dentists are people, too.