We got some bad news today…

Our dentist is retiring in January…

This is not good! You have no idea how difficult it is to find a good dentist… Or maybe you do, in which case you will understand my concern.

I’ve been going to the same dentist since I was born, and thanks to him and genetics, I don’t have a filling in my head! :dances:

In all these years, I’ve only seen two other dentists. Both while my dentist was off work following a heart attack.

The first dentist was very pleasant, poked a handful of teeth and said they would see me in 6 months (I like those kind of visits!) But my mother had to have some work done and ended up losing the tooth.

I’ve heard of a few other patients of that dentist who are forever having to get work done, and then repair work to fix the damage from the original work…

The second dentist was our current dentists practice partner, and the person who will be taking over from him in January.

After my one and only visit to him, I shall here on refer to him as The Poison Dwarf.
He’s one of lifes little charmers who looks down on you like something he’s stepped on, and acts as though he’s doing you a favour by agreeing to look at your teeth.

It’s the one and only time I’ve had toothache, and all he was supposed to have done was scrape a little plaque from one tooth!

He’s also one of those people who doesn’t bother talking to the patient, he just talks to the nurse around the patient.

He asked the nurse if I had to pay for my treatment (I didn’t I was on the NHS) and had the nerve to ask her to book me in for dental work to “sort out those ugly and unsightly front teeth”

He asked the nurse (still not asking me directly) if I had been scheduled to have them fixed before, which I hadn’t… Mostly because there’s nothing actually wrong with my teeth!

Then, the first and only time he actually spoke to me, he told me I would have to come back to get my teeth capped, and that he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t had them put right before when they looked so horrible…

He was quite taken aback when I told him that there was nothing wrong with my teeth, I happen to like them and that there was no way he was doing anything to them!

He wasn’t happy. You’d think they were his teeth!

Now, you tell me, what do you picture when you hear a dentist talking about ugly, horrible and horrendous looking teeth?

I’m picturing a mouth full of black, rotting stumps of teeth, probably crooked… The sort of teeth that have probably never seen either a toothbrush or a dentist in 40 years…

You know what he was talking about?

When I was about 6 I fell off a desk at school and landed on my face. My front teeth were a bit loose at the time (but they were fine). But when the second teeth grew in, they were slightly patchy; some patches were slightly whiter than others. My dentist said that they had been damaged from the fall, but that they were perfectly healthy, they just didn’t have an even calcium distribution (or something like that)… The main thing was, they were healthy, and unless you look really closely, you can’t tell.

That was it, those were the ugly, hideous and horrendous looking teeth he was referring to.

I find it hard to believe, in this day and age, that a dentist would want to do work on perfectly healthy teeth, especially when the patient isn’t even slightly concerned.

I thought cosmetic work was supposed to be because the patient was going to feel better after it, not the dentist!

But then I’m also worried by the growing number of dentists who want to cap, bridge or root canal every tooth that they see… Especially given the number of people who are always having to go back because they’re having bother with whatever they’ve had done to them.

So I’m not happy, I now have to find a new dentist, who knows what he/she is doing, only suggests work that actually needs to be done, and doesn’t want to start attacking it with all manor of tools just for the practice or the fun of it.