DIY Dentistry Horrors
By Hayley Birch
So, dentists are having a hard time of it, are they? 41% in the UK have "excessive workload", do they?I don’t know. It seems to me that if you earn £80k a year, you’d better be prepared to put in some hard graft. How difficult can it be to root around in someone’s mouth calling out random number and letter combinations, especially when you have an assistant to deal with all the instruments/blood/mouth wash/flying teeth.
But an £80,000 salary is clearly not enough to entice dentists to do their jobs properly; in a Patient and Public Involvement Forums survey of 5,000 people, 6% admitted they had resorted to self treatment. One researcher told how, in the space of a few hours, he had come across three people who had pulled out their own teeth. Youch.
One patient spoke of carrying out 14 separate extractions using a pair of pliers, whilst a number of reports emerged of patients using superglue to stick their crowns back in.
£80,000? That’s over £1,500 (about $3,000) a week by my calculations - enough to indulge yourself with 21,180 Jaffa Cakes. Think of the biscuits! (Or cakes depending on your point of view.) Although, perhaps not biscuits, eh?
There’s not much even a dentist could do after that quantity of E-number filled orange jelly.Hayley's page.
Don't try that at home. But you can try these:
Extracting DNA from a banana
Surface tension
Other stuff that will make you ache:
Ice cream - brain freeze
Maths
Image: Ne¾a Èerin
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