Monday, October 27, 2008

Orthodontist

Thursday 9th October 2008
The Café was busy today, it is pension day and now that most of the tourists have left town and gone home, the Seniors have come out to play.
Carolyn took the kids to the Orthodontist this morning, Marisa needs a fair amount of work done to her teeth ready for wearing a brace when she is a teenager.
It’s strange, but go back forty years and kids just grew up with the right number of teeth, more often than not they would be in the right place and every second visit to the Dentist, you got a clean bill of health.
The Dentists were all Sadists who seemed to take great delight in inflicting pain in the name of good teeth, they were on Commission from the NHS and presumably could have made shedloads of money from fitting a Brace to us all in the name of Dental Health. As it was, there were very few kids wearing a brace and the majority of those that didn’t need one, grew up to have relatively straight teeth, so why do so many kids nowadays have to wear a brace at some point?
The Orthodontist that Carolyn spoke to today appears to have his own theory on the subject, in fact he is so sure of it that if a child goes to see him and that child is wearing a Brace put on by a UK Dentist, he will not accept them for treatment, and he is in the Private Sector.
In the case of Marisa he is concerned that when she was younger, she had problems with some of her teeth and the NHS, rather than work on the teeth to try and save them, decided to extract them, this is going to cause all sorts of problems with the positioning of her adult teeth in the future and guarantees that she will have to wear a Brace of some description throughout her teenage years.
According to the Orthodontist this is common practice in the UK, not just in the NHS, but in the Private Sector as well.
Over here he obviously sees people from a lot of different nationalities, and according to him, British Dentistry is amongst the worst in the world.
We have to believe what he tells us and hope that in the end her teeth will fall into place, but saying that, this is a country that puts Cheese in its Sausages, probably because the ones without Cheese taste so bad and can’t make a decent jug of Gravy to save their lives.
Ian quite likes the Cheese Sausages and is hoping it will hold him in good stead when we apply for our Residency Visa.

2 comments:

Ganeida said...

I had braces [crossbite] like stainless steel railway tracks but these days they are really cool with coloured metal & rubber bands. I guess coloured co~ordinated braces?

Anonymous said...

Once upon a time when he was young, grandad hojo had a brace on his top teeth but not on his bottom teeth, which were also very crooked. Whether this was because the bottom teeth were more hidden by his gums or whether in England we were only allowed one brace each, or whether he was fed up with braces after the first one, he can't remember, but his top teeth are now very much easier to look after than the bottom ones so it worked out half right. However, he never did take to his Dad's idea of becoming a dentist. Shame because he would have retired long ago and been very rich.