From FRAGMENTS: ON DENTISTRY
Ander Monson

I live in serious, constant fear of the failure of teeth. My teeth, mostly, though the possibility of others’ dental failure also simultaneously fascinates and repels me. Of course this is even more difficult when confronted by the masses of television commercials featuring gleam-toothed young people, their straight teeth propped up like blinding picket fences keeping me just outside their yard.

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All the time I dream about smashing my teeth—maybe being curbed, like in American History X, which involves a curb, your jaw, and a kick or stomp from behind—or some other collision between my teeth and something harder than they are. Third-person, I watch my teeth ground down to dust or smashed away.

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More often, I have dreams of my teeth shattering not under external force, but in a fall, whether through impact with the floor or a stair or the bookcase. This is probably a symbol of something, but I don’t know what.
    I can see them splintering out of my mouth to fragments on the ground. Do I pick them up or leave them be?

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Are teeth hard or are they soft? They feel hard—they work to crush many things put directly into our mouths. They chew through jerky, chop ice, which otherwise seems hard, break through rock candy and peanut brittle, gobstoppers, jawbreakers, a thousand pounds of gum. We are shocked when we go to the dentist to be told that we have cavities (tooth decay, technically called dental caries). How could these things—our very own pulverizers—develop pits and ruts? According to the Centers for Disease Control, 84 percent of U.S. children, 96 percent of U.S. adults, and 99.5 percent of Americans 65 years and older have experienced tooth decay. These seem like low numbers from my experience, but okay. They are at least statistics, hard numbers—nonmalleable, incorrigible, safe from assault or erosion. This in spite of a huge amount of cash thrown at dental care in the form of toothpastes, complicated orthodontics, and toothbrushes with space-age names like Sonicare 6000.

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I have relied on my teeth, have taken them for granted. I mash popcorn kernels with my molars as I watch the television. I flash them at my animals to indicate aggression. Their presence is comforting on Thanksgiving when confronted with the scads of food that my wife’s (Midwestern, if that helps) family traditionally serves up. Most of the food is soft, but still requires mastication to go down. The problem with her family is that after we eat Thanksgiving dinner (usually at two or three in the afternoon), a completely different meal is served at six, being an actual supper (as opposed to dinner, which was earlier), consisting of entirely new dishes. This is needlessly ridiculous. But still I enjoy—am even consumed by—this consumption. And my teeth are there to aid me, there to smash whatever down to paste and down my throat into the digestive mechanics of the body.

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A quick capsule history of toothpaste: ashes from burnt mice heads, rabbit heads, wolf heads, ox heels, and goat feet were thought to benefit the gums in AD 23-79. The oldest toothpaste formula—discovered recently, and interestingly proving to be far more effective than eighteenth-century formulae—comes from the ancient Egyptians, and included rock salt, mint, dried iris flower, and pepper. In the eighteenth-century, the formula contained burnt bread. In the nineteenth-century, think charcoal, think powder. Fluoride enters the picture in the 1940s. And now of course it’s all chemical and cosmetic to make teeth impermeable, whiter and brighter.

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I watch a lot of hockey, which does not help the dreams. Famously gap-toothed, most NHL players won’t even wear face masks or cages.  I simultaneously fear and admire them with their gappy smiles and mullets. Pucks are hard. Slap shots are fast. The body bruises, heals, but not the teeth, not really. They only wear protection after they’ve suffered pucks or sticks or other major trauma to the mouth.
    I think it has to do with masculinity.
    Or a response to our soft, safe, indoor, antibacterial lives.
    This is probably why I watch it.

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I wonder why the teeth do not heal themselves, unlike the rest of the body’s carnival sideshow.

An article in the October 1978 issue of Prevention addresses this question. Short answer: they do, though only on a relatively small scale. It includes an interview with Robert O. Nara, DDS, a self-proclaimed “renegade dentist” from my hometown in Upper Michigan. His position is that good dental care (prevention) can remove the necessity of professional repair, and since the profession makes its money almost exclusively from repair, you can see why he thinks of himself as a renegade.

I never went to him when I was young.

I want to know if he’s still alive.

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Perhaps I have an alternate life as an experimental dentist. I am intrigued by diseases of the mouth and gums. (I own several books on the topic, more for the horrifying illustrations—like something sampled directly from my dreams—than anything else.)

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In truth, though, teeth are soft. My front two top teeth have been work away over years of I-am-not-sure-what. My dentist in high school thought I was bulimic because of this wear. Perhaps it is due to excessive intestinal gas or acid reflux (though I distrust this designation, this diagnosis, since I see commercials for it all the time, which is in itself suspicious). Or my teeth have worn away because I consumed Coca-Cola in excess in high school. I drank a six-pack a day (by my estimation).

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Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew.

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In 1945, the year that my father was born, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the city in which I now reside, was the first city worldwide to fluoridate its water. The fluoridation was so successful in reducing dental caries that the control city, Muskegon, Michigan, demanded that their water be fluoridated too.

Flashback: the story starts in 1909 in Colorado, really (though fluoride research began in 1901), with Frederick McCay, a young dental-school graduate, when he noticed brown-stained teeth in the people of one town (called thereafter Colorado Brown Stain, and termed eventually fluorosis). This led—skipping ahead—to the identification of water-borne fluoride as the element that caused this brown stain (and in somewhat lower levels helped to prevent tooth decay). So Grand Rapids, a sometimes forward-thinking city in Michigan, a sometimes forward-thinking state, thought about adopting fluoride in its water. Michigan is proud of its ten-cent deposit on bottled carbonated beverages (these drinks are the enemy of my teeth; the sugar and acid mean corrosion): it’s still the benefactor of kids at hockey games who troll through trash to trade their recovered and returnable cans in for ice-cream sandwiches at the concession, leading thereafter to necessary visits to the dentist (if not through hockey or through carbonated drinks, then through these sandwiches we are eventually delivered to the hands of the dentists.) Grand Rapids put into motion and co-sponsored a study of almost 30,000 schoolchildren. This study showed a strong connection between fluoride addition to the water and the decreasing dental troubles of these kids.
    Fluoride additions to drinking water have come under a good deal of fire over the last half century. Aside from the wilder theories about the calming slash pacifying effect on the people (fluoride as conspiracy, Commie plot, etc.) the main debate centers around what fluoride’s actual benefits are, and what it takes to get them. (For years, the thinking was that ingesting the fluoride was necessary, though it seems that simple topical application, e.g., toothbrushing, will do the trick.) So the debate is whether cities should be forcing fluoride on all users of their drinking water, or if this is a waste of money, or worse, a public hazard. Both sides of this debate claim to have medical fact behind them and impugn the opposition’s studies as being medically irrelevant, or inconclusive, or biased due to their association with industry.
    It is strange that this debate is still ongoing, but there is evidently a lot at stake.
    More than 61 percent of the population in the United States currently drink fluoridated water.

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In the mouth, food is broken down into bites, crushed into a paste, so it can be massaged down the esophagus and into all that gastric action.
    Analogy, maybe: the mouth is to food as the mind is to language.
 

From Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson. Copyright 2007 by Ander Monson. All rights reserved.