Teeth
Today I went to the dentist for the first of two “deep cleaning” procedures. Yeah, it’s been a while, I don’t floss regularly like I should and now my jaw feels like a mini battlefield of blood and bruises.
Still, the whole process wasn’t all that bad. Granted, getting a shot of anesthetic into your gums isn’t something I loved, but the aftereffects were amazing. The entire right side of my face became paralyzed within a few minutes and I couldn’t feel very much of anything. I remarked to my dentist that I felt like Two Face in Batman.
Sitting in the dentist chair made my mind wander, trying to imagine what “going to the dentist” even meant decades ago compared to now. Or what the earliest dental care was like. Nowdays we’ve got ultrasonic scalers that do some amazing work for your oral hygiene, but you have to wonder what people did without such treatments?
As the pain in my right-side jaw slowly subsides tonight, I’m left wondering how people dealt with pain not caused by treatment, but rather caused by the lack of available care. This led to me wondering how people dealt without modern medicine and survived.
Of course, this naturally led me to think about the national health care debate. As I sit here in my bed, teasing my molars with my tongue, I’m pretty sure I know where I fall in the debate.
People should be able to get health care. It should be reasonably priced, transparent, reformed, non-bureaucratic and available to all. It’s not a privilege, it’s a necessity to survive. Despite this economy, we’re a nation of abundance and wealth. Public health is a public good. It is something that we need to survive as a nation, to be a stronger, healthier workforce to compete in the world.
Should anyone be punished with a lifetime of pain because they get cancer, are born with a disorder, have an accident at work, were a victim of a crime, exposed to a virus or had a “pre-existing condition”? I don’t think so.
We have amazing advancements in medical care to help people who, for whatever reason, were dealt a bad hand in life. It shocks me at the lack of compassion and will to help create a system to address the physical ills of society.
But right now, so many are acting out of fear, driven to radicalism by lies and deliberate misinformation campaigns by pundits tapping into a political counter-zeitgeist for the sake of a few ratings points on the Nielsen.
Eventually, this pain in my teeth will fade away. But for others, they’ll continue to live with it the rest of their lives.