Teeth? Who needs 'em?

Do dentists actually like teeth?

The Thais I know rarely think twice about getting a tooth pulled, if alternative ways to treat a problem are more expensive.

If an extraction is cheaper than a filling (never mind more complicated work, such as a crown, or bridge),Thais will opt to have the tooth come out every time.

Once, I thought dentists were fighting a rearguard action against such trends, trying to persuade Thais to keep their teeth in, rather than pull them out, as teeth are intrinsically a good thing to have. They look good in the mouth, and help us eat.

No longer. At the dentist’s the other day, where I underwent a 90-minute operation to have pulled a wisdom tooth on my bottom right side, the dentist proposed that I might like to get its opposite number, on the top row, pulled as well.

‘If you don’t, the partner of the tooth you pull today will come down looking for its mate. It needs to have something to grind against when you eat. Once you take out the bottom one, the top one will start getting restless. In the end you will have trouble eating,’ the dentist explained.

The dentist who performed the surgery, a jovial man in his 30s who likes to sing while he works, is a specialist. My regular dentist asked me to come to him instead as the tooth looked too difficult for him to extract alone.

The job took much longer than expected. When we started, as he started sticking his implements in my mouth, he quoted me B500 for the job.

Five minutes later, when he caught a glimpse of the challenge which lay ahead - but still before the full horror was revealed in an x-ray - that price had doubled to B1,000.

By the time the last of my tooth was extracted, in a procedure best likened to a builder trying to prise a rusted nail out of an old plank of wood, the cost was B3,000.

That’s three times what my regular dentist quoted for a 'difficult' wisdom tooth extraction – but then no one, it seems, foresaw just how challenging it would be.

And here they were, asking me to take out the top tooth as well.

The specialist dentist looked exhausted when the last of my tooth – a small fragment, but curved up at the end, which made it almost impossible to dislodge - finally agreed to come out.

He took off his mask, wiped his brow, and leant on a table for support.

Earlier, as he poked around in my mouth, with two assistants applying suction and handing him tools, he asked why I didn’t have the tooth treated earlier.

‘If it was me, I would have pulled it out at the first opportunity,’ he said.

A dental nurse was just as keen on my having the top one out.

‘You might have six months, or a year, before you have to do something about the partner tooth,’ she told me.

She’s had her wisdom teeth, along with their partner teeth, extracted, as she doesn’t want her teeth doing peculiar things. She also wears braces, to close gaps between her teeth.

‘I extracted them at the same time – you can get the pain over and done with on the same day,’ she added.

I declined. ‘I like teeth, and don’t like having them pulled unless it’s absolutely necessary,’ I told her.

The singing specialist wants to see me again to check his handywork. He has given me three bags of pills to take, including painkillers and antibiotics.

Even with his singing to relieve my (or his own?) stress, and many injections to numb the pain, I felt awful.

The whole business was so painful and unpleasant, the top one can just wait.