The Dentist

I had an officemate many years ago - a good-looking guy married to an attractive woman, who refused to go the dentist. How did I know? His teeth were rotten. He survived the daily grind, 8 am to 5 pm work, without smiling. When he really needed to, he would twist his lips to create a small grin.

In our family, we have an aunt who is a dentist. So whenever there's was a tooth aching, my mother would send us running to her Santa Ana dental clinic.

Trips to a dentist can be an unnerving journey to a lot of people, especially in the olden days of my youth when dentists did'nt use yet or spray you with an anesthetic before piercing your gum with the real anesthetic needle. Then, the next dread was when you begin to feel your whole mouth becoming heavy, and the dentist would ask you if you felt numb already, and you had to answer, " nyess."

Having your teeth cleaned was not as awful as getting your tooth extracted. For extraction, the dentist pulled your tooth, sometimes meandering over the area surrounding it, circling his/her hand, and you could actually feel the boring and pulling, even when fully anesthesized.

At school, your elementary teacher told you to go the dentist twice a year and to brush your teeth three times a day. But to many, a visit to a dentist is still a very costly endeavor. Yes, some public schools and some local governments provide dental services but this is not yet a national priority. Even in the advanced nations such as Canada, where there is universal heatlh care, dental health/services are not yet fully covered.

In Toronto, you will be amazed at the number of Filipino dentists having a practise. Filipino newspapers are full of their ads - their smiling faces including those of their staff. Dentists here and in the U.S. make a very good living and are not as prone to malpractise suits as surgeons or family physicians.

Dentists in the Philippines are making a comeback, I guess; this, judging on some print advertisements I've seen lately, enticing Fil-Canadians to get their "dentals" done in Manila when they go there for their holidays or vacations. The ads say it's much cheaper to get tooth implants, or dentures in Manila.

Having a dentist in one's family cannot really resolve the cost of dental services. If your daughter is a dentist, for instance, and she works for a dental clinic, you as her relative would still be paying for the service, although at a discounted rate, perhaps. In the olden days, a dentist, upon graduation from college and passing the dental board exams, would immediately install a dental chair behind the house or in a spare room in the house, hang a billboard outside, and start seeing patients. Now, it is more getting employed by another established practitioner.

In Canada, particularly in the Ontario Province, foreign-trained or internationally-trained dentists have to undergo some years of study, and take the board exams, before qualifying as a dentist. And with a new regulation recently approved, dentists would have competition from those who have been allowed to do some dental services, such as cleaning, even without the dentist designation.

The following are some information regarding licensing of internationally-trained dentists, taken from the website of Citizenship and Immigration of Ontario:

"Canada and the United States operate according to a mutually recognized system of accreditation of dental training. If your dental training was outside of Canada or the United States you are considered to be “internationally trained” and you will be required to successfully complete a full-time, two-year qualifying program. This is the only means by which you can become eligible to take the Canadian national examination administered by the National Dental Examining Board of Canada (NDEB) and this requirement must be completed before you can proceed with making an application to the RCDSO."

These two-year qualifying programs are known by several names, including
degree completion or advanced standing programs,
Internationally Trained Dentists Program, or
International Dentist Advanced Placement program.

For accurate information on how to be licensed as a dentist in Ontario, please go to

http://www.rcdso.org/

If ever I see my former colleague again, I would probably advise him to see a dentist, if he had not already done so. Those days, it was a bit embarassing to talk about grooming or oral health, but nowadays , when even males get botox treatment, telling a friend to go see a dentist, will be a piece of cake.