Paying off the old Mercedes

I know I am not the only one to have a root canal in history. Most of your who are good enough to read this have been thru it.

I remember an old Star Trek movie, the one with a whale they were transporting.

There was a scene where Bones (The Enterprise Doctor) found himself in a modern day hospital setting.

He was appalled by the nature of medicine in 1995 . He saw some doctors treating Captain Kirk.

He said, “STOP you Butchers, Savages, stop your primitive fumbling”.

I may not have the dialogue right but the sense that if we were to go back 200 years to the day of leaches, battlefield amputations without anesthetic or sanitary efforts which killed more than it saved we would scream the same thing.

I have to say that the root canal of today is still a savage rude clumsy way to treat a problem. In the day and age of lasers and I don’t know what in 50 years Bones would say STOP if he saw today’s root canal procedure.

This is a procedure which is far too:

• Painful
• Complicated
• Expensive
• Invasive
• Clumsy
• Time consuming (4 visits)

If a dentist today would offer a root canal for $300 in two visits all-inclusive he would own the market. There are millions of people walking around with dead roots that flare up from time to time and need a root canal type procedure who would avail themselves if it weren’t so brutal.

I do feel much better, but when I broke my arm I would have felt better if they had amputated it. I wouldn’t have been better off later. The parallel holds.

So, my dentist friends (and relatives) can you figure out how to do this right and make this ordeal workable? Someone will and when then do you will have to. Be a pioneer.

I fear too many dentists look at the root canal as another avenue to paying off the old Mercedes. Follow the money and you will better understand the current state of root canal procedures.