American Pie: The Pain Of Gain
...A recent trip to Europe reminded me that dental care, cosmetic or otherwise doesn’t have quite the same priority there as in the US. The Germans, Belgians and Dutch I observed laughed a lot, especially after a few beers. The unselfconscious, open-mouthed guffaws of my European contemporaries frequently revealed mass molar defections, and a few scattered survivors that were every shade of gray...
But the American pursuit of attractive teeth and a beautiful body involves pain, and parting with a good deal of cash, as John Merchant reveals.
For more of John's supple and healthy words please click on American Pie in the menu on this page.
After a recent visit to my dentist, I began to reflect on the extent to which we Americans subject ourselves to pain and discomfort in order to improve or even maintain our appearance. The forty-five minutes or so that I spent in the chair this time involved a rather grueling extraction, the only purpose of which was to clear the way for a dental bridge. The bridge, in turn, will require grinding away the two adjacent teeth on either side of the cavity in order to anchor the new tooth.
The arithmetic seems all wrong. In effect I am losing three of my own teeth in order to hide a single gap, which in any case isn’t really visible except when I laugh out loud – a rare event these days. The complete procedure from extraction to installation of the bridge is scheduled to take four visits over a ten-week period, and cost a bundle of money that my dental insurance will not cover.
Well OK, so the desirability of having a full set of gnashers isn’t just vanity. Supposedly one gets more nutrition from well-chewed food than the semi-masticated ingestion that results from having more gaps than teeth. But then my father, who had a complete set of false teeth from age thirty, and insisted that everyone at the dinner table chewed their food to extinction before swallowing it, was probably one of the least healthy people I have known.
A recent trip to Europe reminded me that dental care, cosmetic or otherwise doesn’t have quite the same priority there as in the US. The Germans, Belgians and Dutch I observed laughed a lot, especially after a few beers. The unselfconscious, open-mouthed guffaws of my European contemporaries frequently revealed mass molar defections, and a few scattered survivors that were every shade of gray.
This being the case, I’m not aware that Europeans are any less healthy than their American cousins, who typically invest a small fortune in orthodontics. It starts early in life with a small mortgage to purchase braces for a child who has less-than-even teeth, an under or overbite, or some other blight on a less than perfect grin. From there it’s an easy step into whitening, and implant replacements for teeth that just won’t obey the rules; not to mention the routine, boring, (no pun intended) cavity filling, plaque removal etc.
And it isn’t just matters of the mouth that require us to endure pain and discomfort in the name of perfection. Almost any time I go the gym, I hear groans of “It’s not getting any easier,” and I know from personal experience that it doesn’t. There was a time when, if periodically I did not increase the weights on a given machine, I thought I was defaulting and embarking on the slippery slope to hell.
When I reached an exertion level that I thought would be foolhardy to exceed, I anticipated that every successive visit to the gym would become just that little bit less testing, but it hasn’t happened. It’s still just as much of a mental and physical struggle to put myself through the workout routine. And it’s not beauty I’m seeking – it’s much too late for that. I just want to be able to get out of bed or a chair on my own, for as long as I’m able.
But for a younger person with years of promise ahead, there’s whole catalog of painful things you can do to reshape your anatomy, fend off the pull of gravity on your body parts, and deny the desiccation of aging. The daughter of a plastic surgeon I know, secretly had her father straighten her nose. Two days after the operation, all unknowing, I called at the house. Unfortunately for this very narcissistic teenager, she was the only one at home and had to answer the door.
The face that greeted me looked for all the world as though its owner had just gone ten rounds with Sonny Liston – and lost. Aside for the purple bruising from cheekbone to cheekbone, the poor girl’s nostrils were stuffed with plaster! “Probise be you’ll never tell another livig soul,” she said desperately.”
Then there’s the whole business of padding things out and sucking them in. I have seen film footage of implant and liposuction procedures that chilled my blood. Dermobrasion, the polite euphemism for painting corrosive chemicals on your face to burn off the old, wrinkled skin, has to be eye-wateringly painful, and who knows what will be revealed underneath. More, wrinkled skin? You have to hope not.
Imagine a young person considering plastic surgery as a career and knowing little or nothing about it. The career advisor describes the more popular procedures: face-lifts, breast enhancement or reduction, liposuction, nose remodeling etc. The young person responds, “But how will I ever earn a living? Nobody in their right mind would pay me for doing those things to them!”
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