gimme a couple thousand $$ or suffer pain, and perhaps die

[miriam_e]

Words uttered by Mafia protection racketeers? Nope. Dentist.
I have an abscess and it is unbelievably painful. Worse, they can kill. I can uderstand that because my brain is all fuzzy with the poison from it. They want a couple of thousand dollars to do something about it. I don't know how they get away with it.

I know. I've heard the arguments. The poor dears spend years learning their trade. But writers, artists, and computer programmers spend all their lives learning their craft. At the end of some years of learning then a dentist, so long as he has reasonable coordination and intelligence can be successful at dentistry. A writer or artist can study all their life and no matter how smart they are they're never guaranteed success.

Computer programming is still more art than craft. You can learn the basics of it in a course or from books, but it still doesn't guarantee that you'll be much good, even if you are brilliant. Even the "obvious" advantage of strongly typed computer languages has recently been shown to be wrong.

For a little time I went to a dentist in Melbourne whose fillings had a bad habit of falling out afterward. Did he give refunds? No way. Dentists giving refunds??? Who ever heard of such a thing?

Yeah I'm feeling sour. Half my face feels like it is rotting away in blinding pain. I can hardly think.

Comments

abscess

[(Anonymous)]

Bad news Miriam. Is there another dentist you could visit?
MFG

Re: abscess

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:) Yeah, I went to another. He was plain rude and used a weird kind of moral judgement on me. I'd dulled some of the pain with oil of cloves and in using it a number of times had burned some of the skin in my mouth. He tried to make out I was somehow guilty of... I'm not sure what... wanting to lessen the agony? What an arrogant moron. I tell ya, I like dentists less and less. In the end all he did was do another x-ray, say "Yes there is an abscess" and not do anything. Well, he prescribed different antibiotics -- ones that worked this time.

Bring on the robotic revolution when we can all have little devices that crawl about inside our mouths and fix our teeth. Let all dentists go broke, I say.

Army Dentists

[jsonstein.livejournal.com]

Daddy Was a Lifer

My father was a career officer in the Army, so I mis-spent my youth going to Army dentists. Army dentists in the 50s and 60s tended to be straight out of training, and they became even more cranky than normal dentists from dealing with hordes of draftees. Chairside manner? riiiiight.

I must admit, my adult experiences with dentists have not left me feeling much different about them. And of course, the more the dentist is an aversive phenom, the harder it is to get oneself to visit regularly for preventative care. Ugh, round and round we go.

Re: Army Dentists

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

Like I said to Michael above, bring on the robotic revolution when we can all have little devices that crawl about inside our mouths, fix our teeth, and put dentists out of work.

Re: Army Dentists

[jsonstein.livejournal.com]

as long as they understand the differences between the "good" and "bad" things in my mouth... I worry about autonomous devices

Re: Army Dentists

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Heheheh :)
Me too. That wouldn't be much different from a visit to the dentist. No I'd expect that I'd be watching what they do and would be able to say "No, not that one. It is more to the left." Perhaps not in words, maybe with a joystick and good/bad buttons, but that the robots would be to a large degree autonomous. The user would simply guide them. I wouldn't feel too happy about letting loose little machines with drills in my mouth unless I could keep an eye on them... at least until AI becomes superior to human intelligence. On a good day I figure that's quite a way off; on a bad day, when I read about politicians or religious fundamentalists, I feel AI might not have so far to go after all.

Re: Army Dentists

[jsonstein.livejournal.com]

> No I'd expect that I'd be watching what they do

ugh
I've always wished to be somewhere else
when medical stuff is happening to my bod

> wouldn't feel too happy about letting loose little machines
> with drills in my mouth unless I could keep an eye on them...

you ever read "Diamond Age"?? (I think that was the title)

> at least until AI becomes superior to human intelligence.
> On a good day I figure that's quite a way off; on a bad day,
> when I read about politicians or religious fundamentalists,
> I feel AI might not have so far to go after all.

hehe
I have a chatterbot on my RIT website...
prompt *used* to say "Talk with an artificial intelligence"
not many folks used it
then I changed the prompt to read
"chat with an Artificial Stoopid"
and more folks began using it
<grin/>

jeffs