DentalBuzz - a jolt of current…

Dear Santa,

This is so hard; I didn’t know who else I could write that could help me in my dilemma. My college finals are over and I recently went to oral surgeon’s office about my wisdom teeth. The plan is to have them taken out right after Christmas. The deal is, they’re not hurting. In fact, they are so buried in the bone that they aren’t even close to my other molars.

The weird thing was when I went to the oral surgeon for a consultation, he told me that when he took the wisdom teeth out, he could send all of them to a cryogenics lab where they would extract my stem cells and freeze them in case I needed them in the future to grow new nerve, cartilage, bone, a liver, or even a new heart.

I thought about it a lot, I really did, Santa. Did my research, too and realized that you’ve got some experience dealing with people who want to deep freeze everything they can touch. Here’s what I came up with:

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Nice product presentation on the left, don’t you think?

Now what exactly are they? The latest in clear maxillary molar implants?

Wrong. You stick them in your ears. You. The dental professional.  Yes, you, the person who is losing their hearing and doesn’t mind spending about a grand to protect what’s left of your stereocilia.

Not losing your hearing? Then prove it to yourself. Take the test below in a quiet place. Naturally you need to have speakers turned up to about medium to hear all the frequencies. The higher ranges are what are known as the “mosquito” ringtones, which are outside the audible range of people over 30, and often used by the young-uns to send stealth text messages to each other.

There have been a few inconclusive studies published in the dental journals this decade about the concern that high decibel-level noise is an occupational hazard in dental practices. We thought that now would be a good time to gather a little of our own anecdotal evidence, and see how dentists’ hearing stacks up to the general population.

Play each of these tones to yourself and then please fill out the anonymous survey below so that we can publish the results in a future post.  

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You’ve watched way too many movies.

If you’ve got images of Star Trek’s Geordi LaForge, nerdy sidekicks in 80’s new-wave glasses a la John Hughes’ teen films, or the horrors of Total Recall memory augmentation burned into your retinas, then please, let those prejudiced views slide gently outside of your peripheral vision and consider that Virtual Reality glasses may actually be good and cheap enough these days to make them part of your patient comfort collection.

 We want to heavily discourage dentists from spending thousands of dollars in wall or ceiling-mounted screens just so that patients can have something to look at besides your ugly mug while you’re fixing their teeth.

We’re not kidding.

The problem with screens like that, during dentistry, is that your head keeps getting in the way while your patient is trying to remain distracted.

There’s lots of other details that can end up complicating the whole thing, so instead of making this a gripe session about overbloated dental amenities, we’ve created a few tracks that will make it inexpensive and easy for you to start using VR glasses in your practice.

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Seriously tweaked patients are bringing their iPhone accessories to dentists nationwide.

The newest iPhone almost fits in the original iPhone dock. Almost, but… no.  And MobileMe still doesn’t sync iTunes remotely, so users are either stuck with purchasing the 3G dock for $29 or sticking it to Apple by creatively finding ways to carve out the plastic edges of their old ones.

Desperate for something to drill on, dentists affected by the recent economic downturn have begun aiming their burs outside of their patients’ mouths and are now the prime facilitators of this dock modding craze.

The unnamed dentist pictured above performed the service as part of a “teeth fixin” deal. He is now questioning his decision to allow photography during the modification due to the large number of geeks currently hanging out in his reception area.

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Our resident gadget expert,The Computeritized Dentist, just wants his network to run properly and leaves the technical specs to the geeks. We asked him to read an important message that we got from Microsoft today.

The Computeritized Dentist will now translate this June 24, 2008 letter from Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte detailing the fate of Windows XP, among other things:

“Today, almost every dental office in the world that is computerized uses a PC with our software platform. And unless you want to ditch everything you’re already using, you’re stuck with us - and all the peripherals that try to get along with us.

“Windows XP is a dinosaur, and you may have heard that it is scheduled to be installed in the Museum of Planned Obsolescence on June 30, 2008.  Ha, ha, there’s really no such museum; that was just a clever metaphor that I thought of myself. 

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