ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

A few months ago I went to the dentist for the first time in, say, six years and the whole time I was there they played me videos about proper dental health and how you can only be really confident about life if you have this thing called the Hydrofloss. I told the dental hygienists that I have a Waterpik I use religiously and they more or less explained that unfortunately that is totally unacceptable if I truly care about not letting all my teeth rot out of their sockets. The Hydrofloss is a device that to me seems very similar to the Waterpik I already own, but as the hygienists explained it is much, much better, for two reasons: (1) the Hydrofloss is something like four times more costly than the Waterpik, and being expensive guarantees that something is good and (2) the Hydrofloss features magnetic technology that is supposed to reverse the surface polarity of the water used to clean your mouth, thereby reversing the surface polarity of your mouth itself, thereby giving bacteria and other foul company nothing to which they may cling.

This sounds suspiciously like totally crazy pseudoscience to me, but they assured me that even though the dentist says I have teeth that are in stunningly good condition considering the dental care drought I went through, now that I know about Hydrofloss and have not purchased one, my teeth will sense this unwillingness on my part and will let me down by allowing themselves to decay rapidly. At least that seemed to be their logic.

Then they told me that I have 14 cavities which will cost upwards of $2,000 to repair and gave me three (3!) order forms for the Hydrofloss, in addition to inviting me to add a Hydrofloss to my tab as I paid for the services they had provided.

That was a couple months ago now and so far I have not purchased the Hydrofloss and I have also not purchased the recommended dental work they prescribed, partly because I don’t have that kind of cabbage at the moment. But they’ve been sending me increasingly impatient reminders to let me know that it is DEFINITELY TIME FOR YOU TO COME SPEND SOME MONEY HERE, THANKS AND WE LOOOOOVE MONEY BY THE WAY. And I haven’t replied yet and don’t plan to until I find out whether this crazy magnet Hydrofloss thing is totally bogus or what. Because if it’s as fake as it sounds, I know I can’t trust these people.

But I don’t like being in this state of limbo about whether my teeth are going to rot out or something. I haven’t gotten a second opinion or a degree in dental medicine at this point, so I have no way of knowing how full of shit they are about this. It sounds trivial but this is actually a source of no small anxiety to me because I believe in oral hygiene the way that some people believe that Mohammad is the one true prophet.

The Hydrofloss website doesn’t even look 25% as good as Amazon.com, which to me is a bad sign, and it requires you to submit your dentist’s information before you can even find out any information about their product, another suspicious sign. They obviously are trying to keep anybody from finding out the awful truth about Hydrofloss before their dentist has had a chance to thoroughly indoctrinate them.

So in the meanwhile I’m worrying about my teeth—which look totally normal by the way—turning black and falling out of my skull, or still worse, being infected with DEADLY SUBGINGIVAL DISEASE which can shorten the human lifespan by up to 8 years! If I find out from another dentist that my teeth aren’t actually committing suicide right here in my mouth, and that regular use of my Waterpik is a perfectly acceptable alternative to the Hydrofloss so-called “new generation of oral irrigation”, then I think that the current climate with respect to litigation will accept that I should have the right to sue my old dentist for lying to me about their stupid magnetic technology.

I am never going back to see those fear-mongers again, no matter how many “urgent” postcards they send me!