A child of the ’80s, my baby teeth were made primarily of Tang and Fruit Stripe gum. Going to see the dentist in Dallas was terrifying, their toolkits filled with aggressive Waterpiks and drills and that weird mouth mold clay that had to harden inside your mouth, forcing you to gag for an eternity to take an impression of your teeth. All teeth-care incentives were nightmare-based. “I didn’t floss” was the headliner of my first confession sacrament at St. Rita Catholic Church. The priest gave me three Hail Marys and a travel-size bottle of brown Listerine. (Back then, we didn’t have the luxury of Cool Mint Listerine. It was character-building, burn-your-mouth-out, alcohol-forward Listerine only. You could spit it out only after you cried a little.)
But now Dallas dentistry is all about making the visit more comfortable. There’s an espresso machine and an arcade and someone making balloon animals in the lobby of the pediatric dentist’s office of my youth. Plus, everything has gone digital. My 9-year-old needed a retainer, and instead of putting him through an unreasonable amount of discomfort, they just took some pictures and 3D-printed the perfect bite-glamorizer for him. He even got to pick the color. (Obviously he chose glow-in-the-dark, which is factually the best of all colors.)
We’re trying to rebrand dentistry with a new image that’s less dentist from Little Shop of Horrors, more Nordstrom spa. If you’re reading this in a dentist’s office right now, they’re probably about to offer you a set of headphones with soothing playlists to muffle the high-pitched squeals of the drills. Dallas Functional Dentistry’s website says their office even boasts “Soothing textures & colors to feel comfortable and at home” and also “local artwork.” Not sure what percentage of people are drawn to visit a dentist based on knowing that the walls will be cloaked in Sherwin-Williams’ Evergreen Fog and their aunt’s acrylic paint pour art, but y’all are the experts.
Maybe dentists are going overboard trying to make us comfortable because Dallas is so stressed out all the time. Dr. Randy Sanovich, oral maxillofacial surgeon at Dallas Surgical Arts, says, “Our TMJ Botox treatments went up 60 percent in the last year and a half.” You’re grinding your teeth, Dallas. You gotta cut that out. It’s hard to guess exactly what we could have been worrying about in this perfect world, but it had to be the stress of parking our own cars at the dentist, right?