Good thing this isn't an audioblog

I've been exploring the Finnish public dental system recently, and it's quite good. A trouble maker in the back row started becoming very sensitive to heat, which is apparantly, A Bad Thing - it implies inflammation, which precedes big dental trouble, yea even unto the roots. It also makes hot beverage drinking unenjoyable, which is what finally prompted action. It's just wrong when coffee hurts.

There are two kinds of public dental appointments you can make here. A regular "appointment" which will be honoured at some indeterminate time in the next three or four months, or an urgent appointment, which gets seen to that day, at the University dental clinic. Since it sounded like I'd have an abcess within four months, I qualified for the fast-track.

I don't know if you've been to university dental clinics, but they're not for the gimlet-phobic. Row after row of half-hidden surgery, the air thick with whining and sucking and scraping... and screams. Little, girlish screams, I couldn't contain myself. They had all sorts of new-fangled things - a little electric zapper to check if a tooth was alive, a bitey-downey thingie (which perhaps has a technical name) for testing for root infection I guess, and a funky portable x-ray machine, swinging around the cubicle on a boom. Madness! I had a little photo of my teeth in my pocket for the whole weekend. I was drilled twice in the same tooth, about half an hour before the anaesthetic kicked in, then had the holes temporarily filled, and was given a magic piece of paper, imbued with mystic powers of referral.

The public dental system here was expanded to cover an additional 130,000 adults last year. The public dentists can't handle all this work by themselves, so the public system outsources explicit work to contracted private dentists, in my case properly filling the holes, and dealing with a fracture I have in another tooth (from when I tried to eat a computer-case-screw sandwich. Don't try this at home.) It all seems wonderful, but as usual with public systems, there are inefficiencies. At no stage was I given a general check-up. Should the private dentist notice half my mouth is about to become infected with tooth-plague*, he can't do anything about it. If he deviates from the contract drawn up by the public dentist, the victim has to pay through the teeth, so to speak. So, though by this time next week I'll have had three dentist appointments, I still feel compelled to book another one, for sometime early next year, just to make sure everything is ok.


Kinda boring, but maybe useful for someone that blunders into this in about ten years with a toothache in Helsinki. Hmm, on that note, the dentist's number can be found at www.hel.fi

*I'm very proud I resisted the urge to scamper whimsically down the Zombie-Tooth narrative path that beckoned just there.