Anger Management

I’ve been thinking about how fortunate we are to have lawyers. People are only capable of being the target of so much fear, hate, and anger before they lose it completely and are put away someplace where they are denied access to sharp instruments and their own armament. Our friends the lawyers go out of their way to divert some of this heat off dentistry, directing it instead to their own broad shoulders. Lawyer-bashing frequently takes the form of crude lawyer jokes, which -- ha ha, I'm sorry, I really shouldn’t say this -- are right on and pretty funny. Lawyers can take it, though, and join in the fun all the time by filing $20 million lawsuits against their tormentors and even each other sometimes -- just to show what sports they are.

We don’t have this luxury to relieve tensions in dentistry. Even though I haven’t heard any good anti-dentist jokes during my lifetime, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of animosity, fear, and loathing out there taking its toll on us.

As compleat professionals, we have had to learn to understand our own anger and how we can cope with it. Keeping it bottled up inside eventually turns us into bitter, hateful people fit only to work in the complaint departments of major retail stores.

It is perfectly normal to experience anger when, say, a patient refuses X-rays you believe are necessary and he implies your primary mission in life is to render him penniless for your own greedy ends. It is not considered professional, however, to throw him bodily out of the office and pray that if he ever does come back, he’ll have interproximal cavities larger than basketballs. No, what you have to do is smile understandingly and sublimate your mounting tensions by one of several methods.

Some practitioners have a punching bag in their lab. There they can go back and lambaste it a few times before it reciprocates, loosening a couple of centrals or fracturing one of their hand bones. I have found that a preferable method is to kick the bejeezus out of one of those inflatable dummies that always return to an upright position after they have been knocked over. Mine came with a complete kit of interchangeable visages such as lab faces, staff faces, IRS and OSHA faces, and a nice selection of generic patient faces.

The family dentist we had when I was young (At that time he didn’t know he was a "family dentist." He was just a dentist like every other dentist.) had trouble dealing with his practice-generated stresses. With enough provocation, like my biting off the marginal ridge of his freshly-placed amalgam, he would gather up a handful of instruments and fling them to the floor, accompanied by fine examples of his colorful vocabulary. I vowed that if I ever became a dentist, I would never have single-ended tools like his, but would go for the double-ended variety that would at least last me through two outbursts.

I have determined the average dentist’s day is made up of two or three really good things, about seven to 10 really wretched things, and the balance of things so boring and enervating that when he gets home at night and his spouse says, "How was your day?" he can’t remember who came in or what he did. He may remember how many times he went back and kicked his dummy because those memories are not recessive like the good things, which happen so infrequently.

If you are not fortunate enough to have a dummy at your office, it is not a good idea to mistake your spouse for one. This leads to a lot of microwaveable food substitutes in studio apartments and overdrawn checkbooks. Members of your staff make poor dummy substitutes also. They have been known to just up and quit for no good reason other than the fact that you couldn’t remember their name and referred to them in public as "the girl."

So you see that even if anger is officially identified as one of the basic human emotions, you have to ask yourself if an ill-fitting partial or a kid who eats his braces for breakfast is really more important than trade meetings among the world’s leaders or Senate hearings on health care reform. Yes, you bet it is, and that’s why I wish to announce the availability of a large supply of double-ended instruments for flinging purposes. Both ends are already missing, but they are otherwise like new and much less likely to impale a tender piece of your anatomy.