The Dentist Suffers, Too

It hurts dentists as much as it does their patients--but in different places. Last week 18,000 dentists, attending the Greater New York Dental Meeting in Manhattan, extracted that martyrs' comfort from two medicos.

In the first place, said Dr. Herbert C. Fett, director of the department of orthopedic surgery of the Long Island College Hospital, a dentist gets flat feet and bunions from standing up too long. He is also likely to get a bad back from twisting around to peer into reluctant mouths.* Dr. Fett suggested a solution: a sort of dental loveseat built for two, with dentist and patient sitting face to face. If dentists, he said, could perform 80% of their operations sitting, down, it would relieve pressures on their feet and strains on their backs.

Dentists' troubles may bore even deeper, the dentists were informed by Dr. George H. Roberts, clinical professor of medicine at Long Island College of Medicine. In 1946, 273 dentists went to the Mayo Clinic for checkups; doctors there found that 51 were suffering from nervousness, 27 from stomach ulcers. Mayo blamed tension, hurry, skipped lunches, overwork.

* In his recently published Your Teeth: And How to Keep Them (Lantern Press; $3), Dentist Jerome J. Miller reports a successful psychological trick to keep patients happy. They are given an electric switch to hold, told they can stop the drill when it hurts too much. With fear gone, they rarely push the shut-off button.

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