Attitudes 3

This story is about my elder brother, my friend and I. Actually there are two stories with so much parallelism, that I have clubbed them together. In the vacation after my first year as a medical student in Mumbai, I went to see my elder brother in Pune. He was a dentist, a fine one, and I needed to have a couple of cavities in my molars filled. So we decided to combine a family reunion and my treatment. My brother was fine fellow, but had a vice that he could not give up. He smoked, often excessively, until it finally did him in one day. His theory was that one had to smoke in a medical college or a dental college. My mother used to tell him repeatedly to stop smoking, but to no avail. He had predicted to her that even I would start smoking when I went to a medical college. When I sat down on his dental chair and opened my mouth wide as per his instructions, he put in a mirror directing it to the back of my lower incisors and saying “this is where you find carbon deposits due to smoking’. Unfortunately he said that first and looked afterwards. Since I did not smoke (and still don’t), he could find no carbon. He changed the angle of the mirror and tried again, but could not find any carbon. His face was crestfallen. Finally he pointed the mirror to my molars that needed treatment, and spoke no more about smoking. Many years later, I went to my friend who was my classmate in science college before I joined a medical college and he a dental college. I needed to have a root canal done on the molar that had been filled by my brother before. My brother was no more, and anyway I would not have gone to Pune just to have a root canal done. I have a upper third molar (so called wisdom tooth) that is malaligned, so that there is a gap between it and the second molar. I am aware of the fact and make it a point to have that and any other gaps properly cleaned after every meal. My dentist friend seemed to be in an educational mood, and he put a pointed probe in that gap, making a drawing out movement and saying, ‘this is the gap that collects food which leads to dental caries’. He put the extracted end of the probe in front of our eyes, to show me the food that he had scooped out and to admire his clinical abilities himself. Unfortunately there was nothing to show. The end of the probe was clean, because the gap had been clean. His face was as crestfallen as my brother’s had been many years ago. He had put himself in a situation that he seemed unable to get out of. Finally I told him I cleaned that gap and all other teeth after every meal to prevent dental caries. Then he went about the business of doing my root canal. I don’t know why these two dentists, both of them quite close to me, had such conviction that they would be right and I wrong, when I had done nothing to provoke such a feeling. I also don’t know why they had to speak first and then look for validity of their statements. Did it have anything to do with my personality? If so, how? I do not adopt a superior attitude any time that people would like to find a flaw in me somewhere. Or do all dentists do the same thing to all their patients?