Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, a recent Fox Family Channel movie, shows a male dentist hypnotizing a woman. He flashes a light in her dull, unblinking eyes. He waves around a pencil-like wand equipped with a sparkly crystal where the eraser should be. "You’re getting sleepier," he intones. Then, instead of firing up the handpiece, this dentist orders his zombied-out patient to invite him over for dinner.

Maybe it wasn’t a big deal, but I’ve lived through Marathon Man, which burned a scorch mark in the American imagination big enough to keep patients shying away from their dentists for twenty years. Why is it so hard for the entertainment moguls to get their dentist portrayals right? The short answer is, because they don’t want to. Movies, television shows and novels may distort dentistry on purpose to suit the narrative needs of amusement. Dentistry is an easy target. For one thing, there’s the schadenfreunde thing: the public is entertained by others’ pain. For another, satire is an equalizer, diffusing fear and making authority figures less intimidating.

But there may be least three other reasons dentists get misinterpreted—because of things we dentists do ourselves. First, we work alone. Dentists seldom practice in hospital or group settings. No one is around to accurately observe.

Second, we are secretive. It’s not that we have something to hide, but more that we tend to seek shelter, like soldiers in a foxhole. Have you ever hesitated before revealing your profession at a cocktail party? Any dentist a year or two out of school has already spent more than a few social evenings performing impromptu consultations and defending root canal fees.

Third, we want our efforts to look effortless. We attract patients with a gentle, painless touch. But we may inadvertently give the wrong idea. A teenager recently said to me, "Dentistry’s easy, right? I mean, once you get through dental school, you have it made."

Dentistry may not ever get a Marcus Welby and George Clooney probably won’t play a TV prosthodontist. But someday maybe the entertainment industry could get dentistry right. We could help.

Complaining won’t do it. Representatives of organized dentistry wrote a letter a few years back to movie executives protesting increased smoking in the movies. The execs laughed.

If we want to get an accurate reading on dentistry, we should give one. We ought to practice being open and forthright. Dentistry is difficult. It is medicine that involves a lot of surgery, which sometimes can go wrong. The body is incredibly complicated, especially the head, which houses a enormous concentration of nerves. The mouth houses organs that heal poorly.

Next, we need to stand up straight. "My son’s a very successful oral surgeon," a mother boasts to a young woman she meets on the subway in a recent Head and Shoulders shampoo ad. We should be as proud of dentistry as our moms are. Dentistry is expensive, but it is not overpriced. Good dental care is a blessing to the public. ("And we pray," reads a segment of an anonymous internet poem called A Prayer for the Children, "for those whose nightmares come in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist...")

One more thing: We can relax and find humor in dentistry. A sheet-metal sign shaped like a molar hanging at a dental office in New Mexico is a favorite of mine. Creaking in the breeze, it startles with its punning ironies. It reads, going down the roots, "Less pain dentist...purse extractions, x-rated rays, London bridges, British crowns, land fillings, sports caps, hot plates." That doesn’t we can get too relaxed. William Goldman reportedly credited his idea for the evil Nazi dentist in Marathon Man to a suggestion from his own periodontist.

From Inscriptions, Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, 15(1):4, July 2000.  Dr. Eric Curtis is author of Hand to Mouth: Essays on the Art of Dentistry, Quintessence, 2002.

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