Body

Robert E. Horseman, DDS

     The human body. This God-given temple of the soul.  Treasure it from birth, nourish it with oat bran and wheat germ, stoke it with vitamins and minerals, baste it with Oil of Olay, this marvelous machine.  Give it massage and aerobic exercises, treat it to Nautilus and every other body-enhancing gadget from the fertile minds of man and Elizabeth Arden, then protect it from every kind of stress you can and you know what?----that sucker will die anyway.

     It's ironic, like learning that Ponce de Leon, after years of searching for the Fountain of Youth, finally finds it just off I-95 and approaches the attendant for permission to bathe.  "No problemo," says the Seminole-in-charge (sic), handing him a towel.  "Fifty pesos and don't forget to take off..."

But Ponce, eager to enjoy the fruits of eternal youth, jumps in still clad in his armor and plummets to the bottom like a safe.

     Well, what did you expect?  When you signed up for dental school they didn't mention the nature of the work? C'mon, everybody knows about the postural and visual defects that begin about the second semester and go down hill from there.  You didn't think for a minute, moron-like, that you were going to sit in a high-back leather chair issuing orders, giving dictation and doing three martini lunches, did you?

     No, it's our lot in life to give new meaning to the biblical phrase "laying on of hands."  To do this requires that we get fit and remain so even if it means eventually questioning the validity of the whole concept.

     Initiated by dentists still young and naive enough to think they could reverse this deterioration, the on-going fitness craze that has gripped this country for the last couple decades shows no sign of abating.  Orthopedic offices throughout the nation are littered with shin splints, torn tendons and sorely abused bodies.  What we've got to do is sort out the things that will cripple or maim us, thus making us ex-dentists and seek out those things that will give us a better chance at fulfilling our destinies.  The following information will not help a bit:

     Right off the bat, so to speak, that eliminates baseball as one of the sports involving the use of hands, our most productive appendages, or at least the one we're most interested in here.  Lose the use of your hands and what's left for you---nothing but the lecture circuit, a scam that's already been thought of by hundreds of your colleagues to the point where in a few years there will be nobody left to do the actual work; they're all out lecturing to each other.

     So let's see what might contribute to your fitness program without the danger of forcing you out to tell other dentists how to bleach teeth.

GOLF

     Golf gets you into the open air and it's where patients think you are on Wednesdays anyway, but that's about all you can say for golf.  It is necessary to humiliate yourself by wearing ridiculous pants and impractical shoes whose only other use is tenderizing cheaper cuts of meat.  You sit on your dental stool, you sit in your golf cart.  You try to get a small object into a hole and you have a level of frustration as high or higher than in your practice.  Golf does not contribute to your fitness, but forces you to recite long, boring anecdotes about your experiences that are only exceeded by those of your fellow golfers.

BOWLING

     Forget bowling, too.  Using three of your vital fingers to propel a large leaden sphere in an effort to flatten ten objects just so you can do it over again and again to the accompaniment of gawdawful noise makes no sense at all.  The requisite costume is an embarrassment from the garish shoes to the sport shirts with embroidered advertising for brake relinings or fast food joints.  Bowling would be bad enough if you got to do it alone, but tradition requires you to do it in concert with a bunch of bozos whose motivation is based entirely on getting a night out.

TENNIS

     Tennis used to be a gentleman's game.  From the crisp, white, impeccable outfits to the strict adherence to manners and tradition, it seemed to fulfill all the requirements. Even though the dominant forearm risked resembling Popeye's while the other one remained like Olive Oyl's, it was still a fairly civilized sport. This has changed.  If you've watched any tennis lately, Andre Agassi, with his sartorial statement, is now a role model, a tennis ball traveling at speeds in excess of 120 mph can alter your physical well being forever and there is way too much sweating and grunting.  Umpires risk getting a biff in the snoot for a bad call and people have been known to get stabbed. It became apparent just after the game was first invented that running around in the hot sun chasing a little ball was a dumb thing to do. That's why the scoring was altered to jump from 1 to 15 to 40 just to get the game over with as fast as possible

Dentists are advised to take up ping-pong, which is the adult version of tennis without the sun.

SCUBA DIVING

     Younger dentists who miss the excitement of doing wheelies on a motorcycle no hands, no helmet, no brains or racing around in their father's Oldsmobile without benefit of functioning thought processes, frequently take up scuba diving as an antidote to the deadly confinement of the operatory.

     Unless you live in Tahiti, Hawaii, the Bahamas or Grand Caymans, you will experience only grinding regret every time you look in your closet at the jillions of dollars worth of wet suits, regulators, masks, fins, booties, hoods, gloves, depth gauges, tanks and special wrist watches the size of a manhole cover with 89 functions, none of which reveal the correct time---all these things getting dusty from disuse.  I realize that to a dedicated scuba diver this is all offset by the sight of a fish going by in its own element deep in the murky depths of water two degrees above freezing, but to a rational person, thirty minutes of a Jacques Cousteau rerun should suffice.

SKIING

     You would think that a dentist, even a young one without the wisdom that comes from years of listening to patients' lies about their flossing habits, would see the idiocy of falling totally out of control down the face of a mountain while wearing seven-foot boards strapped to boots the size of microwave ovens on his feet.  Boards that he waxes to make him fall even faster, for God's sake.  Well, lots of dentists do this.  You can observe them around the resorts' bars telling long, boring anecdotes about their rotator cuffs and spiral fractures.  It's the only sport open to dentists that requires more expensive gear than scuba diving.  The cost of stuff needed for a family of four to just get to the falling down stage of skiing, exceeds that of the S & L bailouts.  Skiing does not contribute to fitness, it cancels it.

JOGGING

     Nobody jogs anymore.  I just put that in here so that if you are still jogging with the misguided idea that it's doing you some good, this is your notice to quit it.  Power walking is where it's at now.  With your $125 special cross-training walking shoes that have the Koreans giggling all the way to the bank, you'll discover power walking is to plain strolling as St. Vitus's Dance is to Barcalounging.  If you insist on power walking, do it in the early hours or after dark so that passing motorists won't lose control with laughter and crash into light poles.

     That doesn't leave us with much.  Certainly dentists with IQs superior to  paramecia should eschew pumping iron.  That branch of insanity will instantly identify any aneurysm you may have in your body, besides running the risk of making you appear to have had badly managed silicone injections inflicted on areas where you don't even have muscles and never did.