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Is it a stereotype if it's the TRUTH?

Is there any truth to the stereotype that the British have 'bad teeth'?

As an American, I can attest to the fact that having 'good teeth', is important for people here. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it's a class thing, and because of that, people would be hard put to just accept having a missing tooth or visible decay for fear of being thought a hillbilly. Crooked teeth, unless they're terribly mangled, are acceptable. I spent three years in braces as a kid because of my awful wonky teeth. Most kids here go through braces, though. And dental check-ups are normally every six months. So as you can see... teeth are important. And I think that's part of the reason that we've got an unfair stereotype of British teeth.

British dental care can be very expensive. We live in a country that has free medical care but not free dental (the NHS subsidises it but patients still pay around 80% ) and I know from my work as a dental receptionist that people *really* begrudge paying for dental care, especially for check ups where they perceive that nothing was actually done. There are insurance programs but very few people pay into them, and private care is prohibitvely expensive.

A lot of people only go near a dentist when they are in so much pain they are desperate. It also doesn't help that NHS dentists can only charge a fixed set of fees and so do the minimum work necessary to maximise their profits, sadly. NHS dentists have a duty to make patients "dentally fit" not to make them aesthetically pleasing - caps and veneers will usually be deemed purely cosmetic and therefore not available on the NHS and so cost a bomb; in cases where they are necessary for the treatment plan they will almost certainly be inferior quality to keep down costs. Many dentists are leaving the NHS too, meaning it can be very hard to even get an appointment in some parts of the country if you can't afford to pay privately.

On top of this current situation there were some right dodgy dentists at large overthe last few decades, many elderly people have no teeth left after dentists pulled rotten teeth rather than fixing them. Several patients in there 70s and older have told me that they were edentulous by age 40, some even before that. Today at least that doesn't happen but the fear those people instilled in the population puts off more people than the price does.

As a society then we have a history of poor dental care (which is generally improving with each generation thanks to better education and toothcare products) and of failing to correct cosmetic problems because it's not deemed financially viable for most. So yeah, we probably do have worse teeth as a nation than America.



This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under Stamps-01-01. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.