Pain and Geekery
So, I had a horrendous cavity in a wisdom tooth. It was extremely painful, so I made an appointment to get it pulled this morning. I wanted to keep the tooth, but it was so bad that it crumbled as it was being pulled out (gross!), so I have no trophy of my suffering except for a giant hole in my gums.
Anyway, as I was laying there, numbed up and having a woman pull and grunt and yank and push and wiggle on my rather stubborn tooth, my mind started to wander. First of all, I was annoyed that she was talking to the assistant about how some woman on Oprah experienced past lives and talked to dead people or some other nonsense, and was trying to take my mind off of that. (Oddly, having a doctor that believes in that crap is more obnoxious than having bones yanked out of my face...) So, as I was trying not to think about the annoying things taking place in and around me, I started wondering about medicine and why we haven't made any real advances in so long.
For instance, why do my teeth need to be wiggled and yanked and pulled and cracked, etc with a glorified pair of sterilized pliers? Shouldn't we have some better way? We still have to be cut open, and we still bleed all over the place - our organs hang out during surgery, which often takes quite a long time. Seems ridiculous. Shouldn't we have transporters that can remove organs and teeth and put new ones in? Shouldn't we have some special lasers that can do repairs without cutting the skin? Seriously, what are the scientists doing with their time????
Think about it - we wouldn't need a cure for cancer if we could just transport cancer cells out while simultaneously transporting good cells in! Let's get on that!
So, I had a horrendous cavity in a wisdom tooth. It was extremely painful, so I made an appointment to get it pulled this morning. I wanted to keep the tooth, but it was so bad that it crumbled as it was being pulled out (gross!), so I have no trophy of my suffering except for a giant hole in my gums.
Anyway, as I was laying there, numbed up and having a woman pull and grunt and yank and push and wiggle on my rather stubborn tooth, my mind started to wander. First of all, I was annoyed that she was talking to the assistant about how some woman on Oprah experienced past lives and talked to dead people or some other nonsense, and was trying to take my mind off of that. (Oddly, having a doctor that believes in that crap is more obnoxious than having bones yanked out of my face...) So, as I was trying not to think about the annoying things taking place in and around me, I started wondering about medicine and why we haven't made any real advances in so long.
For instance, why do my teeth need to be wiggled and yanked and pulled and cracked, etc with a glorified pair of sterilized pliers? Shouldn't we have some better way? We still have to be cut open, and we still bleed all over the place - our organs hang out during surgery, which often takes quite a long time. Seems ridiculous. Shouldn't we have transporters that can remove organs and teeth and put new ones in? Shouldn't we have some special lasers that can do repairs without cutting the skin? Seriously, what are the scientists doing with their time????
Think about it - we wouldn't need a cure for cancer if we could just transport cancer cells out while simultaneously transporting good cells in! Let's get on that!
I agree. And hello, gynecology. Forcing apart our delicate anatomy with a torture device invented by the ANCIENT ROMANS so you can poke around up there? Wtf?