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Tooth Scaries
Dentists Bite Back at Phobic Patients
by Barbara Hoffman
If the drill and pointy tools weren't frightening enough, there are those movies that make you terrified to go within a mile of a dentist's office.
First came Roger Corman's "Little Shop of Horrors," with Jack Nicholson as a nitrous-oxide-addled masochist - then the remake, with Steve martin as the white-coated sadist.
Next up: "Marathon Man," in which Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist aimed his drill at Dustin Hoffman's pearly whites, hissing, "Is it safe? Is it safe?"
Hardly. Now playing is the latest oral-hygiene horror flick - "The Secret Lives of Dentists," with Hope Davis and Campbell Scott - whose trays of scary tools and close-ups of open-mouthed gore can set anyone's teeth on edge.
Even the dentists'.
"It basically portrayed a typical, white-knuckled patient in the chair," grouses Dr. Clifford Williams, a restorative and cosmetic dentist in Manhattan.
But for him, the most painful part of the film was the infidelity between the married leads.
"It could have been two lawyers, two veterinarians," Williams says. "I don't know why they brought dentists into it!"
Nevertheless, dental phobia is a very real problem, with serious consequences. An estimated 120 million Americans are so afraid of going to the dentist that they don't - paving the way for root canals or worse.
Dr. Louis Siegelman, who specializes in apprehensive patients, has known some who've gone literally decades between visits.
"I have patients who glue their teeth in, who've made their own teeth out of wood - out of rulers, out of wax," he says.
One woman's teeth had gone so brown that she'd put little pieces of paper towels over them before she left the house.
After she left his office, he'd find them in his waiting room.
("You laugh," Dr. Siegelman chided. "But these patients are my jewels!") Dr. Williams recalls patients who've learned to talk with their hands in front of their mouths - and men who've grown big bushy mustaches that effectively hide their upper teeth.
He's also seen procrastinators who've simply run out of excuses.
Some work in the same building Williams does, and they've canceled repeatedly for all kinds of reasons: emergency meetings, delayed flights - even a death in the family.
Which makes it all the more embarrassing, the dentist says, when he his staff runs into them in the lobby, smoking.