Gulliver goes Dental

Kevin Lewis titles his column in the latest Dentistry as "Mistaken Identity". His main point appears to be that the system NHS dentists work under is wrong, but the media continue to portray dentists as the problem without drawing sufficient attention to the former. I think he is broadly correct, and this is supported by the recent Dispatches programme. The current system, with its inherent lunacies, is not fit for purpose. Instead, the programme wandered around like some deluded Gulliver taking the side of the Houyhnhnms who think all is good and fine, and portraying dentists as some sort of collective Yahoo culture. Nor does the Swiftian literary allusion end there. Those who have read "A Tale of a Tub" will know it to be partly a parody on credulity, and the comparison here is that the programme makers wanted to, or appear to have wanted to believe that dentists were more wrong than the system in which they operate. Of course, credulous programme makers can cascade their output onto credulous viewers, and before we know it we can have a meme on our hands. A saviour in all of this is that so much of the public are not as credulous as much of the media would like them to be.

We need good investigative journalism in our culture. But my report card from this programme says: must try harder.