Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school!
YAY! What a horror story.
One could read the story as "people had to do what they had to in order to survive and help their fellow humans". But no, you choose to focus on "Soviet dentistry hurrr" without knowing a thing about it.
The article is also guilty. It talks at length about this book with a story of horrible torture that is entirely made up. Essentially that book is a collection of every stereotype and conspiracy mashed into one. The modern-day equivalent would be a book about how QAnon and Pizzagate are real. But no, the author says "the book is a lie, but Russia is bad so it's justified", missing the obvious: the book is trash.
But large chunks of it did become part of the USSR, as the article points out very clearly:
Zosia grew up fatherless in Vilnius, which between the wars belonged to Poland and was called Wilno. On 1 September 1939, she was just about to start her first year of medical school when Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union joined in, and quickly took Wilno, along with most of Poland’s east. A month later, the Soviets gave the city to Lithuania, which had coveted it since the end of the previous war.
Warsaw itself was in ruins. A great portion of the country’s doctors had been killed, and there was a desperate need for medical professionals of every kind. The intensity of this demand led to a certain loosening of standards in training. This relaxation was even more pronounced in the sister discipline of dentistry. Instead of going to years of medical school, all Zosia had to do to become a dentist was endure a short practicum and pass a test. The test was a set essay, on the “role of the mouth in the beauty of the face”.The snippet at the end does touch on Soviet dentistry directly, however.
My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces.
After a few months, she "borrowed" the materials required for braces, and installed them on my dad, and removed them about a year later. Apparently it worked out fine, my dad's teeth are alright.
Obviously, things going "alright" is more a matter of luck than anything else: there's a reason that people go to dental school, and they were fortunate that there weren't any complications, but I always thought it was amusing that that's how my dad got his teeth straightened.
I long ago saw a proposal for a country-scale medical training system designed for graceful upgrading. A highly experienced nurse, wishing to become a doctor, just learns the delta, rather than restarting from scratch. Similarly for a community heath worker moving into nursing, etc. And a different proposal, for automated support and oversight of community health workers' hard-to-take-well cervical-cancer screening photos, integrated with ai-filtered city-based expert consults. And then there's patients who become single-disease domain experts.
So looking forward, perhaps we could imagine a human-computer-hybrid setup where a grandma training and executing with oversight was gracefully supported? Especially if haptic vr becomes widely available.
And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.