The future is rich with promise, and today’s dreams could very well become tomorrow’s realities. So keeping an open mind toward the limitless possibilities of the yet-to-be, here are five dental surgeries that are just an idea for now, but you never know.
1. Horse-Assisted Dental Bone Graft
One defining characteristic of modern dental surgery is how few horses are involved. Maybe someone out there has had a tooth pulled by tying it to a horse and then having their dentist scare the horse away, but horses can’t really perform an X-ray, and they shit basically whenever—a big no-no in medical settings. Consider, though, that the same could be said of cavemen. Our recent ancestors lacked advanced technology and crapped haphazardly, and look at us now. We’re doing dental surgeries damn near every day. So maybe someday, you’ll hop in that chair to get your jaw fixed up, and it will be a big, scrubs-wearing horse that fits you with an anesthesia mask held in its teeth and whinnies for you to count backward from 100. The horse wouldn’t do the whole bone graft, of course. They’re too stupid, plus you need hands. But perhaps, in the fullness of time, horses will be able to assist.
2. Two Big Teeth Surgery
The typical adult human mouth has 32 teeth, and the fat cats of Big Dentistry know how to milk us for every last one. Drill this one, crown that one, braces on all of ‘em. It’s a fucking racket. But if there were a dental surgery that, say, traded our 32 little teeth for one big supertooth on top and one big supertooth on the bottom, those greedy fucks would be laughing out the other side of their face. The floss industry would collapse overnight. Orthodontists would leap from their penthouses. The trick would be finding someone to actually perform the surgery, since few dentists would willingly upend the current dental paradigm, but just maybe, you could flip one lone wolf clinician with an axe to grind. This idea is a long shot, admittedly, but wasn’t flight? Wasn’t splitting the atom? Don’t count out the two-big-teeth surgery just yet, we’re saying.
3. St. Louis-Style Root Canal
As it stands, dental surgeries have little in the way of regional identity. The root canal you’d get in Boston is the root canal you’d get in Santa Fe. But look at hot dogs. Look at BBQ. If those can be an expression of local character, why not dental surgeries? Maybe you roll into St. Louis one day and feel a terrible pain in your tooth. The dentist tells you you’ll need a root canal, and starts dicing an onion. Whoa! You’ve never had a root canal with diced onions before. But maybe it’s good. Maybe the onions bring a whole new layer to it that you never even knew you were missing. You go home and tell your buddies, who all insist that their hometown has the best root canal. A root canal needs clam juice, one says. No, a root canal’s gotta be manually flushed with a syringe and side vented needle containing an irrigant solution of 17% ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, says another. Shooting the shit about all the different styles of root canals sounds like a pretty fun idea, and maybe someday, we’ll be lucky enough to try it.
4. Tongue Teeth
Surgically implanting teeth in the human tongue would probably cause more problems than it would solve, but you’ve gotta think beatboxers could go fucking insane with it.
5. Livestreamed Dental Surgery By Public Vote
You awaken strapped into a dental chair, countless blank screens looming over you. A moment’s calm—then voting begins. OCTUPLE MOLAR EXTRACTION. MANDIBULAR LENGTHENING. Proposed surgeries flash before your eyes. Beyond the glare of the screens you sense, but do not see, dentists awaiting consensus. SWISS CHEESE DRILLING. DOUBLE-DECKER TEETH. Voters begin tactically switching their votes. Blocs emerge, consolidate. TOOTH SHARPENING disappears. STUDDED GUMS pulls ahead. A stifled cough. The whirring of a drill. Then, finally, an upset: REPLACE TEETH WITH WHALE BALEEN clears 50%. The screens pull away. Cold steel pries your jaw open. You look for help, but find only the blinking red light of the camera.
Now thankfully, this disturbing dental surgery is, like the others, still just an idea. It hasn’t happened. It might not happen at all. But as we consider the potential advances of the future, so too must we grapple with its potential horrors. You really never know what could happen in the world of dental surgery, and that possibility can be both a promise and a threat.
