It’s likely uncharitable, given the cloying year-end imprecations to be “nice”, but I choose to be “naughty”. I draw your attention to my annual dose of Nembutal – the year-end “Happy Holidays” letter from the dentist to her patients.
I should qualify that she is not my dentist. I ditched her for a different tooth-borer in the clinic after suffering from a too-hurried jab of an anaesthetic needle. That wasn’t her chief offense, however: it was the stage-whispered offer of “a Shiatsu massage to take my mind off the pain”, whereupon she summoned a dental assistant to throttle my toes. This, friends, is “wellness based dentistry”: the astonishing marriage of dentistry and shamanism (with the emphasis on “sham”), something that “embraces a yoga- based approach to exploring the connections between [sic.] oral health, whole body wellness and longevity…”.
I kid you not.
Each December I await the ‘Dharmic Dentist’s' Happy Holidays letter to her clinic’s patients with schadenfreudic glee. Each edition brims with its own brand of solipsistic hilarity, but this year’s was especially rich.
It featured the launch of her “empowering book from which we can celebrate and embrace a deeper quality of life”; surely the wish of every new dentist-author. Allegedly this doorstop also “helps others reframe the importance of their mouth”, or at least to the same extent as she has. The newsletter heralds her new website, which includes “a video on facial muscle releasing exercises which will also help us to achieve my favourite mantra, ‘lips together, teeth apart, tongue in place’….” Coincidentally, she shares that mantra with reputable escorts in Toronto alleys.
But her year included more than just dipping her Shiatsued toes into the media pool. The Dharmic Dentist also travelled to Brazil on a spiritual meditation trip (India is apparently oh so “September 10th”…). There she brought home something called “a crystal bed” that she welcomes all to experience. “It is available in the office, on Mondays, Fridays and every other Saturday”, which presumes that mid-week is an inappropriate time to recline on a quartz mattress. Sleep Country buyers take note.
The newsletter finishes with sentimental notes on the arrivals, departures and pairings of the clinic’s staff, as well as a final poem on the meaning of “Shalom”, which “means more than peace”.
As my Great Aunt Gert used to say “well, we laughed and laughed…”
