Saying No To Dental Anesthesia

Why To Question Your Healthcare Professionals

I don’t know that I would be brave enough to forgo general anesthesia in a surgery, like the lady in that post. (Damn!)

But recently, I had an abscessed tooth removed.

If I’d known the entire procedure would take three minutes, I would have said no to even the Novocaine.

I’m not sure the oral surgeon would have even agreed to do the surgery, if I’d refused. I mean, I had a block holding my mouth wide open, so it’s not like I could have made much noise to annoy him. (A gagging sound, at most.)

But he actually tried to upsell me into general anesthesia. For a three-minute surgery? How does that make sense? He said it was “just in case the local anesthetic doesn’t block the pain enough.” I said no thanks.

I also was given a menu of the services they intended to provide. On the bill was a $350 charge for a pathology report.

Since I wouldn’t do chemo if they told me that my dead tooth had cancer cells in it, looking at it under a microscope, I told the staff to please remove that from my services.

Then, during the 3-minute procedure, high on nitrous oxide, but with a block in my mouth preventing me from speaking, the oral surgeon told his staff to ignore my refusing the pathology test, and send it into the lab anyway.

I didn’t even go back for the two-week checkup. My mouth felt fine, the stitch fell out, and I didn’t want to drive across town during my work day.

And again, didn’t much care if there were cancerous cells in a dead tooth that is no longer in my body anyway.

Of course the pathology lab billed me for the lab result I do not know the outcome of, because I don’t want the scare tactics trying to terrify me that I “have cancer” if there was something fishy they found under a microscope.

The bill direct from the lab was $125. I suppose I could refuse to pay, but I do need that oral surgeon to finish the zirconia implant in a few months. And I don’t want to fight with the guy. So I just paid the $125. I guess I saved the $225 markup and will have to be content with that.

Anyway, I’m just sharing these things to remind you to keep your eyes and ears open and use your critical thinking skills when interacting with the medical professionals. I’m not saying they’re bad people. Not at all.

I bet most people go into Medicine because they genuinely liked the idea of helping people. What they are is a regular cross-section of people.

They sometimes operate on you when they’re having a rotten day. Or they do your procedure last in the day, when they’re tired and have a headache and they’ve done 6 surgeries before yours.

(Pro tip: best to NOT be the procedure at the end of the day.)

Some of them graduated at the bottom 10% of the class. Some of them went to school in the Caribbean because they couldn’t get into American medical schools.

They forget things; they have gaps in their knowledge; they “wing it”; they’re wrong; they’re just regular human beings like you and I are.

MD’s and PhD’s aren’t smarter than you are. They may have read more books or different books, but that doesn’t mean your instincts that tell you to question them are wrong or ill-informed.

After all, most may still be clinging to the “safe and effective” lie they were told in December of 2020.

Some of them will make fun of you and call you “Doctor Google” if you do research on your own. As if being curious and self-educating is a bad thing.

(Google does indeed prioritize certain types of content. There’s that. I can tell you very officially after watching 2M visitors to my GreenSmoothieGirl website disappear from the search results, from 2017 to 2020, that Google prioritizes everything pro-pharma and pro-medical, and penalizes content that is critical of those industries or offers holistic-health content.

If you want my well researched articles on a variety of health topics, just go to GreenSmoothieGirl and search on the site. Google buries my content.)

So if you need someone to validate that you know best for you, may I vote for that?

Be your own best advocate. You’re completely capable of learning, and making your own choices. Sometimes the thing everybody does isn’t the right thing to do. My thoughts on pap smears, here. My thoughts on SSRI drugs, here. My thoughts on mammograms, here. My thoughts on “vitamin D,” here.

My thoughts on cancer, search on the GreenSmoothieGirl site. My five most important interviews with doctors, researchers, and attorneys, here.

My thoughts on Covid, too many to link to, plus they’ve been memory-holed on YouTube.

Help your adult kids who have less life experience than you do, by teaching them what you know and supplying them important questions based on your own life experience.

If your gut tells you not to do something, you might want to listen to your gut. Research shows that your “gut” often knows before your mind does. (Read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.)

If you need more time to research a drug or procedure, I hope you do that. And go beyond just Googling, for the reasons I mentioned.

Ask around, make phone calls, look stuff up in PubMed. Just don’t ignore your gut if it’s screaming at you, and don’t be afraid to ask more questions of the people in the white coats.

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