Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

The world is flooded with self improvement books. Each one of them acts like a coach to guide the reader on his path of success both professionally and socially. There is one common denominator as far as self improvement or self help books are concerned. Another “selfish” word - self esteem. Since the “self help movement” started a couple of decades ago, the experts authoring these books came to the rather unscientific conclusion that people are obnoxious losers because they lack self esteem. It may have something to do with an unhappy childhood, but the gurus felt and so many still subscribe to that “you’ve got to love yourself before you can love others” myth.

How do we know it’s a myth? Because after an entire generation of self help books with thousands of titles published and billions of dollars spent on all the “non-fiction” bestsellers, America is still the same old country full of unhappy and unloved people. And Singapore is not spared this rip-off. Some years ago, two of my buddies in the army used to snap up every single self help book in the local bookstores. They were single, unhappy and not rich enough. After spending thousands on these books, they were still single, lonely, unhappy and a few thousand dollars poorer. Have the gurus thought of preaching a diametrically opposing doctrine?

Who are the people who are often unhappy and usually unloved; with few friends and even fewer successes in life? Who are the losers? Personally, the losers that I see around me are typically self-centred spoilt brats with poor emotional control. Is there a problem with their self esteem? Do they love themselves too little? Hell, no. In fact, they often have too much self-respect and too little respect for others. They turn hostile when others merely express impatience in repeating something to them. On the other hand, they don’t seem to realise that all the while, others are being very tolerant to their impatience and rudeness which they can’t see. Of course the spoilt brat may choose to live in denial and accuse the whole world of being against them. The objective indicator for who is right and who is wrong lies in the number of friends they and the people they criticise have. The genuine spoilt brats have few friends and even more telling is their propensity to blame the very nature of the environment for their unhappiness.

Like the yin and yang theory in Chinese medicine, boosting the self esteem of these individuals will merely upset the balance of yin and yang further. And without self help books, the parents of these spoilt brats are already doing a very good job perpetuating their self-centredness. These helpless folks agree with everything the spoilt brat says because they fear that disagreeing will trigger a round of tantrums. This way, the spoilt brat will never learn his/her mistakes. Certain cultures actually consider this as appropriate action in the face of unreasonable people/behaviour. I beg to differ. The more we give in to unreasonable behaviour, the more we encourage it.

No country can progress without peace and stability. No personal achievements can be made without hardwork, patience and a calm, peaceful mind. Glitches and mistakes are sometimes caused by our own carelessness. Sometimes they is caused by others’ carelessness or a breakdown in communication. They are intolerant to any glitches in life, getting angry and throwing tantrums whenever things don’t turn out right. By blowing up and blaming everyone instead of staying calm to resolve the matter amicably with people who are not impossible to work with, they effectively set bridges on fire, cutting off opportunities for future interaction and cooperation. Do we still need to add the oil of self esteem on those burning bridges?

The majority of people are able to deal with spoilt brats simply by avoiding them. Not when it happens in your family. Some parents continue to pamper those spoilt brats all the way to adulthood, soothing their already fiery ego on a daily basis. Ironically, that is meant to stop these grown ups from throwing tantrums or issuing malicious threats. What else can the aged parents do?

The internet allows people we have never met to become our patients. It often starts off with an enquiry. This is followed by a consultation, a discussion, treatment planning and finally the actual treatment is done. This source of patients is not to be under-estimated. It’s how we managed to build up a cosmetic dental practice. That was 6 years ago.

In recent months, however, we received a lot of enquiries from people who seemed like potential patients. This may sound like good news, but it isn’t. In the past when trust was easier to come by, a high percentage of people who contacted us via the internet did show up for consultation and treatment. Nowadays, enquiries are much harder to handle. Folks who seem interested try to settle the treatment plan, exact costs, guarantees and number of visits over a few emails. They don’t seem to realise that dentistry cannot be practised online. A lot of details of exact costs, procedures etc cannot be determined without an examination. Even with that, unforseen circumstances may result in a change of treatment plan. Insisting on precise figures is difficult at best and unreasonable at worst.

An example. How much does it cost to do a filling. $80. patient turns up with deep caries involving the pulp. This would require root canal treatment and it’s going to cost much more than $80.

“Can you guarantee that it’s only going to cost $80? No hidden costs.” comes the question by email.

Of course not! How can the dentist tell how bad your condition is and whether a filling is all you need? Don’t these folks realise that as far as I’m concerned, it’s their tooth that is hidden from me and not my costs which are hidden from them.

“I just want to do a filling. If you can’t guarantee that it’s not going to cost more than $80, then I won’t come.”

????????!!!!!!!!

So what if we quote reasonable charges. Some folks may be suspicious why Dentist A charges less than Dentist B. So these folks ask even more questions in an attempt to determine how reliable a dentist is without even turning up for consultation. Some of these questions are irrelevant and some can be downright weird. The more they ask, the more uncertain they become. Someone ought to tell them that the real answers to their doubts don’t show up very well on email. So usually, it back to cost factors. Cheapest practice wins. Not to say that the cheap practices are no good, but what about this thing called trust?

C, a colleague of mine has just been diagnosed with diabetes. His doctor? None other than our schoolmate in JC. The doctor is not an endocrinologist. He is just a GP, but C and his family has been seeing him since he started his own practice more than a decade ago. C’s entire family has not been seeing any other doctor ever since. No matter where they go or how much they charge or what additional tests, medications and procedures they indicate, their pool of loyal patients who see them several times a year follow them. It’s all about trust.

If there’s such a thing as doctor-for-life, is there such a thing as dentist-for-life? I’m sure there is. Quite a few have followed me all the way from Hougang. How do you choose a dentist-for-life then? Simple. Try out a few dentists for simple, non-invasive treatment like scaling. Pick one you like, show up regularly for scaling and develop a close patient-dentist relationship with him/her. He knows you. He recognises the importance of the relationship and is far less likely to do anything “funny” than someone who is seeing you for the first time. So what if there’s no Medisave in his/her clinic? So what if the clinic would only allow a 70% claim of surgical fees? Do you have to look for a clinic that allows a 100% claim (like mine) and shoot 100 questions at me because you don’t trust me? Please go back to the dentist you trust. Entertaining all these doubts, mistrust and reluctance to pay consultation fees is a waste of time for me.

Many years ago, when I was new to the internet, I pissed a certain bureaucrat off in an online forum by describing Singapore’s closure of Singapore’s Chinese medium schools as a stupid mistake and the Singapore’s so-called bilingual scheme as dong bu cheng, xi bu jiu. Not surprisingly, Mr Bureaucrat expressed shock at my audacity in challenging the unquestionable wisdom from the top.

I’m sure that if it was a letter I had written to the press, I would have been villified by representatives from every department of the civil service and the editor would have closed the topic just as I started to pen my first reply. Thanks to the internet, I had more supporters than enemies, all coming from the general public.

Fast forward 15 years and it’s now my turn to be shocked when I read the following article:

SINGAPORE - As a child, he was much more comfortable speaking to his friends in English than in Mandarin. Not surprisingly, Mr Vincent Ng, who comes from an English-speaking family, found Mandarin language lessons in school to be quite a chore.

Ms Adele Sim, a 29-year-old media executive, pointed out that it was easier to learn a second language through pop culture and television, as was the case when she picked up Japanese a few years ago. “I learned because I liked it, not because it was compulsory,” she said.

I must say that an admission of error from our elderly statesman is something most unusual and perhaps quite welcome to many of us. Unfortunately, I believe that the real mistake is not being recognised. There is ting xie in Chinese. There is also spelling in English. What is so mad about all that?

If the teaching of Chinese the traditional way has been so “mad” and ineffective, then why are so many of our Chinese-educated friends so proficient in the language? Just look at the teaching of English in our primary schools. Is it not boring and punishing? Is it not madness? Primary 1 students already have to do comprehension and understand grammatical rules like verb agreement. And the comprehension passages are mostly about Ali visiting his grandmother and helping her with the chores. No wizards and dragons, no magical spells, no laser weapons, alien transformations and buildings blowing up. How do these kids ever learn English then?

Ask a senior of mine who is now earnestly learning the Thai language. What keeps his interest? Are his Thai language books illustrated with bikini babes? Are the books scented with aromas from his favourite food? Most of all, does he need any of these attractions (or distractions) to keep him focussed on learning the language when he is so interested and involved with Thai temple activities?

What about my TCM course? It’s a totally different philosophy from the conventional anatomy and physiology I’ve studied throughout the years. Now I must shut down a lot of my memory banks and tune in to the new frequency of TCM. Eye problems, treat the liver. Bone problems, treat the kidneys. Muscle weakness treat the spleen. Insomnia treat the heart. 324 points, 12 meridians …. not “madness”? How bad can a little ting xie be? Why why would I put up with this madness? Because I want to learn about alternative remedies to benefit myself, my family and my patients.

The whole problem with kids not being interested in Chinese lies with the issue of options and distractions. In the good old days of Chinese medium schools, all science and art subjects were taught in Chinese. The students not only learned Chinese from their Chinese language class, they also learned it in Biology and Geography. They didn’t just have to do ting xie. They had to remember what Chinese characters are used in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name.

What happens when you shut down Chinese schools. What happens when you teach all the science and arts subjects in English? Does one learn English only from English class? Of course not. We also learn English from Biology class, Math class, Physics class, Chemistry class, Geography class … then there is Chinese. Is it so difficult to see that the problem doesn’t just lie in the madness of ting xie? The students don’t need Chinese to help them understand Physics and Chemistry. The lonely subject of Chinese becomes just an optional distraction.

Yes, one cannot master 2 or more languages at the same level. But I believe that many people out there can be decently proficient in 2 languages. Check out some of the MBBS doctors who are also TCM practitioners. They couldn’t have passed their MBBS without being good at English. They also couldn’t have passed their TCM course conducted in Chinese without being good at Chinese. How did they do it? In exactly the same way we learn the English language. By studying not just “pure” Chinese language, but practical subjects in Chinese. Maybe we should just forget about teaching “pure” English and “pure” Chinese. Maybe we should just teach the “important” subjects in these languages and students pick up the languages “naturally”.

So what’s new? Wellness Village packed up and left without any warning, Customers who have paid for packages, some just before the spa closed down, are now left in the lurch. When something like this happens, civilised consumers would seek help from CASE.

And here’s the response. Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE) executive director Seah Seng Choon said that he was “not surprised” by the spa’s actions.

“Don’t be fooled by the location. Spas are generally small businesses, unless they have an international chain … Consumers have to be careful when transacting with them,” said Mr Seah.

Huh? Did I get that right? What was Mr Seah (former General Manager of NTUC Denticare) trying to say? That consumers must be careful transacting with small operations like mine? That small establishments are weak, unpredictable or even nonviable in today’s economy? That they should “merge” with or just surrender to NTUC? That dental patients would be safer and better off with the big group practices and establishments employing hundreds of dentists because Mr Seah wouldn’t be surprised if small and humble practices out there fold up and pack up quietly after collecting deposits for crowns and bridges? That the big medical or dental groups going for IPO are somehow more reliable? Big is in, small is out?

OK, so Mr Seah’s comments have drawn some flak and he has bothered to clarify that the numbers show that SMEs are usually the ones that leave customers in the lurch. I don’t think we need to be reminded of that. There are far more SMEs than big companies out there. Of course the failure rate of SMEs will be higher. I think the problem everyone who objects to Mr Seah’s remarks has, is the derisive way in which someone working for one of the largest organisations in Singapore that has put so many pop and mom operations out of business should add insult to injury. And by the way, if a certain ethnic group in the country is more prone to divorce (as shown by statistics), would Mr Seah warn other people from other ethnic groups not to marry them?

Just take a look at the food courts run by the big players. Impressive theme, impressive uniforms, unimpressive food. Chances of finding good hawker food is much higher in small, one or 2-man operated stalls without any designer decor or uniforms. So why is it so difficult for so many of my middle management friends to understand why I don’t belong to group practices with scores of dentists and dozens of branches?

Why are so many seemingly intelligent people so easily impressed by the size of the company providing a service? Is it because we see with our own eyes how the big boys strangulate the little guys as the new generation of consumers place less and less value on personal touch? Will we end up as a nation of employees under one big employer? What happened to the promotion of entrepreneurship? Were those messages only meant for the scholars heading our GLCs?

Gosh, I’d better be packing my bags and heading for Cambodia soon.

Thaksin’s vision?