Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

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?

I was at Toa Payoh Library on a Sunday morning and decided to make use of the couple of hours before my TCM class started to do some studying. At 10am when the library opened, the crowds rushed in. By 11am, all the seats at the study tables were occupied. In spite of being the only uncle at the study tables, I was quick enough to claim a nice seat. All of a sudden, a sense of nostalgia and deja vu gripped me. Vivid memories of student days flooded my mind. All this was too familiar. In spite of being quite out of place, seated amongst all the youngsters, I settled down to the business of studying very quickly.

And I love old libraries like Toa Payoh. It’s big, with a children’s section downstairs and the adult’s section upstairs. The newer libraries like the one at Sengkang and Hougang, are a total waste of time. They are situated inside shopping malls, with the noisy children’s section blending into the adult’s section, the floor area is miserably small and worst of all, there’s an eatery attached, taking up valuable space that could have been used for more shelves and study tables. I’m not sure about the youngsters, but I certainly don’t like this sort of setup.

Toa Payoh is different. They have enough space for a senior citizen’s room and a newspaper room. Though demand is high, a seat at the study tables is definitely not difficult to find if you’re early and quick. Interestingly, the majority of my companions at the study table started their day by reading Chinese books and magazines. One young lady ate her Old Chang Kee snacks under the table. After some leisure reading, they got down to their English textbooks and highlighted lecture notes. No prizes for guessing where these youngsters are from, but if our local kids are going to continue waking up late on Sundays and “studying” in noisy places like Burger King, dressed in their best clothes in order to draw eyeballs from neighbouring tables, I can guess where our next generation of top students are going to come from.

Another insight I gained from this. I’m not going to believe my kid if he tells me he’s going to study with friends at Burger King or that library in the mall. Go to one of the old libraries if you really want to study.

A patient asked me why I’m called “New Age”. Am I trying to say that I’m young? No, it was Ris Low asking, but the term “New Age” is not well understood by the majority in Singapore. Does it represent youth? Modernity? Not quite.

In fact, a lot of New Age concepts are rather ancient from an Asian point of view. It’s only from the Western point of view that religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, philosophies like Cosmology, Gaia Theory, Yin-Yang Theory, Five Element Theory and practices like yoga, meditation, qigong, various forms of traditional healing are all considered “new age”.

Derived from the rebellious hippy mentality of the 1960s, the New Age Movement represents a rejection of traditional or conventional religious dogma as well as rigid social structures and protocols. In recent years, this rejection extends to the fields of conventional medicine and scientific theories. Unlike the hippies, modern New Age Movement “activists” tend to embrace a more moderate, down-to-earth lifestyle.

Wikipedia:
The New Age Movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions ranging from atheism and monotheism through classical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, and panentheism to polytheism combined with science and Gaia philosophy: particularly archaeoastronomy, astronomy, ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, psychology, and physics. New Age practices and philosophies sometimes draw inspiration from major world religions: Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism; with particularly strong influences from East Asian religions, Gnosticism, Neopaganism, New Thought, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Universalism, and Western esotericism.

Calling my clinic “new age” has something to do with my interest (I’m not an extremist) in the New Age Movement, my inclination towards Eastern religions/philosophies, my belief in TCM, qigong and fondness for New Age music which often include sounds from scorching deserts to the freezing Himalayas.

While our youngsters celebrate Halloween like it’s the coolest thing to do, many young Western professionals in the New Age Movement actually find our Taiji symbol to be the coolest thing on earth.

Like many impoverished Hakka people in Guangdong Province, my grandparents fled from a turbulent China and settled down in a little village near Ipoh. With hardly any formal education, they worked as tin miners, toiling in the sun and the mud from dawn to dusk. Seeing little future in Malaysia, my parents came to Singapore to work during the 50s. Having found better job opportunities in Singapore, they decided to settle down here. I was born into the “State of Singapore” in 1964. A year later, Singapore became a republic. As my parents maintained their close ties with Ipoh, we never really lost touch with our uncles and cousins in Ipoh. Over the years, some of my cousins in Ipoh followed my parents’ footsteps and came to Singapore to work. Some started their own businesses, married and had children here. Most of them were happy as permanent residents of the lion city.

Just recently, a member of our family surprised everyone with a heroic deed. My nephew, Kok Khew Fai, better known as the legendary LTA Kok Khew Fai, saved the life of a recruit at a grenade throwing range. He received an award for his bravery. He later applied for and was awarded an SAF scholarship. He is now studying in the UK. We are all very proud of him.

The guy with the moustache is my cousin. We used to go fishing together and we called him by his nickname Ah Chin. You may be able to tell that Cousin Chin is not the sort who is comfortable with neckties. In fact, he and his wife felt a bit out of place sitting with the well-heeled parents of the other SAF scholars. Well, who cares? My only concern is that it’s going to be hard on Khew Fai to keep up the poster boy image. He is going to be brought out repeatedly during important speeches, as a foreigner who not only did his NS to become a citizen, he even saved some Singaporean asses while doing his NS. I’d like to believe that heroism runs in the family. I just hope Khew Fai knows where and when to stop playing hero when he returns from his studies and joins the establishment.

We know exactly what a poster boy ought to and ought not to do or say just by looking at Uyghur poster girl Rebiya Kadeer. One mainland Chinese supporter argued that the very fact that Rebiya Kadeer managed to become one of the richest women in China shows that Uyghur oppression is nonsense. But did this fellow realise that when Rebiya was doing well in China, she was vice chairwoman of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Federation of Industry and Commerce, and vice chairwoman of the Xinjiang Association of Women Entrepreneurs as well as member of the National People’s Consultative Conference? She not only lost all these posts, she was even imprisoned the moment she spoke out against the Party’s policies.

Poster boys/girls are meant to be there to prove something that the authorities want to show. They are not meant to be heroic and speak their minds.

From poster boys/girls, we move to local innovations. As a Singaporean, I’d be proud of local inventions that make a difference. Earlier on, while commenting on Singapore women’s success on Everest, I’ve said that I’d be very proud of our girls if they had managed to do something that no other women’s team managed to do.

If there’s a dental product developed by Singaporeans and if it is something that no one else managed to do or sell at an agreeable price, I would buy tonnes of the product and use it exclusively. Some time ago, the manufacturers of Alvelac pushed a box of the socket preservation thing as a consignment in my clinic. I didn’t turn them down. One of the researchers who came up with this concept was a senior of mine in dental school. That ought to give me another reason to feel proud.

Looks impressive? Well, just how useful is it? The manufacturer mentioned quite casually that the scaffold must be inserted in the socket, near the edges of the buccal and lingual walls. This means that in order for the product to work, the socket must be completely surrounded by bone. How often do we get extraction sockets which are like that? Make no bones about it, most teeth are extracted because of gum disease nowadays. With gum disease, you will almost never get perfect bone walls suitable for Alvelac.

What if you do get perfect walls? Well, a socket that is perfect for Alvelac would also be perfect for immediate implant placement. Why bother to preserve the socket with something that prepares it for implantation when you can implant and preserve the socket immediately, saving the patient time and money?

Sorry, guys. I would love to support this local product and I would still keep my consignment just in case a patriot decides to insist on the placement on Alvelac, but I will keep patients informed of the much better option of immediate implantation.