Here is a tip kids. Go to the dentist before your teeth start hurting. Don’t do what I did, and wait till the last minute. Otherwise you are in for a fun ride.
I think the hole in my tooth somehow developed some extra mutated nerve endings. My tongue was essentially all numb, and the whole side of my face had no feeling but I could feel every freakin thing that the dentist was doing to my tooth. My whole jaw still hurts – I don’t know if it’s from the shots, or from the muscle tension or both. I may or may not have to have a root canal. It depends if it continues to bother me or not…
This whole thing got me thinking… Dental care is kinda like software engineering. Going to the dentist in some ways like refactoring. No, I’m serious. Badly designed code is essentially akin to tooth decay. You can ignore it for a while, because fixing it might be scary and it can potentially mess things up. But at some point it becomes such a pain, that you will be forced to do something about it. And the longer you wait, the worse it gets.
If you resolve it early in the development process – say the instant you realize that your design is flawed, the whole procedure might be relatively painless. You can use the built in tools in your IDE, rebuild and be done with it. You may need to spend some extra time testing it, or making sure that everything works properly.
If you wait till the last minute though you might be in for a real pain. Bad design will often force you to make more bad design choices, to overcome the inherent shortcomings, and quirks of your code. A wrapper class here, some glue code there, few ugly hacks to patch things together – these things accumulate and create layers of kludgey code which is neither easy to debug, nor easy to refactor. No IDE can automatically clean up your code, if what you wrote is a tangled web of workarounds, and dirty hacks built around a broken model.
[tags]dentist, tooth, teeth, dental care, programming, refactoring[/tags]
I agree. I was on dilantin for 15 years which caused my gums to swell. This also made my gums bleed very easily. I felt like I was donating blood every time I brushed, so I stopped taking care of them. Now that I am off the meds and my gums have receded, I have some seriously crappy teeth . . .
At software can be redesigned . . . you only get one chance with your teeth.
Yup – very true. No matter how much you mess up the code, you always have the option to start from scratch. Unfortunately we only get one set of teeth for life…
Sigh… Maybe I should try that crazy shit when you brush them after each meal, floss religiously and stuff like that.
One of the Chem faculty members at my Uni used to brush his teeth after lunch in the restroom every day. I used to think this was some sort of OCD thing but I think he was just doing what the dentists say you are supposed to do anyway.
It’s funny how most house dogs go through their whole life without ever having so much as a cavity thanks to the bacteiral fauna in their mouths. I’m wondering if this is an evolutionary thing. As we became smarter and more civilized, healthy teeth stopped being a factor in natural selection, and thus bad teeth genes were passed on to future generations.
Or maybe we just always had shitty teeth in general. Anyone knows what is the teeth situation of our primate cousins?
Oh my geez, poodle! You better take care of your teeth, two cleanings a year and you will hardly feel a thing.
The good thing with me is my dentist is around the corner from my apt, I practically show up in my jammies and watch the today show while I get my teeth cleaned. Easy as pie! (yes, some dentist have TVs in their rooms to keep your mind of things!)
Wow! Your dentist is more awesome than mine!
I seriously need a job with some good dental insurance cause I have none right now :(.
Ouch – root canal = not good.
I an sympathise, don’t much like dentists so kept putting it off – then I had to have a root canal and some teeth removed.
Reccomendation is that looking after teeth + regular dentist checkup = good.
Sorry to hear about your teeth. I see my dentist 2 or 3 times a year, floss once or twice a day, and brush after lunch as well (like that ocd dude :) and still, I’m not happy with my teeth.
I like your evolution theory though, maybe I’m already from the next species :p
Absolutely see the dentist 2-3 time per year, especially if you have a family history of teeth-related problems.
The author is right, waiting is just setting you up for disaster. I see it all too often in my practice.