Healthy yellow teeth.

This is an edifying story about my teeth. If that sounds too boring to you, proceed at your own risk.

I had a dentist's appointment on Monday to have my wisdom teeth removed. I got an invitation 2 ½ years ago, but I never went because they sent it to a wrong email address. Now that I finally got the invitation to my real address, my wisdom teeth had fully erupted without any gum flaps! So the dentist told me that it wouldn't make any sense to get them removed anymore.

She said it's very rare for a woman to have such perfectly erupted wisdom teeth in perfect line with the other teeth. But this got me wondering. If they would have removed them a couple years back, but waiting it out, they actually became perfect teeth... why don't they always wait and see if they can become good teeth or not? I never had any problems with them, even when they were still partly under the gum. Only some minor uncomfort, which is natural, but never infections or anything.

Initially I wasn't going to go to the dentist because I hadn't had any problems with them. But then I read an article in Lääkärilehti (an official magazine for doctors that my parents subscribe to). It said that wisdom teeth will always be an infection risk, no matter what, so they have to be removed. But this dentist said that there is no risk since I have very little dental caries and no gum flaps.

So the lesson is, don't trust everything they say in Lääkärilehti. Obviously everything they said was right, except they didn't consider cases where the wisdom teeth erupt perfectly. Maybe it's so uncommon that they didn't bother mentioning that?

Anyway, I'm truly fascinated by the doctor magazines my parents get. It's so cool to have both parents as doctors, because I can always ask about the strangest things that come to my mind. Like, what was that disease that can cause your eyeballs to bulge out?

Answer: Toxic goiter, i.e. a goiter with hyperthyroidism. It's when your thyroid overproduces hormones and you have to shut it down completely with medication. After that, you have to take hormone meds for the rest of your life to compensate.

Medicine is so cool. I wouldn't want to be a doctor, but it's absolutely fascinating to learn about all kinds of icky things that can happen to a human body.

Peacey.

I feel like I'm in peace right now. I feel content that I finally took control of things. I hate feeling out of control. I'm not an extreme control freak, but I definitely have some symptoms of it. I love routines. They're my lifeline. If everything is under control and I can do the things I've planned everyday, life is good.

I didn't realize how inexpensive depression meds actually are. Only 3,30€ for a month! It's nothing compared to other regular medication, like painkillers or contraception. Perhaps subsidized by the government? I know it's a ridiculous amount of people who are on depression meds these days.

I always thought, and still do, that there must be something wrong about that fact. Can it truly be the case that such a huge proportion of people need to be treated for depression? Is it a new epidemic, or has it always existed, only doctors didn't have a name for it, let alone treatment?

It would make sense if it was somehow caused by the living conditions, the way the society works here. Probably also the environment, considering that this country with long and dark winters rates very high in suicide. Personally though, I'm more inclined to believe in the former - there's something wrong with our way of living.

Maybe we're simply too well off. Too much time to think, as we don't have to spend all our time and energy on simply surviving. If you fear starving over the winter, you're hardly going to think about some of your smaller worries. Then there are the ridiculously inhuman expectations in today's working life and life in general.

Everyone should be 100% effective for 8 hours a day five days a week, should have more than 2 kids to keep Finns from becoming extinct, mothers and grandmothers and men in general should all stay fit and healthy for all their lives to diminish the costs on the society as far as health care, and young people should apply to exactly the right kind of education for them so the society doesn't waste money on education for nothing.

Oh and people should also be willing and able to move around the country and to other countries whenever their employers decide that it's more cost effective to do business elsewhere. And of course, everyone should cut down on eating, heating, CO2 emissions, lighting, air conditioning, watching tv, increase garbare recycling, use public transport, forget holidays abroad.... am I forgetting something? Probably. It can't be this simple, can it?

It's really difficult even for professionals to decide whether the increasing number of diagnoses is due to the advance of medicine, i.e. we know more now what causes what and how it can be treated, so it will of course be treated. Or, we may be diagnosing as disease some symptoms that are a fundamental, inevitable part of the human condition and life in general. It's the so called medicalisation phenomenon, and everyone thinks they know the best what's going on.

However, with increasingly more information circulated in the media, in a simplified form, people are of course more educated on a basic level and know that they can demand treatment and get better. The problem is, they think they are fully aware of everything related to it, while of course they aren't. There's a reason why doctors undergo a long and difficult education and training, and consequently someone who hasn't can't really claim to know or understand the intricacies of diseases.

Of course you get depressed if you lose someone. Or you suffer a serious injury, or a miscarriage. Anything with a big impact on your life, any major disappointment, will affect anyone. It's a whole another matter when you're depressed for years without any apparent reason.

Well, all I can say is I don't envy doctors in the least.