Modern dentistry has gotten so bad that I’m already resentful about my 10 a.m. teeth cleaning, which is coming up in about three hours. By the time I get home from the dental clinic and swing a kettlebell, it’ll be past eleven, and I’ll be more drained from the dentist’s chair than from deadlifts. What used to be a minor inconvenience—like getting an oil change—has mutated into something I actively dread.
About three years ago, I noticed the shift. My hygienists are top-notch: precise, cheerful, and merciless. They’ve traded their humble hand tools for futuristic contraptions that sound like dental drones and feel like punishment. Since COVID, the industry has embraced high-frequency ultrasonic and piezoelectric scalers that vibrate at tens of thousands of cycles per second—tiny jackhammers pulverizing tartar with surgical precision and medieval sadism. Add to that the air-polishing jets that blast your gums with baking soda dust, the industrial-strength suction roaring in your ear, and the chemical rinses that sting like mouthwash brewed in hell, and you’ve got yourself an ordeal.
Once upon a time, a cleaning was almost meditative—forty minutes of harmless scraping and daydreaming under the warm hum of fluorescent lights. Now it’s an endurance sport in which I try to appear stoic, pretending the ultrasonic harpoon digging into my gumline is just “a mild tickle.” What was once a routine tune-up has become a high-tech excavation—cleaner, faster, and infinitely more barbaric.
It’s one of those perverse cases where technological progress has made the experience worse. Dentistry has gone digital, and comfort has gone extinct. Here’s hoping I can channel this resentment into a rage-fueled kettlebell session worthy of the gods of molar misery.
Cinemorphosis 
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