Minding one's own business

The place was eerie quiet. I put my mobile on silent mode and looked up at the wall, there were beautiful faces with Closeup smiles, Colgate white teeth and a lot of quotable wordings about the need for a perfect smile and bright white teeth.

There was a long list which looked something like this:

Porcelain veneer
Ceramic crowns
Zirconia CROWNS...
('I couldn't register the other fancy names')

For a moment I wondered if I had wrongly entered an antique store, while I was supposed to accompany my dad to the dentist. But wait, no I was at the right place. Until then, I thought dentistry was itself a medical specialisation. But I was proved wrong, there was a list of specialities in dentistry like orthodontist, paedodontist, endodontist, prosthodontist, maxillogacial surgeon! (This time I was wise enough to take a picture of the list). I was reminded of my 11th Standard English teacher. Had she seen this list, she could easily make a note for our challenging daily dictation test.

I wondered what each of them did? I had no clue, nor the interest to Google it. My mind was racing in another direction. Whenever I visit a hospital, I wonder where all this specialisations cropped up from? Was it the need of the educational industry to increase the scope of courses or the need of the healthcare industry to widen their scope? Business it was, that was a fact.

The pace at which businesses are growing these days is scary. The health care and cosmetic industry are using the vulnerability of customers to their advantage and materialising the fear factor of consumers. A few days ago, I received a call from a lady who claimed to be part of a healthcare service provider, stating that they had conducted medical check up in my daughter's school. She called to alert me of the fact that my 4 yr old's teeth were not aligned, and needed immediate attention. I wanted to laugh, but I politely told her that it was milk teeth and would fall off in less than 2 years. She took care to explain the consequences and to refer an appropriate doctor, a paedodontist if I'm not wrong. I told her we had a family doctor, and it was her turn to laugh now. The term family doctor is almost extinct now, family hospital would be an apt term with all the specialists that are on offer. 

On similar lines, I read a recent article on the coming boom in mental health industry. The findings of the study were interesting, nevertheless creepy too. It says most of modern day health issues were owed to the 24/7 life style and the disregard for our biological clocks, and that the demand for psychiatrists would multiply exponentially in coming years. The one major contributor to this is mobile phones, nobody can deny that. Unlike humans, machines need much lesser time to charge in a day, and we all know what happens to these machines once it stops working. They would be replaced with another latest version in less than a day. Sadly if we don't take enough time to charge ourselves everyday with sleep, exercise and hobbies, that would be our plight as well. Humans fail to realise that we are slowly killing our batteries.

We have all been blessed with a 24 hour day. An ideal mix would be 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours for other activities which should include a dose of hobbies and exercise. Wishing you all a balanced healthy life, ideally minding our own business rather than contributing to others businesses, and passing the message to the next generation.