After Sessions

I spent three hours in this room today, over two of which were in chair, jaws open at station #101 (lower right). It's the Main Clinic of the dental school where I've been making progress on the teeth since September. Here you see the place when almost everyone is done for the day. Earlier it was mobbed.

Once you get through the application and the psychological threshold of being worked on by a dentist-to-be rather than a fully credentialed dentist, it doesn't take a genius to see that this is the best dental deal in the United States, especially if you're poor like me.

If I had a fairly good insurance plan, the co-payments would be higher than the full prices of procedures here. And then I might be treated at a clinic whose staff wasn't half as good. And I would have paid for x-rays, an extraction, and two root canals that were covered here by the 1946 Hill-Burton Act, which almost nobody in this country has even heard of.

This one of the "trenches" in which dentists earn their degrees and the building where you would look up the reason why Doc Holliday was called "Doc."