By Patrick Whiteley (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-07 07:11

Some younger folks may say a 40-year-old like me is a bit long in the tooth and according to my Chinese dentist, they would be right.

Dr Hua recently told me the roots of my teeth are longer than those of his Chinese patients. He said expats like me, from milk-drinking countries, have deeper roots because of our huge calcium intake. We really like to shake it.

There are many cultural differences an expat has to understand when starting a new life in China and my recent dental X-ray revealed the physical differences too. When I saw the pictures, I was gobsmacked.

It had been about 18 months since my last visit to the dentist, and it was my first visit to a tooth doctor in China. I had been putting it off because I hate dentists. They always deliver pain, both to my body and my wallet, and I was especially fearful of a "foreign" dentist.

The only dental procedure I had ever seen in China was in Lijiang in Yunnan Province. My jaw dropped when I witnessed a female dentist operating on a table in an open-air fruit market next to a fellow selling apples.

That patient didn't seem to mind, but I feared the worse.

My Beijing dental treatment was yet another case of being proven very wrong.

Dr Hua's hi-tech dental surgery was much more modern than the dental clinics I had visited in Sydney. His fees were the nicest surprise. A check-up and clean usually costs me $120 back home. The Beijing guy charged me $30, with full X-ray treatment. I've been told a dental check-up costs as little as $5 at a public hospital.

I was led into a room and this big X-ray machine took some happy snaps of my teeth. Then my English-speaking dentist took some more pictures inside my mouth with a camera that looked like a toothbrush.

About 10 minutes later he gave me the whole story, in full technicolor. Back home, the dentist would open my mouth and use mirrors to show me the problem as I laid back in the chair. "Can you see this," he would ask as he bounced one reflection off another. "You need some work here."

"Blahhhhhh, blaaahh, blaahh," I would reply with my mouth wide open. He would nod his head in agreement. Dentists can understand anything.

My Chinese doctor showed me large color pictures on a computer monitor and pointed to the problems. He then held the X-ray into the light, revealing exactly how deep my tooth roots were. "You've had a lot of milk shakes, haven't you?" he asked.

I sure had. When my brother and I were boys, we would both easily drink a liter of milk a day. In my mid to late 20s, when I thought more muscles meant attracting a hotter girlfriend, I was hooked on the gym and protein-powder milk shakes.

All this milk consumption is now paying off.

My false teeth fears have been laid to rest, thanks to modern Chinese medical technology and my milky way.

(China Daily 01/07/2008 page10)