Open wide and don’t make a sound

It’s free medical care you can find on the internet day at Brokelyn! We stumbled across something that would probably be more prevalent had Mitt Romney won and done away with Obamacare: dental students offering you teeth cleanings on Craigslist. Is it a symptom of the terrible insurance-less dystopia we live in or just a guy in dental school whose friends won’t let him practice his craft on them? We’re too afraid to go and find out, but then, we’ve seen The Dentist 2. But hey, if you haven’t had your teeth cleaned in a year and don’t have insurnace, the person does make the compelling argument that this is the time to turn your life of poor dental hygiene around. Unless…oh man, do you guys think this is where those wisdom teeth push pins really come from?

It’s the honest to god tooth, we love these

You know what’s a boring but necessary part of any home? Push pins. Your choices are sold grey thumb tacks or pins that have a little color but no flair. And yet you’re at their mercy to hang things like posters or keep bills organized on a corkboard. So what’s surprising about these wisdom teeth push pins from Life: Curated is that no one has tried something like this before. They work from an aesthetic standpoint, considering that they really do look like teeth, and they’re great for bullshitters too. Seriously, if you have one of those friends who just loves to screw with people’s heads, you know you can see him saying, “Oh those? Yeah, when I got my wisdom teeth out, I asked the dentist to save them for me. I dunno, I just couldn’t bear to let them go. Go ahead, touch one.” Or are we the only ones with friends like that? $6 for a set of 6, available here

Do you know exactly how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Is it because you’re terrified of your molars cracking around a cavity that lay in wait like the loose plank on a rope bridge? Living without dental insurance can be an exercise in masticatory terror, where danger lurks inside every bag of corn nuts. If you dare, find out just how bad it is tomorrow by submitting to free bitewing xrays from a dental hygiene student at New York City College of Technology. Appointments are available for tomorrow, March 25, at 8:30 am, at the school’s downtown Brooklyn HQ. Patients even get a copy of their prints to take home for fridge or frame, or save time and money once you save up enough to visit the dental pros. Contact Tracy Lau to volunteer or for more information.

This is a question I’ve asked myself every Wednesday morning for the last five weeks as I’ve ridden the Q train into Union Square to see a pick-happy third-year dental student at the NYU College of Dentistry. Dental insurance is one luxury I haven’t had in some time, like so many former students, former employees and, well, people these days.

I had just moved back to Brooklyn after a few years in Boston, where I had dutifully forked out $100 or so every few months to minimally maintain my not-so-pearly whites. Now I was back in New York and overdue for a cleaning. I also had a sinking suspicion I might be in for some more. My Boston hygienist said a dental school was a good, cheap and still respectable way to get dental care, and that NYU was the place to go in New York. So there I went. (more…)