I confess, one of my guilty TV pleasures is the US 'drama' Body of Proof, starring Dana Delany. It's yet another of those completely ridiculous shows where a civilian (in this case, the Medical Examiner) is like some kind of labcoat-wearing crusader for justice, one wrong move from being a true vigilante in the eyes of the law, and that wrong move is only barely prevented because they're accompanied by police officers when they start investigating the crime themselves.
Which got me thinking... What if Dentists were like TV Medical Examiners?
I mean, think about it... In reality, the ME would never be allowed anywhere near interviews, let alone (grudgingly) allowed to grill the suspect themselves, or throw some important new piece of evidence in their face to break their alibi. They wouldn't accompany detectives on their investigations. They wouldn't be allowed to make sanctimonious judgements about people based on flawed assumptions.
Medical Examiners would end up in prison on charges of perverting the course of justice if they behaved they way they do on television.
So consider the humble dentist, transformed into a dental-scrubs-wearing crusader for oral health, confronting the hapless friend of a patient whose crown had fallen out, and teasing them with details about the consistency of the toffee the patient had been eating, traces of which had been found on the teeth adjoining the crowns, and how that kind of toffee is only made in a particular part of the country... where a certain friend had recently taken a holiday...
...Or how the particular pattern of enamel staining and erosion has been proven to be connected with one specific carbonated beverage, which the patient would never normally drink... but which was found in the friend's refrigerator, and two crumpled cans were found in their kitchen bin that very morning... the morning after the patient was known to have visited...
...Or how the cause of the gum disease was a splinter of wood from a toothpick given to them by their arch nemesis, to remove an embarrassing bit of food just before the patient collected an award both had been up for.
Seriously, it could work. It's no less ridiculous than the kinds of things TV MEs get up to.
House has opened up a world of possibilities... that's all I'm saying.
Weirdly, and on a somewhat maudlin note, this reminds me of an exchange of email I had some years ago, with a friend who is now deceased... We'd each done some kind of career-oriented psychometric profile and compared our results. Mine suggested someone like me might be interesting in becoming a dentist or working in law enforcement (because, y'know, of course). Hers suggested a role as a dental nurse.
"That settles it!" I enthused. "I shall become the world's first Crusading Dentist, and you shall be my assistant!"
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