Teeth and Philippine culture (2)

Like many Filipinos my age, I spent a good part of my adolescence wearing braces. There was some concern that my two front teeth were protruding—“like Bugs Bunny,” as a classmate put it. Like any teenager, the last I wanted was to be bullied for the way I looked. Thankfully, my parents supported such a not financially insignificant dental procedure.

And so, every month or so, after classes in UP Rural High School—or during weekends when I went to college in UP Manila—I would go up to Dr. Flor Romero in Vega Center to have my teeth adjusted. I still remember tooth pains right after a fresh adjustment; the hassle of cleaning teeth with all those wires. My pictures at that time—there aren’t too many of them—serve as souvenirs of those days.

Dental braces are as much an aesthetic as they are a therapeutic procedure, though as social scientists are quick to say, there’s a thin line between the two. On one hand, orthodontists say that 50 percent of all humans require some form of orthodontic treatment. But in practice, our bodies deviate from medically defined “normal” values; all too often, it is what society—and what we feel—that drives us to act on our concerns.

Interestingly, braces are not just a means to an aesthetic end. They are an end in themselves, deemed “cute” to a point where some people put on “fake braces.” (Even now, one can find a variety of “ready to wear braces” in Shopee and Lazada.) While some scientists have suggested that many of our dental problems weren’t shared by our ancestors, they would nonetheless have been unsurprised with today’s dental metalwork. Indeed, the fact that dental modification has been around for centuries speaks of a long-running view of the body not as something to be left untouched, but something to be tinkered with, improved, beautified.

Yet beyond the desire to look good (or not to look bad), orthodontic procedures can also be motivated by other reasons. When I was doing fieldwork in Puerto Princesa, I met someone who told me that he dreamed of becoming a flight attendant. But because his teeth were “baliko,” he had no chance of getting accepted. “I have not given up on my dream,” he told me, adding: “That’s why I’m saving up so I can have braces.”

Of course, there are more mundane dental practices, such as brushing teeth, flossing, and gargling with mouthwash, each of which has its own history. Unfortunately, people have often taken such practices for granted, making it difficult to historicize: How many people would describe how they brush their teeth in their diaries? Even so, there are enough traces in our history to conclude, as Ambeth Ocampo has done, that Rizal “brushed his teeth with a toothbrush and tooth powder available in the 19th century” and that “he did not want people to mix toothbrushes or, worse, use another person’s brush.”

What has likely changed is the consumerism that has engendered the need and demand for all kinds of tooth products, from electric toothbrushes to teeth whitening serums and mousses.

Despite these practices and products, dental caries remains one of the most common diseases in the country, spurred by our unhealthy eating habits and high sugar consumption. With a pandemic that has engendered the need for “comfort food” (most of which are bad for our teeth), along with raised anxieties (which can cause teeth grinding) and disrupted dental services, dentists are raising the alarm over an impending dental crisis. Although there’s a lot of self-medication and “folk dentistry” going on (I have met tagabunot ng ngipin in mountain communities who use pliers to pull out children’s teeth), these are insufficient to address the looming crisis.

All of the above should raise questions about the social determinants of dental health, given that it is the poor who are often exposed to unhealthy, teeth-damaging food, even as they also have the least access to dental care.

Given how little we know about people’s dental health practices, whether in the past or in the present, more “dental anthropology” should also be encouraged so we can explore these issues—to inform dental care, to further illuminate our somatic practices, and even to interrogate the conditions that lead to poor oral health in our time.

As with different parts of our body, there is so much we can learn about our culture just by looking at our teeth.

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glasco@inquirer.com.ph