According to some recent statistics, the use of handwriting is declining and some 50 per cent of British people have not hand written a letter or note in the past six months.
This will come as little surprise to most dentists as the frankly illegible (for the most part) clinical notes of yore are now replaced by computerised cyberbabble with indecipherable acronyms representing many common clinical activities.
But I was still surprised to learn, earlier this month, that a New York firm is now offering an “app” that will actually simulate your handwriting for you. You send them the text, and choose from a variety of fonts, which the computer will then translate, using a guided printer “nib” which is carefully programmed to create a nonregular form which exactly simulates a real person’s handwriting.
How long, I wonder, before this becomes the norm and the taxman (sorry, taxperson) sends me individually crafted letters indistinguishable from a real human being? And what a boon to politicians with bulging postbags, being able to reply “individually” to each and every constituent? Their empathy scores would soar, putting them on a par with that affable man in the pub, Nigel Farage.
Fortunately, at the moment the printers that perform these miracles are actually no quicker than a human hand, so I imagine that the costs will be disproportionate for a while, but who knows how long that will be the case? I’m sure the medieval scribes looked at the printing press and thought it would never catch on.
All this got me to thinking about bespoke services in general and how lucky we are that dentistry is one of the very few things that you can’t get from Amazon or eBay (unless you count miracle cures, or tooth whitening gels of sometimes dubious origin or effectiveness).
We are fortunate enough to work in an activity that requires our close and personal attention; where patients form a bond of trust in a specific team or clinician, and where despite the endeavours of NICE and others, they actually want to come back, with no concerns or symptoms whatsoever and invite us to find something wrong.
Moreover (as was apparent in the recent report on the Department of Health’s Engagement Exercise) they actually and very often want to return for clinical reassurance at a frequency of their own choice, even if this is somewhat shorter than that which a panel of experts decrees.
Mind you, my own past experience of actually treating ‘experts’ (such as dentists, academics and healthcare professionals in general) is that they actually don’t come back very much at all... Perhaps it was just me, or perhaps
they are so expert that they believe everything will be all right - forever.
One of the things that currently undermines this bespoke approach to our science, art and practice, is the need to accelerate everything. This can be done either (a) by decreasing the unit reward for any given activity, or alternatively (b) by requiring clinicians to do so many other things, apart from actually being clinical, that they have virtually no time for individuality at all.
While you may say that is the way of the world and the 21st century will continue to accelerate at a rate of knots, maybe that is not entirely true. Think of “slow food” – as evidenced by the glut of cookery programmes on the TV, or the return to sustainable energy, or indeed the growth of the Slow Movement, which extols the virtue of resisting the accelerative change all around us.
In truth, this organisation points out that our basic human needs have not changed for millennia. We need to be appreciated and to belong, and, they add, there is a “need for nearness and care, and for a little love.”
So, fellow earthlings, we can all do our bit to rekindle some of that in our lives and work can’t we? Just as they say that if you give up everything you enjoy, you don’t live longer, it just seems longer, so maybe if we try to do everything faster, maybe we live a little less long?
And just as you can’t buy good dentistry on the internet, so we have the potential to do all this – literally – in our own hands. Handcraft your dentistry, don’t commoditise it!