We can only talk so much about a couple phone calls from 2004, before we get back to the real meat of this thread: You all know that our own Respaul goes into spastic convulsions at the mere mention of "teeth" in the same sentence as the word "English". Well now, here's a little something for Respaul "The English have perfect teeth" Shadowfax:
Britons get creative to care for teeth - Dentists leaving national system
By Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Rochdale, England - It is easy to be mean about British teeth. Mike Myers' mouth is a joke in itself in the "Austin Powers" movies. In a "Simpsons" episode, dentalphobic children are shown "The Big Book of British Smiles," cautionary photographs of hideously snaggletoothed Britons.
But the problem is serious: Britain's state-financed dental service has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.
Since moving to Rochdale, a working-class suburb of Manchester, William Kelly, 43, said he has been unable to find a National Health Service dentist willing to take him on. Every time he has tried to sign up, lining up with hundreds of others from the ranks of the desperate and the hurting, he has arrived too late and missed the cutoff.
"You could argue that Britain has not seen lines like this since World War II," said Mark Pritchard, a member of Parliament who represents part of Shropshire, where the situation is similar.
Anyway, this article goes on to tell how that Mr. Kelly ended up yanking his own teeth out.