Very few of us enjoy a visit to the dentist, not least because eventually, the drill is going to come out. The dentist’s drill is actually fairly effectively at scaring the crap out of us as far back as the days of radio horror, and as a tool of fear it’s probably second only to the lurking suspicion that your dentist might, some terrible day, try to feed you a banana.
Fortunately, most dentists are not torturers and in fact do want to help you have better teeth. So one of them finally had the bright idea of getting rid of the scariest part of the drill: That damn whine.
Dr. Dhanni Gustiana had the fairly brilliant idea of tweaking his drill so it plays MP3s instead of the screaming whine of an angel sucked into Satan’s exhaust fan. It even takes requests, and has an ingenious design to encourage gibbering cowards like me children to keep their mouths open:
“The patient will hear the music louder when they open their mouths compared to when they close their mouths.” Gustiana presented his singing device at the International Dental Congress in Greece earlier this year, so as long as patients can resist the urge to chair-dance, it hopefully will end up in more dental offices.
Personally, I’d show up to the dentist just because I want to configure that bad boy with a playlist. We suspect that this will be pretty popular, if for no other reason than everybody wants to see the dental drill in action.
And of course, by the time they realize what they’ve signed up for, it’ll be too late. Is it safe?