In only a few hours I will be going under the knife. A specialist in oral surgery and dental medicine will be cutting into the gumline just above my canine, in order to cut out a small cyst hanging onto the root of the tooth. Before you eep though let me explain a few things. Cysts are actually not very uncommon around teeth. Frequently they are caused by blood being cutoff from the tooth, and causing some organic decay. Root Canals are the usual treatment of such Cysts, and as evident by how common the procedure is, quite easy to fix.
In my case, the tooth in question has already had a root canal. Normally then, the dentist, would just retreat the tooth (do another root canal) and fix the problem. Unfortunately, because it was a canine, I had a post put inside the tooth during the last root canal, in order to stabilize it and keep from losing the tooth. Here's where the problem set in. Although a post can be removed and a root canal performed, my canine has been deemed to integrated into the post to risk removing it (it'd probably destroy the tooth). Instead the doctor will go in above the tooth, and perform a kind of reverse root canal. The procedure itself should take about 20-40 minutes, and isn't considered dangerous. However, in order to do it, the dentist will still have to cut into live flesh, and then stitch it close again, ie, it becomes Surgery.
For the non-layman, Surgery is a bogey-man kind of word. The average person does not cut into themselves deep enough to draw blood daily, nor does the average person tie flesh back together after-wards. Although Surgery is so common place these days, with all the corrective procedures available, and the wonderful world of plastic surgery to alter one's appearance, Surgery itself still holds a residual charge of emotion.
Most of this emotion stems from the association people have between surgery and pain. Coupled with the fact that people dread anything to do with changing their body, and that until this last century, surgery had a very high rate of death, and you've created a very highly perceived source of danger. On the other hand, a lot of it is just perceived notions of association.
Why is association so powerful? The human mind is a very powerful tool, most of revolving around memory. Association is a big tool that memory uses in order to link similar things together in order for a person to complete thoughts and ideas. Thus in order to assure that a person, doesn't devolve in repetition, association between thoughts takes place at a more base level motivator. Take for example a dog. Common four legged animal, it generally like to explore and be active. When it comes across another dog that is larger and more angry then it, one usually leaves with a couple of scratches vowing never to return. Ie, to the Dog, pain = Big Dog = don't go near that area or dog again. In humans, its roughly the same way, the more real pain is, the more a person wants to avoid it, ie Surgery. Oddly enough, because the mind can be so screwed up, sometimes this doesn't always prove out. Course it more often then not does, as evident by drug addiction and the like.
The end result? Although Surgery is a powerful emotion motivator, you have to realize that it's not all that bad. Frequently surgery is a needful tool to make sure you don't have a longer pain from something you refuse to treat. That is, get done with the sharper pain immediate, and spare the longer more nerve racking pain from occurring.
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