CONVENTION CRASHING: AMERICAN DENTAL ASSOCIATION

Saturday, Oct. 21, 2006 | 8:03 a.m.

Imagine that each dentist projects a sort of energy field.

You can almost feel the energy when you go into one of their offices: guilt, shame and anticipated pain. Over the years, through repeated small doses, you've developed a tolerance. You can take it - it's one of the things that makes you a mature, rational adult. Perhaps you even nap in the chair, you're so nonchalant.

Now imagine the combined field produced by 40,000 dentists, all of them able to spot the plaque-pocked darkness of your soul.

There they were, them and their accusingly white teeth, at the 147th Annual American Dental Association session, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center this past week. Forty thousand and fifty-two of them, to be exact. Well, OK, maybe some of those were dental hygienists and toothbrush salespeople, but still thousands of dentists.

Tens of thousands.

If walking among them weren't enough, try doing it down aisle after aisle with their tools on gleaming display atop black velvet: picks, scrapers, pokers, pliers, hammers (!) and chisels (!!). And drills with diamond drill bits. And syringes. With needles on the end.

Icy drips down the back. A clinging shirt. Sweat? In an air-conditioned hall? What's that feeling amidships, an iron weight, screwing itself up in the stomach? And the air... where'd it... go? But... but... I flossed!

And then, on a flat television as big as a Labrador and hung too high to miss, the inside of a mouth. Shuttling across the screen is a laser-and-water device that causes teeth and gums to melt like Nazis at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Turns out, this is the gentle method.

Mike Koceja, a sometime consultant for Biolase Technology Inc. and a dentist in Camas, Wash., says he has used lasers in his practice for six years and considers them the future of dentistry.

"We think of lasers, you know these light beams cutting through metal or chopping off, whathisname, Anakin's arms or whatever," Koceja says, "but they're not like that. Not at all."

Instead, he says, the laser and water ablate teeth and gums without heat or vibration, wearing them down and washing them away. The wavelength of the laser also disrupts nerve signals, dampening pain to the point where common procedures can be done with little or no anesthetic.

Koceja says he is so confident that he recently filled his 3 1/2-year-old son's cavity without a drop of novocaine, something he wouldn't have dared before. He might not have even taken the patient.

"Kids. Kids are horrible to treat," Koceja says. "They're either wonderful or the absolute worst. But now?"

It's one of the things that makes the $85,000 price worthwhile.

"I could go out and buy a Mercedes or get a laser," Koceja says. "Well, the Mercedes isn't going to do anything for my patients."

And it's not all altruism when a dentist can see more patients and do more procedures in a day.

"The returns are fantastic," he says.

Product 1: Soft as melted weasels

All day long, dentists are washing their hands, putting on gloves and pulling them off, the woman explained as she washed our right hand. It dries the skin right out.

That's where Touch of Mink skin care products come in. Just a little bit of the cleanser or the mink oil will keep skin soft and...

Mink oil? From minks?

"We don't kill them," she said. "It's a byproduct."

But it is rendered from, what, the fat of dead minks?

"Yes."

Then Heidi (not that kind of Heidi) went back to rubbing mink oil on our hand.

Which we just can't seem to stop petting these days.

Product 2: You want to whet their appetite?

Flavored latex gloves: green apple, bubble gum, vanilla orange, grape, strawberry and mint. Packs of 100, $6.50 with powder, $7.50 without. By Plak Smackers.

Overheard

"Ooh! You like masks!"

- One attendee to another as she shoved a handful of free surgical masks into her hands.