Would you let someone who's not a dentist pull your teeth?

How much of the years of study a dentist has to go through is really necessary to fulfil the function of dealing with tooth problems?

Very little.

If they pared it down to the relevant data and allowed students to develop skills with hands on exercises and practicals, they could produce a competent dentist in one fifth of the time.

Isn't the whole point of going to a dentist to get the tooth fixed so that it doesn't need to be pulled?

My local dentist has dental nurses (sounds a bit like the hygienists/therapists in the article) do the initial check, scaling, etc., while the qualified dentist does all the drilling/filling serious work, and the final check. Seems to work fine as a system.

Tales of kids in America going to emergency rooms with abscessed teeth is shocking and shaming. A country as rich as the US, and you seriously cannot give your children proper preventive dental (and medical) care on the nation's dollar?? What a scandal.

I go every three months. National insurance is great.

A sore tooth, serious pain in the middle of your head, is a wonderful though unusual way to wake a person up to the nature of their humanity, the fact that they are still alive and the preference for a less painful existence.

In answer to the question in the title, without the pain, of course not; with the pain, I would seriously consider it.

And at least with a door and a piece of string, at least there is no sound of the drill or (worse) the bone-saw.

When I was a kid I never went to a dentist to have my baby teeth pulled. I always went to my neighbor to get the toothie job done. My reasoning: She had four children, all older than me, and surely she must have pulled their baby teeth out. Thus lots of experience. So, I trusted her with wiggling out my loose baby teeth.

While still a child, I had a tooth that became infected. When a local dentist tried to pull it, he held a needle up in front of my face ... and I panicked. He couldn't touch me. My father then took me to another dentist in another town ... and he put me in a hospital to treat the infection. About 10 years later that dentist told me in a serious talk on his dentist chair, "If that first dentist had pulled that infected tooth ... it would have killed you." My savior: a new drug called pencillin. Tis a longer story, but I'll stop short here.