Dentistry’s Dirty Secret
Bringing subtle sexual harassment during examinations in Medical Sciences to the fore and how my own experience has shaped my life
Whether we refer to it plainly as ‘mind’, a bit more organic as ‘heart’ or even prefer to mystify it further by christening it as our ‘soul’, very few among us can claim to intimately know all the secrets held in the deepest alleys and narrowest lanes of that mysterious chamber nested somewhere deep inside us. The mechanism of working of our mind is such that even we ourselves fail to recognize what to make out of some life experiences We grapple with the issue for a while and then move on either accepting them as inevitable collateral damage of being what we are. The fact is, whether we recognize it or not, our minds hold much more than we recognize.
Often the remnants of many of those events stay frozen in a time warp until someone or something comes along that makes us think of things in a way we never thought before, revealing patterns that we never realized existed. The feeling of ‘why I didn’t see this before’ that accompanies those ‘moment of revelation’, as I would like to term them can be equated to the sheepish delight one experiences upon when finding the right key to a door from a big bunch after fumbling with the set for a while . The ‘moment’ also brings along a wave of relief not very dissimilar to what a directionally challenged person feels upon finally finding the way to an address after endless minutes spent going around in circles. The funny thing about life is that in retrospect nothing is complex.
Sometimes a story is all that is required to unlock secret chambers of our mind or to decipher the hitherto unrecognized patterns of life experiences. In my case it took two; one to open the lock and the other to reveal the pattern.Frank Swain’s article in Medium, ‘Science’s Dirty Little Secret Not all lab rats are the furry kind’ was the key; Hannah Waters’s ‘The Insidious Power of Not-Quite-Harassment’ connected the dots, like a song, to put it rather figuratively.Those, along with the series of articles in Medium, now compiled in the ‘Power of harassment’ section has made me realize that what I went through during those 3 bad days in September 2001 was not just a clinical residency exam that went bad and broke me bad, but mental torture of the kind inflicted to unsuspecting captive slaves by their masters, laced with liberal doses of ‘Insidious Not-Quite-Harassment’ variety of sexual harassment.
Why am I writing this?
Where my story is different and probably why took it so long for me to realize what I experienced is that I was a man and a vulnerable resident to boot.Even today, when the discourse about gender equality and harassment has finally moved to the center stage of public debate, it is not considered a manly thing to admit that you went through it. Even now, it is almost as if a man’s role in the matter of harassment is as the one who does it to a lady, not as the one at the receiving end of it all. Frank Swain wrote about harassment that young researchers are subjected to while Hannah Waters brought to light the challenges faced by young science journalists. Another important reason why I was in denial might have had to do with where I come from professionally — Medicine and Dentistry. What I would like to add to the mix in Medium is the harassment that some young clinicians silently endure during that final rite of passage of a clinical residency. And in Medicine and Dentistry, as is in the case of other branches of science, a lot hinges on what you don’t speak out.
It is for no reason that science sounds so very similar to silence.
Here is my story: the three day ordeal
Those were the days when the final clinical examination in the specialty of maxillofacial prosthodontics was, at least in my country, viewed as the ultimate trial by fire, a test more of endurance than knowledge and skills, sort of a Tour de France of dentistry. The word ‘examination’ is too meek to describe what happens during the three days in which a candidate moves from one exercise to another as if he or she is a powered toy responding to the push of a button. Long days and sleepless nights spent in preparation of laboratory models, starting days before the actual test superimposed with extreme stress of the process is enough to convert even the toughest of the lot to mere zombies by the second afternoon.
First, the verbal abuse
I can’t really pinpoint exactly at what moment during the exam the ride got rough. Was it when one gentleman examiner, in an apparent effort to prove that the denture tray I had molded in patient’s mouth was not retentive enough pulled at it’s handle with such great might that the patient nearly slipped off the chair, the tray taking off like a projectile to hit the ground ? I don’t know, but I remember that the start of the verbal abuse coincided with that. After a barrage of verbal abuse yet another examiner (there were 5 in all) decided that a crucial piece of work was not acceptable just because it was not made the way he would have made it? . My gentle reminding that I had followed one of the two accepted techniques only enraged him further. In a fit of rage the man heated a wax carver and literally disfigured the entire wax rim and dismantled the gothic arch tracer meticulously fitted on to it. Game on. Trauma begun.
At 7 PM in the evening, a good eleven hours after the ordeal had begun sitting hunched over the operator desk beside a blue gas flame, I cut a lonely figure in the clinic. I was rebuilding the wax rims from scratch, checking it and perfecting the jaw relations and reattaching the tracer. Every time I managed to get a successful tracing from the patient the same gentleman who destroyed the rims would walk over and say just one word: NO. There was only one man rooting for me through the process- my patient. Why don’t they plainly fail me and let me go home?
Next: the subtle sexual harassment
Undoubtedly, all the verbal abuse and unfair treatment hurt. But what stays with me after all the years that have passed are the rude sexual innuendos made by one among the two ladies in the examination panel Each ‘chair-side’ viva by this lady felt like walking on glowing, hot coal. In denture prosthetics, ‘pressure’ is an important concept. She would give me a ‘you know what’ smile and ask me questions that bordered on obscene, like where exactly do you apply pressure and what do you get out of it. The gentlemen were relentless and loud, the lady was silent but was literally rubbing it in.
Apparently,in dentistry there are a lot more things that hurt more than the drill.
Just as Hanna Waters described in her article, there wasn't any touching or overt sex talk. But it was still harassment - hard to talk about and difficult to recognize. Reading your articles made me finally realize why I was having nightmares night after night for many months after those three days. It also explains why I cried like a child when the results were published. I had failed exams galore before so the tears were a real surprise. Now I know why. Thank you Hannah, Frank and Medium!
In case you are wondering if such a thing as what I described can actually happen, the answer is a resounding yes. In case you are wondering why my own teachers were not able to intervene and stop the harassment, the answer is sometimes in science this is the way scores are settled between heavyweights — unlike the boxing ring, they don’t throw punches at each other, why bother doing that when you have enough residents around to settle scores?
In the recent years,much has changed in the way clinical examinations in dentistry are conducted — shorter exams and more use of simulators instead of real patients for instance. But my hunch is that the more things change the more the say change, until a cultural change happens. It has begun, but it is early days still.
How those three days shaped my life
Looking back, I recognize that what happened during those three days has not gone away from me. Like a powerful talisman, it has shaped my interaction with my own students — both undergraduates and residents. Fortunately, for my own soul’s sake and more importantly for my students, I was somehow able to imbibe some positive lessons out of my experiences all of which can be summarized in one personal motto:
You can bend or even fail a student, but never break him (her).
And I have spent more hours with my students talking about how to deal with failure than the usual pep talk that glorifies success at the cost of not even recognizing the existence of the twin elephants in our lives: failure and hardships.
