Because Dental Care is a Luxury, Some People are Poor, and Toothaches HURT

So if you’ve been around lately, you may have read that due to a Financial Aid issue, I had to pay for my spring semester myself, and I found this out two days before tuition was due.

That wiped me out. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500 just lying around. I had to put it on my credit card. My emergencies-only (supposedly) credit card. I thought about just letting the semester go, but in the end I decided to risk not having an emergency cushion, and paid. Eventually I’d recover financially. It’d be fine.

Of course, I shortly thereafter developed a toothache. It hung around despite everything I could do, and I decided I must have an infection. I’ve had them before–that’s what years of poor dental care (Teeth are a luxury, man! Employees don’t need dental insurance!) will do to you.

Always before, though, I’ve scraped the money together to go to the dentist. A dental visit, a $5 prescription, and I was good to go (even though I still had the cavity that caused the original problem, but whatever.)

This time I just didn’t have it. I couldn’t scrape the money together because there was no money anywhere. Even my tiny cash-stash was gone, deposited to cover the automatic payments about to come due. My roommate had $7 to her name, my kid $5.

So I asked the internet what people used to do for dental infections. I found out that you can buy penicillin for fish online, and the dosage for a human, but I didn’t have that money either.

Then I found that garlic is apparently a natural antibacterial. I had a jar of minced garlic in my fridge! I tried it.

Holding minced garlic in your mouth for half an hour is awful. But it seemed to work! One treatment and my pain was gone!

It came back. I tried again, a couple times. Each time the pain would go, but it wouldn’t stay gone. So I brought out the big guns–I also had fresh garlic on hand. I broke off one clove, cut the ends off, smashed it with the handle of the knife, and placed it in my mouth beside what I suspected to be the inspected tooth.

Hell yes, it burned. It hurt like hell sometimes. I developed sore spots in my cheek that might have been from the garlic juice or from the rough edges of the clove. I tried once, twice, but it’s hard to find well-spaced times in a weekday to hold a clove of garlic in your mouth for half an hour. Still, whatever I managed helped. Then came the weekend, and I did it three times a day for two days, and since last weekend my tooth pain has been gone.

Would I rather go to the dentist and then take a pill for a few days? Hell yes. But if you’re ever stuck on the edge without that option, here’s an affordable and not dangerous alternative that truly does work.