Dentists in England

No, they need a BDS (Bachelor of Dental Science) and be registered with the Dental Council.
They then choose to advance or specialise, by studying for a MDS (Masters) and so on up the ladder towards gaining a Doctorate or beyond.

The British have a long history of dental care, having invented tooth decay back in the 16th century, when sugar became part of the everyday diet.
Since that time, the people in the UK have sought many varied and unusual ways to yellow their teeth, and to also come up with the most painful method of drilling and/or extraction.
The citizens of the UK have always taken a patriotic pride in their yellowing stumps, so much so that in and around 1620, people were actually expelled from these shores purely because their teeth somehow remained a distinctly unhealthy shade of white.
The first "gleamers", as they were called, were ejected on a ship called the Mayflower, which set off in a westerly direction until their navigator, one Benjamin Osmond, sighted land which is now known as North America.

Benjamin and his family set off inland and helped found Utah, where his descendants continue gleaming today.

If you look at the present population of the USA, you will still be able to pick out the odd gleamer here and there, and scientists are now sure, owing to the advances made in genetics, that pretty much every one of these people can trace their ancestry right back to the original settlers from the UK.

Here in the UK, gleamers are still regarded as suspicious, and border guards are always on the lookout for them at ports and airports.
Some Americans wishing to visit the UK for a holiday have even been known to forego teeth cleaning and/or swill black coffee for a month or two before arrival, purely to obtain the correct degree of healthy yellowness.

This potted history is totally factual.

Lordyaswas-
Thank you. That is very informative as well as interesting to read. Do you have a book on the subject? How does one acquire such knowledge?

Here is a link in regards to the first paragraph of my above post.

www.gdc-uk.org/Pages/default.aspx


As far as the rest of that post is concerned..........







I was joking! It's a standing joke with Americans that all British people have bad teeth!

The Irish, too . . . i've seen it for myself . . .

You must be referring to my neighbour, Gummy O'Malley!

I've heard it say that those of British extraction can be discerned by the quite large two front teeth. Was Bugs Bunny supposed to be British? Was Elmer Fudd supposed to be of some Continental extraction ("dat darn wabbit").

I always thought that the less than gleaming teeth of the Brits was to allow allies to discern correctly who was a real Brit, or a spy, during a war? Makes sense?

Absolutely!
It saves an absolute fortune on chain saw links, as we just go down to the bottom of the garden and knaw down any unwanted oak.

I've never heard the spy theory before, but it seems a jolly good idea, which I will now forward on to Whitehall.