Sugarcane Crank to Teeth — The Unequal Contest
Imagination, aided by photographs

Last week, in Five Dental Accidents to Avoid, I talked about how a patient of mine had the crank lever of a sugar cane crusher come back and hit him in the teeth.
Even as I wrote it and shared pictures of chipped teeth made all whole again by the magic of dental restoratives (and me), I felt that the story was incomplete without a picture of the crusher itself.
I looked around town for a picture of a sugarcane juice crusher but this was the best I could do.

This photo captured four people on one scooter, only two of whom had helmets on. It was in an article on how to avoid dental accidents so there was a subtle irony there, of the dentist(me) who talked about accidents that had happened; like the weird sugarcane juice crank, but not about those that might; like these helmetless kids on a scooter. As a guide to how the crank-to-shattered-teeth accident had happened, however, it was not a useful picture.
Wherever I looked in Jamshedpur, I saw sugarcane juice sellers with motors attached to their crushers, making their lives easier. Their money will flow in as fast as the juice flows out. However, it did leave me with the nagging feeling that my article needed a picture of a sugarcane crusher with a hand crank.

On our trip to Ranchi, which is 80 miles away from Jamshedpur, Vikesh and I spied this seller with a hand crank. I took a picture right away. The seller was bemused. I told him, hand-operated machines are a rarity, which is why I want a picture.
I suppose I should have been kinder. He probably thinks now, “The crazy lady with the huge phone thinks my machine is a museum piece worth photographing.”
Sigh. I hope the person going around upgrading all the Jamshedpur sellers’ machines reaches Ranchi and gets him a motor, too.
That aside, now that I have a picture, you can see the ball end of the hand crank my patient smashed his front teeth against.
For those of you who haven’t read the other story, my patient was in a hurry to get his glass of juice and he tried to help the sugarcane seller crank the juice out. The ball came back to hit him in the teeth, result: he needed three root canals $45 each, and three caps, $63 each.

As I waited for the seller to crush the sugarcane for my juice, I realized that my patient wasn’t as much in a hurry as a Good Samaritan who was trying to help the seller who was fatigued from cranking.
I wanted to help the juice seller too!
However, I think that if someone wants to help a sugarcane juice seller, they should help buy them a motor, not help them manually.

Else, this could happen!