Sir, 'If there wasn't blood everywhere ... gums flapping, bones bleeding, the root's disappeared!' These thoughts are probably quite common in the minds of dental surgeons conducting apicectomies. However, it is somewhat unusual in twenty-first century dentistry to actually voice them to a patient. Nonetheless, these were the very words spoken to my wife recently at a well-known Glasgow practice. She was understandably alarmed to hear such a detailed description of the carnage in her oral cavity.

While it is important to keep parents fully informed during dental surgery,1 there is such a thing as too much information – and, indeed, too much contemporaneity. Such running commentary hardly instils in the patient a sense of the dentist's professionalism;2 in fact, it paints a vulgar picture of the dentist's competence, given that it was the dentist who started the bleeding, the flapping, and the disappearing. My wife might have said something to this effect had she been able to answer back. Fortunately, the surgery seems to have had a good outcome despite the dentist's low score in terms of (over-)communication skills. Hopefully any of your readers with a similar penchant for gory imagery will alter their manner accordingly.