Doctors

Dental Amalgam Mercury Poisoning: Why Is It Still an Issue?

by

This is a guest post written by Harmon Pearson who is currently pursing a post graduate degree in dental science. He  spends time blogging about his pursuits and writing on dental care. When he is not studying, he enjoys restoring antique pendulum timepieces. How is it that in the 21st century we continue to put a known toxic element—mercury—into our mouths?  The question may seem straightforward, but the answer, curiously, is not.  Mercury remains a primary ingredient in dental amalgam, also known as silver fillings.  Other ingredients include copper, silver, tin, and zinc.  These elements when bound with mercury form what’s typically referred to as a stable compound.  It’s hard and resilient to degradation in the mouth environment making it a seemingly ideal compound for replacing small amounts of decayed or removed tooth material.  Because of this, it’s remained a … Read more

Unsafe Injection Practices Plaque U.S. Outpatient Facilities

by

In a post last year I discussed how an Oral Surgeon Investigated for Reusing Needles and Syringes. In a recent article in JAMA titled “Unsafe Injection Practices Plague US Outpatient Facilities, Harm Patients,” Bridget M. Kuehn discusses many problems with injection practices (December 26, 2012,Vol 308, No. 24, pp. 2551-2552). She describes how hepatitis C virus was contracted by 2 patients who received an epidural injection from a pain management clinic. “During the visit, they observed the physician who treated both patients withdrawing medication from a multiple-dose vial with a previously used syringe topped with a new needle, a breach of safe injection practices that may have contaminated the vial and exposed subsequent patients to potential blood-borne infections.” This led to 8,000 patients who were treated at the clinic to be tested and 8 additional cases of hepatis C to … Read more

American Medical Association (AMA) To Shut Down Newsmagazine

by

I was upset today when I heard that the American Medical Association (AMA) is shutting down it’s newsmagazine. Crain’s Chicago Business has an article discussing this over at http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130812/NEWS03/130819977/ama-to-close-news-magazine titled  “AMA to close news magazine,” written by Andrew L. Wang on August 12, 2013. Now not only is the AMA shutting down the print circulation, but it is also shutting down AmedNews.com which is the website for the publication. In recent years, I have enjoyed reading amednews.com and keeping up to date on the many informative articles published. I have always thought the domain name choice was a bit poor, but the current Alexa traffic rankings shows a 167,229 in the World and 46,097 in the United States which is quite good. The article by Chicago Business discusses that the print circulation has been going strong for 55 years and … Read more

Senate Report Calls for Removing Deceptive Corporate Dentistry Entities From Medicaid

by

Previously I have written an article titled Fraud and Abuse in Medicaid Clinics where a discussion was made that currently dentists have large amounts of debt when they graduate from school. This leads to them having to face potentially hard and difficult choices to pay their bills as they essentially become indentured servants. Recently Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Max Baucus (D-MT) published a 1517 page report in June 2013, titled “JOINT STAFF REPORT ON THE CORPORATE PRACTICE OF DENTISTRY IN THE MEDICAID PROGRAM.” This report is a very large PDF file (143 MB) and is available for download over at http://www.finance.senate.gov/library/prints/.  Don’t be intimidated by the size of the report though as it really is a bit over 30 pages with the rest of the 1400+ pages serving as an appendix. Hence, it is very readable. The report talks … Read more

Washington Dentist Troubles

by

Recently, a few articles appeared on DrBicuspid talking about Washington dentists. One of the dentists is a Washington state dentist, the other is a Washington D.C. dentist. The first article talks about how a now retired Washington state dentist must pay $35 million to 29 former patients. The reason for this is because the court determined that the former dentist had performed numerous unnecessary root canals over a long period of time.   The article discusses how the retired dentist performed over 2,000 root canals on about 500 patients over a five year span several years ago. The dentist who purchased the retired dentists practice said that a lot of failing root canals and railing crowns were being noticed by the patients coming in. The court in this case found that the dentist was negligent, failed to obtain informed consent from … Read more