Doctors

American Medical Association (AMA) To Shut Down Newsmagazine

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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

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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

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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

Marketing the Services of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons

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An interesting article appears in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery titled “Marketing—Preparing the Soil for Success” by James Hupp vol. 71, pp. 1-2, 2013. The article discusses how the general public does not know much about the possible health care services that an oral and maxillofacial surgeon can provide. It also is a bit of a reality check of how health care is practiced in the United States article. The article talks about a new marketing initiative and says “To me, this represents the association’s wish to start a new time of planning and laying the groundwork for a new season of better educated consumers seeking our care.” The author discusses how the image of oral and maxillofacial surgeons by the general public is not that well understood. Most would know that they remove teeth and have much … Read more

Biostatistical Knowledge of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Residents

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I found an interesting and critical study titled “Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Residents Have Poor Understanding of Biostatistics,” by Al M. Best and Daniel M. Laskin appearing in the J Oral Maxillofac Surg vol. 71, pp. 227-234, 2013. The article discuss how the three main oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMS) journals have low quality evidence and how some of the articles can’t be taken at face value. Hence, the purpose of this study was to evaluate residents’ understanding of biostatistics and the interpretation of research results to see if the curricula of training programs should be changed to better prepare clinicians to practice evidence-based dentistry. In the study a 6 question survey was developed for OMS residents and compared to results for a similar survey of medical residents. Further, questions looking into demographic characteristics, the methodologic courses residents may have … Read more