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Is Dentistry in an Uphill Battle Against Dr. Google?

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During the February 2022 Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting Dr. Gregory Psaltis gave an interesting talk titled “Dealing with Dr. Google.” Dr. Psaltis presented how nowadays patients are turning to internet searches to seek information on scientific topics and in particular their dental treatments. Based on what the patients find online this can cause them and their parents to challenge any recommendations. In the talk Psaltis said how parents of young dental patients these days are arriving at dental practices and don’t agree with the recommendations the dentist suggests. He presented four such scenarios including that parent’s do not want x-rays for their child, that parent’s do not want flouride for their child, that parent’s only want tooth-colored crowns—not silver (stainless steel) for their child, and that parent’s only want only fillings for large lesions and never any crowns for … Read more

Orthodontist Sentenced to Prison for Public Corruption Scheme with Former State Senator

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A former Arkansas dentist who served as an orthodontist, who has since resided in Florida, has been sentenced to one year plus one day in prison and a $157,500 fine for Conspiracy to Commit Honest Services Fraud. This was due to the orthodontists involvement in a public corruption scheme that involved a former state senator in the state of Arkansas. The former orthodontist entered into a plea agreement where he plead guility and admitted to hiring the former state senator to influence and request official action to benefit his dental clinics. The orthodontist owned and operated several orthodontic clinics in Arkansas. He found himself in trouble in 2013 when he was accused by state regulators of allowing his dental hygienists to provide services to patients who were not receiving any orthodontic treatment. At the time a state law known as … Read more

What Dentists Should Say to Patients when Something Doesn’t Go Right

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Unfortunately dentists and oral surgeons don’t always have all procedures go as planned for their patients. For example, when it comes to wisdom tooth surgery, it is possible for the wrong set of wisdom teeth to be removed as is discussed on the wisdom teeth complications page, see https://www.teethremoval.com/complications.html. Since procedures don’t always go as planned, on this site before guidance for patients who want to be very defensive has been provided, see the post The Defensive Patients Guide to Wisdom Teeth Removal. While patients can sometimes be bad actors and deny that certain information was provided to them prior to a procedure (see the post Patient Recall During Informed Consent for Wisdom Teeth Surgery), dentists and oral surgeons also can behavior badly such as by telling patient’s after their procedure that their condition that resulted could not have possibly … Read more

Assessing the Impact of Three Day Opioids Limits for Dentists

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An interesting article titled “Opioid Formulary Edit’s Impact on Commercial Dental Prescribers” was presented on July 23, 2021, at the virtual session of the 2021 International Association for Dental Research (IADR)/AADR/CADR General Session written by David Hamlin and et al. The research set to investigate the impact the insurance company Cigna had when it implemented its three-day quantity limit on dental opioid prescriptions. Insurance companies limiting new opioid prescriptions for dentists to three days (or another time duration) has been discussed on this site before in the post Insurance Companies Limiting Access to Opioids After Wisdom Teeth Surgery. The authors speculated that by limiting opioid prescriptions to three day there would be year-over-year reductions in prescriptions greater than three days and reductions in the average total metric quantity per prescription. In the study, the authors looked at the claims of … Read more

Dentists and staff should wear protective eyewear and disinfect between patients

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An interesting article titled “Blood and saliva contamination on protective eyewear during dental treatment,” written by Nora Bergmann and et al. appears in the 2022 edition of Clinical Oral Investigations (Feb. 14, 2022). The article sought to explore the amount of aerosols, blood and saliva splashes on protective eyewear worn during dental treatments. The authors also looked at the effectiveness of disinfection of the eyewear. In the study the authors used forensic techniques to analyze 53 protective eyewear shields worn by dental staff during aerosol-producing dental treatments. The protective eyewear were worn during dental treatments like supragingival cleaning, carious cavity preparation, and subgingival periodontal instrumentation. To detect blood contamination, luminol was applied on the surface of the eyewear shilds. The authors found that a macroscopically detectable amount of contamination was found on 60.4% of the protective eyewear shields that had … Read more