Southcentral Foundation
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Alaska’s Rarest Occupations Or, is there a prosthodontist in the house? By Scott Rhode 90 | April 2022
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good prosthodontist is hard to find. Only three such specialists may be currently working in Alaska, depending on how “semi” some semi-retired dentists might be. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), prosthodontist is among the rarest occupations in the country. As of May 2020, BLS counted 530 nationwide. Only private household cooks and wood patternmakers are fewer in number. All are craft-related occupations, observes Dr. Joseph Macy, who prepares dental prosthetics at Southcentral Foundation (SCF) in Anchorage. “As a society, I don’t think we tend to financially reward craftsmen,” he says. “I think we tend to reward production.” Prosthodontics focuses on replacing missing teeth and fabricating appliances to replace function for cancer or trauma patients who have lost sections of their jaw or palate. Macy and his colleagues at SCF, Dr. Tiffany Lee and Dr. Bridget DeYoung, trained for an extra three years in the specialty, learning alternatives to the standard approach most dentists know. “Prosthodontics in its very essence, if you want to be good at it, you have to know which are the right questions to ask,”
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