Exploring: Preventive Care
Dentistry is Health Care That Works! Patient Access to Care: Dentistry’s Achilles’ Heel or Golden Opportunity? By Dan D. Dunwody III, DDS February 21, 2009 In these uncertain times, the effectiveness, benefits and the values of many of our institutions will be examined. Healthcare is now considered a commodity by government entities, big business, and the insurance companies. Thus far, oral healthcare has, by and large, maintained a preventive, patient centered focus by the design of the dental professionals, clinicians and educators who have preceded us. Oral healthcare works. Crisis healthcare delivery by the medical profession has treatment choices made by bottom line accounting practices. Years ago, the medical profession agreed to accept a greatly reduced fee to treat persons of limited means. Their advocacy groups fought hard to encourage all the doctors to participate and have the government raise indigent fees. When the fees reached a certain level, the doctors participated. However, there was an unintended consequence of this act of benevolence. The insurance companies informed the doctors that if they could accept this fee for indigents, then they must accept a similar fee for all patients or the doctors would be discriminating against their insured. If the doctors did not participate, the patients would be directed by the insurance companies elsewhere to someone who would accept the fees. With the best of intentions, medical care has gradually become a commodity. The major decisions on patient care, (i.e., the type of care delivered, when and how) are based on the entities’ bottom line payment for delivering such care. When the patient care decisions are removed from the individual patient and the doctor’s treatment is dictated by others, an invitation for mediocrity, rather than the improvement of health care services, is created. Changes occur each day, driven by the planning of ready, fire and then aim. How would you like to be a part of that future? The model of oral healthcare is primarily proactive and preventative in nature, rather than reactive and crisis oriented. Did this happen accidentally? Certainly not! Dentistry has created methods to prevent the major oral diseases of decay and periodontal disease through continuing education of the public, fluoridation, sealants and periodic health examinations.
In this photo: (clockwise) Kathy Huber, Dan Dunwody, Ken Hutchinson, Dick Singer, Doug Torbush, Paula Cady, and Karyn Stockwell. Paula Cady (center) who is a hygienist and organizer of the Hebron Community Clinic, is receiving a check from the Pierre Fauchard Academy Foundation Grant.
The oral healthcare model has been nurtured by the dental profession. One of the great preventive movements began with the fluoridation of Grand Rapids, Michigan water in 1948. A fifteen year study of water fluoridation in Grand Rapids demonstrated a 50%-67% reduction in dental decay of primary teeth and 35% in the permanent teeth. By 1980, 37% of in a sample of 40,000 school children were free of decay. By 1987, the number of decay
Dental Explorer | Second Quarter 2009