Dentistry

[naomikritzer]

I spent the day volunteering at Project Homeless Connect. While I was there, I picked up a list of low-cost and sliding-scale dental providers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, since I know a ton of people who have issues finding dental care.

Sliding-scale and low-cost does not necessarily mean you will be able to get what you need for a price you actually find affordable; however, this is information that might be useful to some people, so I scanned it in as a PDF (actually, two PDFs because there were two sides to the sheet and I only have Acrobat Reader. There may be a way to combine them into one but I haven't figured it out yet.) If anyone wants it, drop me a note either as a comment, a fb message, or an e-mail (same name I use for everything @ Google owns my soul dot com). I'll note again that it's only Twin Cities area providers.

Also, one of the things that bothers the hell out of me, in general, is the way our society treats dental health.

On one hand, decent dental care is treated as a luxury. There is no "dental ER" where a person in extreme pain will be treated regardless of ability to pay. If you are lucky enough to be able to find charity care in an emergency, you're going to be offered an extraction, because crowns are for people who can pay for them.

On the other hand, people with visible missing teeth are discriminated against in employment, joked about, and (in some cases) treated with disgust and contempt.

The rationale for this is the myth that virtue inoculates you against dental problems -- therefore, if someone needs a root canal, it's because they didn't brush. The problem with this is that it's bullshit. You can brush, floss, and use fluoride rinse and still wind up with catastrophic dental problems for any number of reasons that are totally outside your control, including whether you breathe through your mouth in your sleep, whether you suffer from GERD, whether your saliva is particularly acidic, whether your enamel failed to form quite right. You can break a tooth while eating a salad.

There are a lot of crazy societal double standards when it comes to poor people, but this is one of the more blatant.

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I remember when the way you could always tell an American was we had these unnecessarily good teeth. Not anymore. Now we all look like hockey players.

[carbonel]

I am in fact going for an emergency root canal today. (I was scheduled for next week, but the tooth is refusing to wait.) I may end up losing the tooth, since there's a vertical crack in it, but I'm glad I have the resources to pay to try to keep it. And it's not as if I did anything wrong.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Dental health is, IMO, one of the most problematic aspects of health coverage in Canada, too. (Although I think you can, in fact, get emergency dental treatment covered -- but it makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE to get preventive and maintenance care so that you don't end up with an emergency, or at least postpone the emergency. There's free dental screening and even free treatment for low-income kids in some jurisdictions, but adults? Not so much.) Dental health is an important determinant of overall health, as well as really, really affecting people's social and work lives -- "cosmetic" dentistry, in many cases, really isn't, it's important.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I have Acrobat Pro; if you send/link me the pdfs I can easily combine them into one document.

[mikeross1809.livejournal.com]

Do you do restorative dentistry in West Chester (http://www.beckettdentalcare.com/services/)?