One of the best solutions to contain health costs is the use of Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants to treat sick people. About two thirds of patients in a doctor’s office can be treated by a NP or PA with the same results as if the patients were seen by a doctor. The use of these medical practitioners is proven, successful and cost effective and MD’s have slowly and reluctantly acknowledged their worth.
In the dental field there is a parallel situation where dentists have refused to loosen their stranglehold on lucrative dental practices. The use of dental therapists has long been proven in Britain where these trained therapists perform some of the less complicated dental procedures like tooth fillings and uncomplicated extractions. It was in Alaska where dentists are few and tooth problems were rampant that dental therapists have proven their worth in this country. Dental problems were so prevalent in Alaska that dentists could not prevent the use of dental therapists to relieve the pain of widespread communities, although they tried. In Minnesota there is a similar story where many of the dental needs of Minnesotans were unmet until dental therapists went to work.
The screams of dentists protecting their wallets are the same as MD’s in the past trying to prevent loss of income. Dentists throw millions of dollars at legislators to prevent the incursion of dental therapists into the dental field. Dentists use the same outworn and disproved rhetoric that only dentists should perform dentistry. Dentists disregard the proven record of PA’s and NP’s in the medical field and the similar record of Dental Therapists. Protection of a lucrative income has no use for facts or alleviation of dental pain. This is a classic case of a special interest pitted against the needs of the public, especially pertinent to anyone who has suffered a toothache.
As usual, legislators are in the middle. Whose interests will they protect, dentists who want to keep a lock on their monopoly or citizens who could greatly benefit and control dentist costs by the use of trained dental therapists?