Dental 'therapists' fill holes: Part II

Dental 'therapists' fill holes: Part II

November 13, 2007 -- Can a high-school graduate with two years training do much of what a dentist does? Most dentists would say not. But the federal government is already assuming they can.


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That's the source of conflict that led the American Dental Association (ADA) to sue the State of Alaska for allowing federally-certified Dental Health Aide Therapists to perform tooth extractions and restorations on Alaskan Natives. The ADA lost the suit, and as a result, dental therapists are fanning out across remote Alaskan villages performing procedures that were previously the exclusive province of dentists.

What happens in Alaska could affect dental care throughout the country. Although the dental therapists now practicing are limited to working with Alaskan Natives, already American Indian organizations in the lower 48 states are researching how they might bring dental therapists to their own communities. "Definitely we're interested in that possibility," says John Lewis, executive director of the Intertribal Council of Arizona. American Indians have similar needs to those of Native Alaskans, and he would like to see 50 to 100 therapists working in Arizona, he says. He added that the subject drew interest from representatives from around the country at a meeting on American Indian healthcare in October.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), which oversees the Alaska program, would have been happy to put actual dentists in these villages, says Ron Nagel, D.D.S., M.P.H., who helped design the program. The problem is that there just weren't enough dentists willing to step in. "We have a 25 percent vacancy rate with our dentists," he says.