There’s such a shortage of dentists in Maine that primary care doctors are the ones pulling teeth.
Not only does the state have a severe shortage of dentists, poorer patients have trouble seeing one, since few accept those without insurance or with Medicaid.
So that leaves the primary care doctors to pick up the slack and learn to pull teeth, screen for tooth decay, or lance oral boils.
As more mid-level providers perform more primary care, generalist physicians need to branch out and learn skills previously confined to specialists, or now, dentists.
We can only be indispensable by adding value, and in a procedure-dominated payment environment, learning to pull a few teeth shouldn’t be seen as such a bad thing for primary care.
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{ 9 comments }
Dental residencies and fellowships?
Down here in Texas, we’ve seen the number of dental applicants increase at an even faster rate than medical applicants; however, the number of dental school “seats” remains relatively unchanged from year to year.
…hopefully that’ll be adjusted to accommodate the ever-growing need for our drill-bearing, cavity-filling friends. =)
I’ve always thought it was crazy that we give dentists, optometrists, and podiatrists free reign. Not that we can’t do that through competition. We should have agressively went after all of those. The entire human body should be under our roof.
Don’t we have an equal if not greater shortage of primary care doctors in many areas of the country? Maybe dentists should learn to become primary care doctors.
To suggest that physicians should do dental extractions because it is a procedure and procedures pay well shows you don’t understand why this is happening.
This is largely driven by Medicaid. They can’t keep or recruit enough dentists at the low rates paid by Medicaid so they’re training primary care physician residents to do this. N
ow how exactly is this going to help primary care pay or recruitment if they won’t pay the dentists enough for them to do it?
Probably better opportunities to develop technowhizbang products and services coming out of the fed’s health initiatives; they don’t necessarily have to be effective or useful. The amount of grant money being shamelessly thrown around for this looks like a replay of Katrina.
Chuck Brooks
FutureWare SCG
James said… Maybe dentists should learn to become primary care doctors.
No way, dentists aren’t stupid….
If we don’t want midlevels acting like doctors, why would we let physicians act like dentists?
I think it can be a good idea for PCP to have the option of leaving some simple dentistry, like removing teeth etc…
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