Thread: Immigrants pay painful price for illegal dentistry

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/ ... tists.html

Immigrants pay painful price for illegal dentistry
Serious health problems haunt victims of botched procedures

By MARY LOU PICKEL
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/24/05

When the pain in Liliana Moreno's tooth became unbearable, she did what many recent immigrants to Atlanta do. She called an unlicensed dentist's office she'd heard about from friends. A busy practice operated out of an aging apartment complex off Buford Highway, the area's most ethnically diverse strip.

In Apartment H-4, they'd pull your teeth cheap, friends said. The dentists had real chairs, drills and lights in the back bedroom. They stayed open late and took cash.

Moreno went to the apartment on a Friday night and had a molar pulled. Three days later, her mouth was so swollen she couldn't talk, eat or sleep.

"I was pale," said Moreno, 32. "My head hurt so much."

It is a felony to practice dentistry without a license in Georgia, but backroom dentists are seldom reported or caught. No one knows how many there are, because they operate below the radar of the state's regulatory board.

Dentists and hygienists who speak languages other than English are in big demand to serve the state's booming immigrant population, which almost quadrupled from 1990 to 2003, according to census data.

Many immigrants with no papers, no health insurance and little money tend to end up in a dental chair in someone's living room, apartment or trailer.

If everything goes well, the work is done correctly and the pain goes away.

If something goes wrong, there's little recourse. The dental offices are open one day and closed the next.

Still, many immigrants are lured to backroom dentists because they believe they cannot afford a regular dentist, said Mario Ortega, Moreno's boyfriend.

Immigrants feel more comfortable dealing with someone who speaks their language. They want flexible office hours and lenient payment terms. The undocumented don't want to call attention to themselves.

"One gets fooled into this," said Ortega, 22. "They say it's more expensive to go to a regular doctor, and that's not true."

Low price is the hook

Business cards advertising dentists at a house in Norcross and at the Park Villa Apartments in DeKalb County, where Moreno went, appeal to immigrants' desire to save money.

"Dental Work Within Reach of Your Pocketbook," one card promises in Spanish. There's no address, just a phone number.

When Moreno visited the unlicensed dental office in January to seek care for her aching molar, she didn't even ask the names of the dentists.

"I was pretty desperate," said Moreno, who came to Atlanta from Peru four years ago. The dentist first treated the wrong tooth. Moreno went back the next day. This time the dentist gave her anesthesia and pulled her molar.

She soon developed a serious infection in her gum and returned twice to have it treated. A female dentist scraped her gum and tried to clean the wound.

By the third day, Moreno didn't want to go back. "I'm scared," she told her sister.

Moreno paid the illegal dentist $115 for the tooth extraction plus an envelope of antibiotics and painkillers.

On the fourth day she went to Dr. Judith Finkelman, a licensed dentist in Alpharetta, who cleaned the pus out of the gaping hole in her mouth, packed it with medicated fillings and sewed it up. The trip to Finkelman, plus antibiotics and painkillers from CVS, cost only $2 more.

'As busy as McDonald's'

Patty Donehoo, 50, lives at Park Villa Apartments, where people have knocked on her door over the years looking for the dentist. She always had doubts about her neighbors.

"Let's just put it this way: I needed dental work and I chose not to go up there," she said.

The Georgia Board of Dentistry regulates dentists and has disciplined more than 200 in the past five years, public documents show. Most of the cases involved dentists who were duly licensed but made mistakes: letting their licenses lapse, doing a poor job on root canals and bridges, cheating insurance companies, or writing drug prescriptions for themselves.

The underground dentists who have never been licensed, haven't graduated from dentistry school, and have no intention of operating a legal practice usually don't fall under the purview of the board, said Mollie Fleeman, division director of the state's Professional Licensing Boards. "We refer those to law enforcement."

Over the past 4 1/2 years, the board has worked with police on 20 unlicensed practice cases, Fleeman said. Four involved jewelry stores that sold gold caps or decorations for teeth; the rest dealt with unlicensed dentists who catered mostly to poor clients around the state. Seven cases were in the greater Atlanta area.

Fleeman could not say how many involved immigrant clients, although one case in Dalton did involve an immigrant dentist.

Marta Patricia Vasquez was charged with two counts of practicing dentistry without a license. She worked out of a house and left a man with a swollen brain, said Kermit McManus, district attorney for Whitfield and Murray counties. She skipped bail last year before her hearing.

Her office "was as busy as McDonald's," patient Kenneth Smith said. A Mexican friend who works construction referred him to Vasquez.

Smith said the infection that resulted from the visit left him with symptoms of a stroke and permanent problems with his leg muscles, for which he has to take expensive medicine.

"I would give half of what I make for the rest of my life not to have gone to this dentist," Smith said.

Practicing dentistry without a license is punishable by a fine of between $500 and $1,000 and two to five years in jail.

"We have to find these people," said Dr. Peter S. Trager, a Marietta dentist who served as president of the Georgia Board of Dentistry. He has heard of cases in the state's Hispanic and Asian communities. "Someone has to tell us who they are. We don't have police going out and looking for this."

'Nobody's perfect'

At Park Villa Apartments, unit B-2, a young Hispanic man dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt, blue work pants and a baseball cap rings the doorbell and enters the apartment. He takes a seat in the living room. The apartment is sparsely furnished, and the beige carpet is dirty. There are no diplomas on the walls, no hint of a license. A television sits in a fake wood entertainment center. It's turned off.

Outside, peddlers hawk Mexican snacks door to door and women chat by the laundry room.

In the kitchen, a slender man in a button-down shirt, talking in Spanish on a cellphone, invites a client in.

Down the hallway, a young boy reclines in a dental chair under a bright light while a man drills inside his mouth. He comments about "dientes cochinos" â€â€

I bet anyone that criticizes or tries to stop illegal dentists from practicing will immediately get called a racist, or told they are immigrant bashing. Anyone should be allowed to practice dentistry without a license and the proper training as long as they speak the native language. More examples of how illegal immigration is dragging us into the third world abyss. This is totally disgusting.

I bet anyone that criticizes or tries to stop illegal dentists from practicing will immediately get called a racist, or told they are immigrant bashing.

I bet you're right. And it won't stop at dentists.

In my local paper today, there was a story of a "health professional" who treats her hispanic patients by rolling an egg over their body.

That's it. She just takes an egg and rolls it around the persons body. It releases evil spirits or something.

Needless to say, the person writing the story thought this was some kind of medical breakthrough, that, thanks to diversity, is now available to all of us.

If there weren't any illegal aliens, we probably wouldn't have any illegal dentists.

My suggestion is return to your homeland and let your dentist in your land pull your teeth.

Good God...now it's dental work.

What will the "issue" be next?

Illegal Pedicures?

Gosh. Now that sounds like a job I could do!! Wonder how much that "health professional" gets for rolling that egg all over someone's body. And, I also have a pretty good collection of pliers so I guess I could jerk teeth out. I think I could speak enough Spanish to tell them to open wide!!

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OUR OPINION

Unhealthy choice in any language

> Published on: 07/29/05
Georgia's immigrants do themselves no favor by patronizing unlicensed practitioners of dentistry â€â€

well I guess Congress will add a dental rider to the healthcare benefits for illegals now