"For want of a dentist"

[Goofball]

A twelve year-old boy has died because an infection from a toothache spread to his brain. A comedy of errors in the Medicaid system turned what should have been only an $80 tooth extraction into $250,000 worth of medical treatment that saw the patient die anyway.

Now, let me be clear: I don't mean this to be an indictment of the American healthcare system in particular. I think that even in Canada where we have socialized medicine, this could well have happened. As the article states, dental care is an area that falls through the rips in the social safety net.

And the sad part of it is, there doesn't really seem to be any way to fix it.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17372104/

[BDC]

Antibiotics for children aren't free on medicare?

[Hosakawa Tito]

A colleague from work experienced a similar infection after a dental procedure, except he survived the infection in his brain. We have decent dental coverage too, so it wasn't from lack of access. The dentist just screwed up and hadn't properly disinfected his instruments. This is a sad case.

[doc_bean]

I'm going to the dentist on friday, thanks for sharing

[GoreBag]

There should be some kind of mouth-douche.

[Fisherking]

If it was that bad the kid could have been treated in almost any ER. Maybe a lot of people don't know it…and when it is someone else's pain sometimes people don't act quickly enough. If they were indigent they wouldn't have had to pay.

I had a Great Uncle who died from that sort of thing, but that was a long time ago.

[ajaxfetish]

It seems a little extreme for one brother to have six rotting teeth, and another an abcess so bad it could spread to the brain. I wonder if there is a genetic problem in the family, or alternatively if there's a lack of oral hygiene.

Ajax

[Adrian II]

(..) an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.

No conceivable system can ever eradicate human failure. But Goofball is right in stressing the wider message of the article: for the quaintest reasons, dental care is often considered as a sort of cosmetic treatment that doesn't count as health care in the proper sense. This article demonstrates why it should.

[Papewaio]

I agree a lot of diseases are related to poor oral hygiene.

[ShadeHonestus]

Almost every town in the US over the population of 50,000 has a free dental and health clinic. Aside from that, if you show up at an emergency room, without insurance, yes even for a toothache, they will treat you with a prescription of painkillers and antibiotics. As long as you're at a hospital larger than the local Starbucks, you can ask for samples or that the prescription be filled there at the ER.

[Papewaio]

In NZ every school had a dental room. The dental nurse would go from school to school, so twice a year you were sent to the dental nurse for a check up.