To the extent that the Minnesota Board of Dentistry
already trusts specially trained personal to behave responsibly and professionally in the event of a cardiac event, it seems only logical to extend that trust to specially trained team members who monitor a healthy, sedated patient.

In an emergency, these staff members know not only how to spot trouble early and attend to the patient, but also how to immediately summon a dentist who may be in the bathroom or attending another pressing health issue.<< MORE >>

When it comes to Oral Conscious Sedation (OCS), trust the dentists who best understand its benefits and risks – those practitioners who use OCS regularly.

As far as we can determine, not one general dentist who has been trained in OCS protocols and uses them regularly has written to the ADA or TEAM 1500 in support of tougher standards. Not one.

The cry for new restrictions comes from dentists who are largely unfamiliar with OCS and don’t offer it to their patients. They speak not from experience.

More than 7,500 dentists currently offer OCS to their adult patients, safely and effectively. These are dedicated professionals whose values are above suspicion. If OCS dentists saw any evidence that these protocols were in any way risky for their patients, the OCS dentists would be pounding the ADA’s table to make changes.

IV sedation and OCS are not one in the same. Being an expert in the former doesn’t make a dentist an expert in the latter.<< MORE >>

Is this who really represents the ADA? Do these ADA spokespeople wish to “win” at any cost, even their integrity?

I don’t want to bore you with a line-by-line rebuttal to each sentence in the ADA News articles, but suffice it to say that Dr. James Bramson attributes motives to TEAM 1500 that may be reflections of his own culpability when he says our actions are, at worst, “an attempt to deliberately mislead the public.”<< MORE >>

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TEAM 1500 has sent the American Dental Association roughly 1,200 comments opposed to the revisions and have the documents to prove it. That alone should help dentists understand how disingenuous the ADA is being TO ITS OWN MEMBERSHIP when it states that "some opposed" the revisions, while "many" were supportive.

By my count those opposed had to outnumber those supporting by at least four-to-one. Probably more!<< MORE >>

In attacking TEAM 1500, I suspect the American Dental Association hopes to take some of the focus off its own duplicity. Here is an organization founded to serve the whole dental profession and the public at large, but instead has warped and twisted itself into a small group of power-hungry, turf-hungry dentists who will sell out its members and their patients to maintain a comfortable status quo.<< MORE >>

Adult oral conscious sedation patients in Minnesota who need to use the bathroom anytime after they’ve received their initial dose of medication can now count on their dentists coming into the restroom and even individual toilet stalls with them. Makes no difference if the dentist is male and the patient female or vice versa.

The new regulation raises all order of potential bathroom embarrassments. If a dentist needs to use the bathroom once an adult patient has received sedation, the dentist by law must take the patient with him (or her).

This is no joke.<< MORE >>

Our efforts going forward will be threefold:

1. Continue to exert pressure on the ADA to relent in the face of strong opposition from members, patients and the media.

2. Lobby the 450-plus members of the ADA’s House of Delegates – who will vote on the final proposals in September -- to defeat CDEL’s agenda. (While CDEL is dominated by oral surgeons and other specialists, the House of Delegates is a far more representative body.)

3. Work closely with the dental boards in every state to discourage them from adopting the ADA proposals as regulations.<< MORE >>

Those who wish to contribute to TEAM 1500 can fax back this PDF form.  Pledge Form