I hope lots of folks at the American Dental Association read this past week’s Wall Street Journal, which ran a story headlined, “Poor Oral Health Is Linked To Deadly Pancreatic Cancer.”

The Journal quoted a study of 51,000 men that revealed that those with a history of gum disease were at 64% higher risk for pancreatic cancer versus those who had good oral health.

Moreover, and this should come as no surprise to most of us, reporter Tara Parker-Pope also wrote that “some early research suggests that treating gum disease may lower risk for heart and other problems associated with poor oral health.”

You’d think armed with this type of evidence, the ADA would be wracking its brains trying to figure out how to drive people to their neighborhood dentists in droves. 

Instead, the ADA is throwing up roadblocks like rice at a wedding in a bow to its most influential – and dare I say delusional – committee members.

Somewhere, in the ADA’s perverse logic, the organization that is supposed to safeguard the public has calculated that the chances of an adult dying or being injured by a dentist following existing ADA guidelines is still too high.

The ADA position ignores the glaring fact – (kind of like overlooking Times Square on New Year ’s Eve) -- that well over one million adult patients have already been treated with oral conscious sedation without incident by dentists following guidelines currently in place.

But in a superfluous effort to be super-duper safe, not sorry, the ADA has recommended that the training requirements for those dentists wishing to offer adult oral conscious sedation be raised so high that only dentists with the educational fortitude of mountain climbers will be able to comply.  Most dentists, unable and/or unwilling to ascend laceType>Mt.laceType> laceName>EverestlaceName> in order continue doing what they’ve been doing safely for years, will abandon the administration of OCS altogether.

Which brings us back to the Wall Street Journal article.  Who, might we ask, is most likely to request OCS from their dentists?  Are they the patients who visit their dentist twice yearly as well as brush and floss daily?  Or are they patients who due to fear and anxiety avoid dental visits for years and become walking billboards for Porphyromonas gingivalis?

Which, I would like the ADA to consider, is the greater risk?  Allowing dedicated dentists who comply with current ADA guidelines to continue to practice – even if it turns out that one patient in two million or five million or fifty million is unfortunately injured, or facilitating the onset of gum disease in hundreds of thousands of fearful and anxious patients who simply won’t go to any dentist unless they receive oral conscious sedation?

(I know the above is a long sentence, but please, take the time to reread it.  It is that important!)

Medical insurers should be howling about this.  The cost of OCS pales in comparison to the cost of pancreatic cancer treatment, bypass surgery and other major medical complications that ground-breaking studies are showing have their origin in the mouth.  As the links between oral health and general health are more clearly established, I have little doubt that major medical insurers will take up the battle against the ADA’s asininity.

Meanwhile, I think we all must realize that we are not merely fighting to save the teeth, comfort and smiles of our oral conscious sedation patients.  In a very real sense, we are fighting to save their lives.

-- Dean Rotbart

p.s. For anyone who doesn’t know, pancreatic cancer remains one of the most deadly of all cancers.  Very, very few people survive more than a year after their diagnosis and the mortality rates have been that way for decades.