Kanawha County dentist pleads guilty for falsely billing Medicaid

A Charleston dentist pleaded guilty Monday to health care fraud in connection to falsely billing West Virginia Medicaid and state Medicaid Managed Care Organizations for more than $700,000. Antoine Skaff admitted to fraudulently billing for dental procedures he did not actually perform for more than five years, including noting complex procedures when he actually performed simple extractions.

See NY counties where dentists are shunned

About 41 percent of 35- to 44-year-old adults have lost one or more teeth due to tooth decay or gum diseases, according to the state Health Department. Another 17 percent of people 65 years and older have lost all of their teeth.

Re: Custom Bikes Of The Week: 20 August, 2017

Dustin Kott returns with the bike he said he'd never build. Plus a sleek Harley Super Hooligan racer, and a Benelli restomod from a pair of Barcelona dental surgeons.

Callis: Ode to the dental chair

Those who suffer with odontophobia will find it ironic that the man who developed the electric chair, Alfred P. Southwick, was a dentist whose invention came soon after the patent for the dental chair, credited to Waldo Hanchett in 1848. While 75 percent of adults experience some degree of dental anxiety, it is believed that between 5 and 10 percent suffer from a genuine dental phobia.

Crown tattoos: a growing trend

Crown tattoos in downtown Chicago

Almost one in three Americans has a tattoo, according to the Harris Poll in 2015. What once made someone seem unique and possibly a little extreme is now commonplace. What’s an artistic, self-actualized Millennial to do to stand out nowadays? Perhaps consider a crown tattoo.

Companies such as Oral Arts in Alabama and Tennessee advertise the ability to add various custom designs to all-ceramic and PFM crowns and bridges. They encourage any design that can be made small enough to fit on a restoration. Suburban Dental Lab in Connecticut prides itself on being an early adopter. According to an October 2014 article on DentistryIQ, they’ve been adding decorations to their indirect restorations since the 1950s, when they began embellishing with white images on their popular gold crowns. As demand for ceramic restorations grew, they shifted to porcelain glaze images instead.

It’s not just young people who have jumped on this trend bandwagon. Suburban Dental Lab explains that most of their clients are middle-aged and request designs with children’s names or sports teams. Their most popular request, in fact, is for dogs. Their ceramists paint each design by hand in layers added to the porcelain before firing to set the image.

I myself encountered one of these ceramic crown tattoos just recently in Logan Square in Chicago. After striking up a conversation with a young woman next to me, it came out that I’m a dental student. She got really excited and explained that she’d just gotten a heart tattooed into her new crown. Even though she normally hates going to the dentist, her new dentist had won her over with this fun bit of flair. She even let me snap the above picture as another chance to show it off.

Remember, a tattoo is permanent! Oral Arts boasts that these designs will not wear off over time (unless the whole crown comes off). It will add one more day to the lab processing time, however. Once you’re sure you really want one, that gives you one more day to figure out how to explain your latest tattoo to your poor grandma.

 

~ Rachel Bush, Las Vegas ’18, electronic editor

Ghana Health Service to deal with erring doctors

The Ghana Health Service has said it would not countenance any action or practices by medical doctors likely to impact negatively on quality healthcare delivery in the country. Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare, the Director-General, said that it was quite worrying that some public sector doctors and dentists, who are on full time appointment by the government, have in recent times developed the penchant for spending part of their official working hours to work in private health facilities.

'I'm back in the 1950s': Saint John dentist says proposed tax changes punish women

Kelly Keys Manning, a small business owner and dentist, says she feels she can't recommend her daughters to pursue a similar career path as she did. A Saint John dentist and small business owner says she feels tax changes Finance Minister Bill Morneau proposed earlier this month, unfairly target her for being a female entrepreneur.