When Our Community Room Becomes a Dental Clinic

Why should anyone have to live with a painful tooth simply because they can’t afford to see a dentist?

For far too many New Yorkers, that’s exactly what happens.

We live in a city with some of the finest medical care in the world, yet something as basic as dental care remains out of reach for many of our neighbors. If you don’t have dental insurance through your job, your options can be very limited. Even people covered by Medicaid often struggle to find dentists who will accept their insurance. Too often, people put off seeing a dentist until they’re in serious pain, turning relatively minor problems into much more serious ones.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Every other Thursday, a community room at Educational Alliance’s Manny Cantor Center becomes a dental clinic. Four students from NYU’s College of Dentistry, supervised by faculty, provide free dental care to members of our community. The program reflects the commitment of NYU’s College of Dentistry, and particularly its dean, Dr. Charles Bertolami, to bringing dental care to people who might otherwise go without it. No insurance is required, and there’s no need to wait months for an appointment.

On one recent Thursday, the team treated an entire family. The father received a deep cleaning, the mother had an X-ray to investigate a painful tooth, and their daughter, who uses a wheelchair, had her teeth cleaned with special accommodations for her needs.

A clinic every other Thursday won’t solve a national problem. We live in a society that has largely accepted that millions of people cannot get treatment for something as basic as a painful tooth. But together with NYU, we’re doing something about it right here in our own neighborhood. And for the people in that dental chair, it can make a profound difference.

In the above video, I speak with Dr. Cheryline Pezzulo and Dr. Felisa Lindain, who lead NYU’s community-based dental programs, about why a toothache so often becomes something much worse, and what it takes to bring a clinic into a community center like ours. It’s a serious social problem that gets remarkably little attention, and these are the people working on it every day.

Please take a few minutes to watch.

Best,

Rich Baum
President & CEO, Educational Alliance