Community Dentistry

My main objective for myself and the teams coming down is to promote community development. The idea of community development is something I’ll develop in more detail through future blog posts, but the basic idea is that our focus here should be strengthening community organizations rather than doing hands on work. One of the reasons the community is poor is because it doesn’t have institutions to serve it. For instance, a poor community with sick people would benefit from a few doctors coming down and passing out medicine, but it would benefit even more from a permanent clinic. One of the best practices for community development is working along side with professionals in the community. This way the community institution gets the support it needs and it is able to address more needs (again, this is a very complicated topic which I’ll develop further in a future blog post). This past week a medical team was here and they went out into some of the remote communities that couldn’t really access the clinics and administered some care there. We had a dentist with us, and he was able to set up a mobile dentistry clinic and do some of the most interesting dentistry work as well as community development work.

Many of the Haitians have dental problems that go unaddressed. These issues have many roots, the biggest being poor diet, few opportunities to clean their teeth, and unclean water. Dentistry is also less common, so it is less of an expectation in Haiti than in the US. Most Haitians have so few resources to begin with, dentistry is just not on many people’s radar. Because of this many people will have tooth infections that can cause chronic pain and create other problems. On this trip we did a really great job of not only treating lots of people who have dental problems but also getting the local dentist exposure to the community.   

The dentist for the mission, Dr. Miguel, is not very well known in the communities, especially not in the more remote areas. He is a very competent dentist and does great work for the people who see him, but because dentistry is not as present in Haiti as it is in the US, he does not have as much business as he would like to have. We decided to bring him out with us to the communities. This was great from a public health perspective because we treated lots of people with dental problems, but it was also good on a community development level because were showing people in the community that he can help them! Along with this trip was also an American dentist, Dr. Bob Evans who worked side by side with Dr. Miguel throughout the entire trip.

I was really proud to be apart of this group because the dentistry initiative was a great example of community development. Dr. Evans, being a white American dentist, drew a lot of attention. Dr. Evans shared that attention with Dr. Miguel, and was able to promote Dr. Miguel and his work. Working side by side with professionals in the community (in this case, working side by side with Haitian dentists) is a key part to community development. Dr. Miguel could go out into the communities himself, but as a single Haitian he doesn’t attract that much attention. As a group of American healthcare providers however, we stick out in a major way, and people want to be apart of our clinics in part because we’re such a rarity. Together the two dentists were able to see over one hundred patients throughout the entire week. Dr. Evans set up a mobile dentistry clinic with Dr. Miguel and together they spent each day working on the chronic tooth pain in the community. They not only treated the pain but they promoted the dental clinic, and made the community more aware of another resource they have available to them.