Patients, insurers and regulators are attacking a `holistic’ practice that entails what they say are unnecessary extractions of teeth and bone.
Rebecca Lindsay had a toothache. Dentists told the 36-year-old Irvine woman that her dental fillings were slowly poisoning her and that she should attack the problem at the source. Her teeth had to come out.
Over the next three months, the dentists, James Shen and his wife, Rily Young of Huntington Beach, extracted nine of Lindsay’s teeth — and much of her jaw.
They didn’t stop there. They yanked 18 of her mother’s teeth after Lindsay referred her to them. “You just put your trust in doctors,” said Lindsay, a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. “I thought, if I don’t do this, I can die.”
The treatment left Lindsay so disfigured that a new team of surgeons has since transplanted bone from her hips to reconstruct her jaw. New plastic teeth are allowing her to eat normal food. Now, she said, after years of shame about her appearance, “I am going to have to learn how to smile again.”
Lindsay and her mother, Lyndel McKay, 67, are suing the dentists for malpractice. They are among a long list of patients who have been subjected to “holistic” or “biological” dentistry, a controversial practice that urges wholesale extractions of teeth and surgery to remove “decaying jawbone.”
Shen and Young have denied the allegations. They are fighting the suits by Lindsay and her mother.
Many in the dental establishment consider holistic dentistry a fraud. They say there is no reason to pull people’s teeth to stop common ailments and that many holistic dentists do so solely to pump up their bills.
“It is hocus-pocus,” said Robert S. Baratz, a Boston physician and dentist, who has appeared as an expert witness in 18 cases against holistic practitioners before state dental boards. In all the cases, he said, the dentists either were reprimanded or lost their licenses.
In California, regulators have cracked down on some holistic practitioners, suspending their licenses and fining them. They say the practice has quietly existed for decades and acknowledge that there is little their overburdened departments can do. Patients often are willing participants in the treatment, and those who feel duped are embarrassed to come forward.
Two of the nation’s largest insurers recently targeted holistic dental treatments, declaring that they would not pay claims to dentists who scoop out chunks of patients’ jawbones. A few months ago, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois stated that the procedure was not a recognized treatment and thus not covered.
.
