Our First Month….

Indulge me for a moment, and allow me to vent…..   Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” just sold for a record $450.3 million dollars at auction. While I do appreciate fine art, I wonder if the money could have been better spent serving the needs of the poor? I think of our clinic, for example, that could be duplicated for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. The half a billion dollars just spent on pigment and canvas could have instead provided the means to establish 2,500 clinics in areas of critical need. There are 650,000 practicing dentists in the world. What if just 2,500 of them were persuaded to staff these hypothetical clinics, on a volunteer basis?  If each facility served the needs of 25 patients a day, 250 days a year, 15,625,000 patients could be seen each year.

That’s probably a drop in the bucket, when you consider there are probably 5 billion people on the planet without access to health care, but as the Mission Nurse here in Tonga told me today, “One starfish at a time. One starfish at a time.”

Still, I can’t help but imagine what could be done if the Bill Gates Foundation, or some other multi-billionaire, gave just a small fraction of their fortune to do help their less-fortunate fellow travelers?

These are three young guys we met in Nuku ‘alofa who are on the Tongan Rugby Team.

Many patients come to the clinic wearing a tupeno, (skirt), a kafa (apron), all supported by a tu ‘ovala (cord). It’s not at all unusual to see the tupeno worn around town, very casually. I’m wearing mine to dinner tonight. Midwestern is going to “Little Italy” on the waterfront, and they’ve invited us to join them.

A couple of patients came to the clinic, wearing grass skirts. I complimented them on their attire, not realizing that it was the traditional dress of those in mourning for a departed loved one. They wear it for a year, afterward.

We saw a girl today, who needed a root canal on a 12 year molar. While she was being treated, I found her mother waiting in the reception area, and I led her to the “x-ray room” where I took a set of bite-wings. Then I grabbed a dental student and asked him to do an exam. We are going to see her in the next few days to do several restorations, and make a flipper partial to replace missing teeth. You could pull any person, at random, off the street, or out of the reception area, do a quick visual exam, and find a dozen procedures to do.

Because I don’t have specific responsibilities to treat patients while Midwestern is here, I can just roam around and find people who need attention, who are getting lost in the shuffle. If I see a vacant chair, I seat my patient down and stake out a claim. Once I’ve done that, it’s pretty easy to get a student to do a visual exam, chart 4 quadrants of decay, and get them started on treatment. Very few patients have inter-proximal decay. It’s all pit and fissure caries, and if we don’t get to it in its early stages, the coronal tooth structure will be destroyed, and the tooth will either need a root canal or extraction.

Even as we provide oral health care, we recognize that a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.

There has been discussion about establishing a rotation for Midwestern students, in Tonga. They are thinking about making the director of the dental clinic an adjunct professor at Midwestern, so they could send students five at a time, for a two week period, to get some real-world experience. It’s all just talk, for now, but it might just develop into a viable program. Planting seeds. Who knows what could happen?