Posted on 02/28/2007 6:59:16 AM PST by montag813
WASHINGTON - Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.
A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.
If his mother had been insured.
If his family had not lost its Medicaid.
If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.
If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.
By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.
Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Ooooooh, life is all about choices. This "mother" hasn't made the right choices, and clearly doesn't learn from her mistakes. Now her boy is dead. What has she learned? To get into the news and be an official victim. I'm sorry for all her kids. A parent like this is ruining their lives from the get-go.
I've never heard of someone dying from a cavity before.
Abscessed tooth, gets to be a haven for bacteria.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001060.htm
I was behind a man in a grocery store the other evening and he paid for the groceries with food stamps. He was using a Blue Tooth.
Have you ever had an abscessed tooth? If yes, could you even begin to imagine the pain lasting longer than 2 days let alone 6 months?
I used to be a dental hygienist and one of the worst cases of tooth decay in a child, was the son of a physician. Money isn't usually the cause of dental neglect.
But the lack of brushing, flossing, proper diet and other prophylactic measures can be assumed.
A cleaning is $100!
I heard a local Baltimore talk show discussing this sad incident this morning. At first, I thought they were talking about a similar incident that was widely reported in the New York Post (or Daily News) several months ago. How can the M.D.'s not know about it when another teen died from it in the recent past?
Forget a "reasonable payment schedule". IT's an $80 charge. I bet this woman has cable TV.
Perhaps this family has something congenitally which makes them more susceptible than most to tooth decay.
That said, I was always amazed at the number of high schoolers who seemed to have a steady diet of candy, soda and white flour items like bagels who also had no cavities. I attributed it to fluoride in the water and possibly dental treatments when young. I wonder about their future gum problems, but they were certainly way behind me in getting cavities.
Brush's Fault.
And you know this how? What are you basing this on? Nothing like that was in this article, we don't know what her other habits were. We DO know this, her care of her children was substandard, to say the least. But the rest of your diatribe (getting drunk and high with Tyrone) is uncalled for.
I live in NY and called a local Dental School. They said they would do an extraction for a low-income patient for $25.
Are the authorities going to book the mother on child neglect charges? No? Why not?
In her case, the doctor on duty just didn't believe her. He even mentioned "psychosomatic." They did absolutely nothing to stabilize her. They took a CAT scan, then left the room (and us alone). THEN, she had the stroke. She was almost screaming in pain. They just said there wasn't anything they could do. They discharged her (in a wheelchair). The nurse helping her out of the wheelchair was incredulous that she was being sent home. An MRI a few days later at a real hospital showed the stroke.
Nope, we had them. But if that shack had closed down (and we could have closed it down, my legal counsel assured me of that), a lot of people would have had to travel 40 miles for trauma care that the local hospital was perfectly capable of dealing with. In that particular community, no one who has lived there more than a few years goes to the local hospital, unless they are indigent.
If this woman had not had babies that she obviously couldn't afford to raise . . .
Really, we need to address the root of the problem, not the hundreds of subsequent points along the line where spending taxpayers money might produce marginal improvement. It's a near certainty that if this boy had survived 3-5 more years, he'd already have spawned one or more offspring by teenaged girls who were just as unequipped to raise children as his mother. This woman had a total of 5 children -- three others were living with grandparents.
I don't know. My brother-in-law (the fifth physician we consulted) said that only if all other causes were ruled out, would he admit the possibility of an absess from the tooth spreading to the brain.
Well, no one, not one of the five physicians in two states was able to explain the stroke in a very healthy 43 year old woman with no risk factors. So I did some inference, and concluded that the absess caused the stroke.
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