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More Letters

• Letter To The Editor: Marco Island ‘under construction’
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I was disappointed to read Dr. Eck’s dental Wellness article in the Sept. 24 Eagle. I have read his pieces every week and have not been too concerned with the veiled advertising of his office that goes on in his “informative” responses to reader questions. But, this last column was too filled with misinformation.

Dr. Eck’s suggestion to his readers that a patient should , “run, don’t walk out of their office” because a clinician’s diagnostic opinion is different than that of Dr. Eck, was unprofessional. I have spoken to nearly every board certified oral surgeon in our area and could not find one that agreed that a CT scan is the “standard of care” in every implant case.

I want to make perfectly clear that I do not place implants in my practice. I am greatly concerned with the over use of x-ray radiation especially in cases where a CT scan is not clinically necessary. CT scans are vitally important in cases where implants are being placed close to important structures such as nerves and sinuses, but hardly for every case. Exposing a patient to excess radiation, possibly cancer causing, for no other reason than to line ones pockets is as unprofessional as it gets. In general dental x-rays have minimal radiation and are very safe but anything in excess should be avoided if not necessary. A full mouth of x-rays for a thorough exam (about .36 milliseiverts) is less than one eighth what the average Floridian will be exposed to in background radiation (about 3 milliseiverts).

The citizens of Marco Island deserve to be well informed and recent dental advancements can be confusing to the lay person, information is power but unprofessional misinformation weakens the profession as a whole. In this column the question asked wasn’t even answered, no description of the many implant options was even touched upon.

Axel E. McGuffie DMD FAGD

Fellow of the Academy of General Dentistry