False Impressions

A postal worker's widow, and now a charwoman on Chicago's North Side, Agnes Jones had to watch every penny. So she was delighted by a neighbor's suggestion that a dental laboratory down the block could make her a set of false teeth more cheaply than a dentist could. On her first visit to a grubby North Clark Street office, a technician examined Mrs. Jones's mouth and told her: "I have had a dentist for 28 years, and he knows his stuff." The lab man quoted her $125 for the job.

The back-room dentist took out six teeth, but ran into trouble on a seventh. "My gums bled and swelled up so much he couldn't grind any more," she recalls. Despite her pain, the dentist extracted full payment from her before she left. Agnes Jones had to go back again and again to have her gums treated. When she finally got her plates, they fitted so badly that her mouth swelled unbearably. Not until another dentist had her mouth X-rayed was it found that the back-room dentist had broken a tooth and ground it below the gum line, but left the root in place.

Same-Day Service. Mrs. Jones eventually got well-fitted dentures at one of Chicago's three dental-school clinics, where the going rate is $30 to $75. And from her bitter experience the Chicago Dental Society got evidence that helped to put a score of bootleg dental-lab operators out of business and threatens nine conniving dentists with loss of their licenses.

The trouble, according to an American Dental Association spokesman in Today's Health, is that too many toothache vic tims are so scared by the prices that fashionable dentists are known to charge that they do not even consult a reputable pro fessional man. They do not know what a break they can get at the clinics. Worst of all, they have no idea of the damage that unqualified workers can do.

The dental laboratories at first worked legitimately for dentists. Soon many of them slipped over the line of Illinois law into dealing directly with patients. Some, like Mrs. Jones's operators, hire a dentist for extractions ; others do not even bother to put up this false front. Most use the sign "Broken plates repaired" as a come-on; many advertise same-day service --some promise it in one hour.

Do-It-Yourself Kit. The Dental Soci ety has spent -$150,000 gathering dossiers on 137 labs which, it estimates, have done a $9,000,000 annual business. This year it won an injunction in Superior Court, for bidding 19 of the labs to take impressions or do major repairs except under the supervision of a dentist. In the Illinois Supreme Court last week, lawyers argued the case on appeal. The defendants contended that the law would force them out of business and thus unconstitutionally deprive them of their means of livelihood.

The society's answer: it merely wanted to make them comply with the sound standards of the Dental Practice Act.

The outcome of the Chicago cases was of national concern. Not only has the city more than its share of bootleg dental dealers in local trade; it is also home to virtually all the mail-order business. This undertakes to supply false teeth by copying old dentures mailed in, or--stranger still--by using impressions made by the victim at home with a do-it-yourself kit.

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