Quackery has been in practice in the dental ecosystem for a long time now. A simple reason behind the same being the demand is more than supply, viz. there is a scarcity of qualified dental professionals. The domino effect, gullible people falling to the dupes of quacks, who provide dental treatment apparently backfires.
In India particularly people residing in remote areas, are deprived of affordable oral healthcare services. Quackery, for those who aren’t aware of the term means ‘fraudulent misrepresentation of one’s ability and experience in the treatment and diagnosis of a disease or the effects of the treatment that is provided’.
Even the high court has mentioned a quack as ‘a person who does not have knowledge of a particular system of medicine but practices in that system is a quack and a mere pretender of medical knowledge or skill’.
If we go by the statistics, approximately 3000 quacks are already practicing dentistry across India on an illegal basis. Well, there is this huge difference in the allocation of dentists in public and private sector. Again wherever there is some basic oral healthcare facility available the infrastructure is really poor with limited workforce and resources.
Malpractices that the quacks carry out in dentistry include life threatening risks like using the same needle on multiple patients, not using sterilized equipment, no usage of aspepsis while undertaking procedures, using self-curing acrylic for replace a missing teeth. Using an already extracted tooth for replacing a missing one. The aforementioned are just a few examples of unethical practices that people fall prey to due to paucity of oral healthcare professionals. In the name of providing instant and pain-free treatment these quacks fool the people who are not well informed around oral care and are in need of immediate solution to their problems. In contrast, the treatment they receive when they consult such quacks is not only painful but destructive too, at times causing irreversible damage.
This problem too has a solution and the solution lies in providing accessibility to dental services in remote areas alongside stringent polices against unethical practice. Alternatively, spreading awareness amongst people around dental quacks and furthermore training these quacks after absorbing them would certainly help curb these problems to a great extent.
*Sourced from the Internet