Bernie is a general dentist with Yorktowne Dental Group. With a dentistry degree from Temple University and over five decades of experience, Bernie has been a champion for the underrepresented patient population. Asides from working in his regular practice, Bernie is the founder of MOM-N-PA, an annual free dental clinic and the chairman of two free dental clinics in Pennsylvania. Bernie walks us through an emergency evaluation and procedure and explains the gratification from working with families for multiple generations.
Transcript
My name is Dr. Bernie Dishler. I'm a dentist, a general dentist, in private practice. Well, I see patients for examinations on their routine six or three-month basis, and I see patients who are new patients, who need a more comprehensive examination. And I restore teeth that have been decayed and people who need crowns. I also see people on an emergency basis, if they have a toothache, and try to relieve their pain. Usually, I see patients in my chair, about one each hour, and plus the fact that I also visit the hygienists who are doing the cleanings, and check their patients. So we have three hygienists in our practice, so I could end up seeing four patients in an hour, but three of them were just superficial exams. Often, patients will come in in an emergency with a toothache, and either with or without swelling, and we take an x-ray and diagnose it. Sometimes with the x-ray or sometimes with their symptoms, you can see the swelling right next to the tooth. What we do then is actually enter into, make a hole in the top of the tooth, and enter into the pulp canal where the nerve used to be housed. And usually when they need a root canal treatment the nerve has already died and it's infected. And we have instruments that treat through that hole, and then when we're all finished, we sterilize it and put some material in to seal it, so that no infection can get back into it. We utilize expanded functions dental assistants, we call it EFDAs, and they're specially trained, and they can actually do a lot of the procedures that a dentist might do on his own, or her own. And, like filling teeth, and all reversible procedures, so that after that's done, I'll go in and I'll prepare the tooth, and then turn it over to the EFDA. And then I come back in, and if there's something I don't like, we could do it all over again, or make an adjustment, or whatever. Yeah, so I have an interesting situation, cuz I practiced in my office and I was the owner of the practice, and I had to take care of all the administration and payroll, and all those things. But I sold my practice to another practitioner 13 years ago, and now he has all those responsibilities, and all I do is, I come in two days a week and treat patients who are like family to me, because many of them had been patients for many years, generations, as a matter of fact.
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