![]() ![]() And then they pulled out this big wand attached to a monitor. They asked me what kind of smile I was after. I walked into a room with a lot of purple and white and signed in on a tablet. They wouldn’t me let record audio inside, so I just took notes. It looks a bit like an Apple Store from the outside, it’s in a busy section of downtown. So I headed to a Smile Shop, one of Smile Direct’s storefront locations, to see what he’s talking about. He tells me Smile Direct is simply meeting a consumer need, and leveraging new technology to do it in a smarter way. “They don’t want nobody messing with lower fees.” They’re the ones earning the big dollars,” he said of traditional practices. To him, the company is all about increasing access to affordable care. He owned a few dental practices, and worked in insurance before Smile Direct. If you’ve gotten an email from Smile Direct with the greeting, “Hello Future Grinner,” it was probably signed by Sulitzer. “We give what they want, not what organized dentistry wants.” ![]() They’re not our customers,” said Jeffrey Sulitzer, Smile Direct’s chief dental officer. “We don’t cater to the organized dentists and organized dentistry. When the company’s top dentist talks about its detractors, he sounds a bit like he’s talking about some kind of mafia. Smile Direct, though, says the concern voiced by Gehani and others is overblown, malicious even. Hidden impacted teeth and cavities can blow up under aligners - and if teeth don’t move in just the right way, your bite goes way off. If your gums or jaw have underlying disease, teeth can get moved right out of your mouth. “They are not looking at all of those things.”Īll orthodontic treatments come with risks. They are not looking at the pockets, like how their gum condition is and how all the gums are receding,” said Gehani. They are not looking at the bone condition. “They are not looking at the soft tissue. The teeth are teeth, and the teeth are attached to the jaw bone and to the gum and to the head.”īefore getting aligners, he said, you need a real, clinical evaluation in a dentist’s office, and Smile Direct won’t give you that. “The teeth are not like nails in the wall. “They just feel that they can just put a plastic appliance, as if those are nails in the wall and they just want to align those nails in one condition,” Gehani said. Orthodontics is more complicated than most realize, he said, and some people just aren’t good candidates for aligners in the first place. But besides the root canal, there was the loose tooth, the tooth just hanging in the air,” said Gehani. “There was one particular patient who came to me for a root canal. ![]() Gehani said he first heard about it after his patients came in with complications. The group was an early and vocal critic of Smile Direct. And don’t put plastic aligners on every person who walks through your door,” said Chad Gehani, head of the American Dental Association. “I would’ve given THE LOOK the entire time.”Īt the top of the thread, a dentist had posted a close-up of some really messed-up teeth, apparently a patient of his, almost done with a Smile Direct treatment. “I was sitting on a plane today next to a dude who worked for 9 hours on SDC stuff. There are about 18,000 members, and Smile Direct Club comes up a lot. So to get dentists to talk to one another, or really anyone outside their offices, Goodman started a Facebook group. They typically only deal with their assistants and us, the patients who want to be anywhere but in a dentist’s chair. The private-practice model tends to silo dentists off from colleagues, he said. “They work in their own little cave because it’s just set up for dentists to work as solo practitioners.” “They work in their own little, you know, people call it islands or one dentist that I’ve connected with calls it a cave,” said Paul Goodman, a dentist and consultant in Philadelphia. If that’s news to you, it may be because dentists, I learned, are mild-mannered, solitary creatures. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.ĭentists have been locked in a fierce battle with mail-order orthodontics company Smile Direct Club for years now. This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. ![]()
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