To whom it may concern,

I am a hygienist of 12 yrs. I am in charge of training new employees in our office. We have 6 dental assistants, which are expanded funstions assistants that came to us from all over the country. I have personally never trained an assistant that I felt had the knowledge of the anatomy of the tetth, roots etc that have led me to feel comfortable that they would know how to perforem such tasks, Most assistants have never cleaned the margins of temp or perm crowns porrperly and effectively. Out doctors will not allow them to do so due to the tissue trauma that has occurred and the damdage to the marginal tissue. I feel sallowing scaling is a very incompinent decision of behalf of the dental society to consider. Any doctor who would like to cust cost to allow this has an ecominical as wellas ethical delimma and should consider doing cleanings himself or herself. A point by our doctors is that they feel they are not qualified to scale effectively and therefore take us to the surgery center rather than perform these duties themselves. Scaling and scaling w/out trauma are quite different. I have photos adn x-rays to show how assistants scale, Please e-mail me if you would like to see the crowns we ahave redone at no charge due to improper cleanings on crowns and damage to the marginal tissue.

Sincerely ,

Deborah Seaver