“No extenuating circumstances for those who
throw mud on the dental profession.”
- Rome Medical Society
Newsletter
Huh? Who was throwing what mud on
whom how? I couldn’t resist clicking through. The mudslingers turned out to be . . . real dentists who dishonor
the profession by covering for phony ones. This is an old story. Most dentistry
in Italy is done privately, not on the National Health Service, which has
spawned a whole army of dental imposters – 15,000 or so strong, said to fill a quarter of all the country’s cavities.
Usually the pretender is a technician, trained
to work on crowns and bridges but dabbling in live teeth on the side, in cahoots with an authentic doc who
for a price allows his name to grace the receipts, the prescription forms, and
the bronze plaque on the office door. One of my closest friends had a dental
technician uncle so she never went to a licensed dentist until she moved to
another city at age 35.
The figure of prestanome or name-lender is as deeply rooted in Italian society as
that of the Mafia consigliere. Years
ago my secretary was inveigled by her first boss into being the official CEO of
a shady import-export company, whose shenanigans eventually got her hauled into
court. The judge took one look at her neckline and jeans and spat out in
disgust, “She’s obviously just a prestanome.”
While name-lender dentists never used
to risk more than a slap-on-the-wrist fine, lately the Medical Societies have
started upping the ante. Last week’s headline was celebrating the very first
time the Rome Medical Society had publically stripped a dentist of his licence,
after the courts had found him guilty. This particularly bad actor, charitably left
unnamed in the article, had abandoned hand-in-mouth dentistry years earlier in
favor of skimming the profits off a chain of quack offices.
But, then, when I was studying medicine
in New York it was whispered that patients at my Mount Sinai Hospital had been
operated on for years by a neurosurgeon who didn’t have a medical license. As
the Italians say, tutto il mondo รจ paese,
everywhere in the world it’s the same village.
