FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog

And to think this dentist moron, Robert Woo, thought this was appropriate?

According to court documents, Woo, who practices oral surgery in Auburn, liked to joke with a longtime assistant about her pet pig Walter. The assistant adored Walter, and potbellied pigs in general, even going so far as to rescue unwanted pigs and adopt them out to new owners.

Woo, however, was not so enamored and sometimes joked with her about barbecuing Walter. Once, he had his photo taken with some pigs strung up in a shop window and made a point of showing her. Another time, after a hunting trip, he brought in a photo of himself alongside a dead boar.

Woo later said he’d never kill Walter and that the photos were just playful teasing. His lawyer said Woo ran his office more like a family than a dental practice, and that he and the staff, most of whom were longtime employees, were close.

Given that closeness, Woo said he decided to take the boar joke another step in the summer of 1999, when the assistant needed a dental procedure, according to court records. In addition to the temporary replacement teeth, which were ordered two weeks in advance, he also ordered an additional set of teeth made in the shape of tiny boar’s tusks, the kind that curl up at the end.

In court documents, he said he planned to present the assistant with the tusks as a gag gift. But when she decided at the last minute to have full anesthesia, he came up with another plan.

While she was unconscious, he inserted the fake teeth. Other assistants came into the room to help Woo take photos. The photos show the patient and the teeth, with her eyes and mouth propped open by various sets of hands and dental instruments.

Her lawyer later called it a “grotesque and/or ugly piglike state.”

After the patient saw the photos, she broke down crying, left the office and never came back. Unbeknownst to Woo, she had been sexually assaulted as a teen. The boar’s-teeth incident was a different sort of violation, but it brought forth memories of the sexual assault and spurred a case of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a psychologist’s report in the court file.

And then the MORON sues the insurance company for his poor judgment.

On Monday, the state Court of Appeals ruled that an insurance company had no obligation to defend dentist Robert Woo, whose idea of a practical joke was to photograph the set of teeth in the mouth of the anesthetized patient. The ruling overturns a jury verdict of $750,000 — in favor of the dentist — but leaves intact a $250,000 settlement with the patient.

Flap thinks the good dentist should have cut his losses the first time…. and stop trying to be funny!

YOU AREN’T!

What a moron!

Earthquake in 5 magnitude range centered in Yucaipa

Flap felt it here in Thousand Oaks.

Anyone else?

Hillary Clinton is now the official front runner for the Democrat presidential nomination. On Wednesday the Richland County Democrats held the nation’s first straw poll for the 2008 presidential race and the surprise winner was U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

Clinton’s victory at the sparesely attended event was a mild upset. Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, a native South Carolinian and last year’s Democratic vice presidential candidate, had been considered the favorite.

Clinton got 44 votes to 34 for Edwards. Virginia Gov. John Warner came in third with 32 votes and U.S. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware got 24 votes.

Everyone else scored in the single digits.

The straw poll was conducted by the Democratic Party of Richland County, the most Democratic county in South Carolina and the state’s second-most populous.

Fancy that and Flap thought she was just running for re-election to the U.S. Senate

Nearly one in three gay and bisexual men who tested positive for HIV at a major Los Angeles clinic last year acknowledged using crystal methamphetamine, an illegal drug that increases sexual risk taking, according to a new study.

This story mirrors one Flap published in March of this year about the New York Methamphetamine connections with the Gay community.

That’s almost triple the rate of methamphetamine use in HIV-positive men in 2001, officials at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center said. They presented their data, based on 19,300 tests over four years, at the National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.

Although there is general agreement that meth is a growing threat to gay and bisexual men nationwide, the latest numbers were higher than some experts expected.

“It does surprise me,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, director of sexually transmitted disease control in San Francisco. “It’s an important and serious problem.”

Quentin O’Brien, the Gay and Lesbian Center’s director of health and mental health services, called the increase startling. When asked if the problem had peaked, he said, “No one knows. We’re on the upward trend right now.”

But, now someone is recognizing the problem and may actually do something…….

Later this month, one local group serving HIV-positive clients will begin a small marketing campaign on sex-seeking websites and in the gay press, encouraging meth users to become educated and seek treatment.

The campaign’s slogan is “Get off now,” said Demetri Moshoyannis, executive director of Being Alive, a coalition of people with HIV and AIDS.

“One of the things we need to do is create a different social norm in the gay community, making it unfashionable to use crystal,” Moshoyannis said. “We want to get to the point where peers are saying to one another, ‘No, I don’t use crystal, and nobody’s doing that now.’ ”

In the past, those who treated substance abuse and those who treated HIV did not necessarily collaborate.

“There’s been HIV funding and there has been drug treatment funding, and those are different arms of the government, of the county,” said Cathy Reback, a researcher and director of prevention at the Van Ness Recovery House in Hollywood.

As meth use has been increasingly linked to HIV, though, “there has been tremendous movement in the right direction,” she said. Reback and colleague Steve Shoptaw plan to open a clinic in West Hollywood this year to provide meth abuse treatment to gay and bisexual men, along with education on how to reduce their HIV risks.

Gay or Straight Meth is a problem that needs immediate national attention.

Too many folks are dying from an Unnecessary Epidemic.

This is a great tutorial on how to use PubMed and RSS feeds for journal reading.

Flap uses Onfolio for his RSS Feed Aggregator and loves it.

How-to: RSS feeds for Dentistry journals

I’ve received some nice feedback from my previous post with RSS links to medical journals. So here goes a quick tutorial on how to get RSS links using Pubmed:

1) Go to www.pubmed.com
2) Click on “limits”
3) In the first drop-down menu (All fields), select “Journal”
4) In the search area, enter the name of the journal you’re looking for
5) Click “go”
6) In the drop-down menus right above the search results, go to the one that reads “send to” and select “RSS feed”
7) Automatically it will take you to another page with configuration details about the feed you are about to create
Select 50 as the number of items in the feed, so if the journal publishes more than the default 15 items you won’t miss any
9) click “create feed”
10) Your link for the RSS feed is ready, under the XML button !

Go to your favorite RSS aggregator and enjoy not having to bother about all those e-mail notifications

Have fun with these feeds.

Now, college chemistry students are manufacturing Meth.

A San Diego State University chemistry student was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of manufacturing methamphetamine and other illicit narcotics on campus.

Federal agents took Matthew Finley, 26, into custody at his Ocean Beach home, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reported.

A search of the Santa Monica Avenue residence turned up methamphetamine, the potent analgesic fentanyl and several marijuana plants, DEA officials said.

Investigators also sealed off the building that houses SDSU’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory and searched a work area assigned to Finley, a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree, according to the DEA.

There, they allegedly found more methamphetamine and fentanyl, as well as a quantity of the psychoactive drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy.

Hey DEA how about raiding the labs in Mexico.