at the roots of an unequal healthcare system

Delivered. Traumatized at the age of 7 by an indelicate dentist, Olivier Cyran has retained a strong aversion to this profession. Although his “stomatophobia” – a disease that affects one in two French people – spurs On the teeth, the fierce and corrosive charge it delivers is above all directed against a deeply unequal healthcare system. ” Year after year, writes the journalist, studies are piling up on the varnished wooden desks of the health authorities, pushing the ministry to admit, in 2011, that inequalities in oral health are strongly correlated with social inequalities. “ For its part, the Court of Auditors alerted, in 2016, to the mediocre dental condition of the French population, where it is estimated that four out of ten people give up seeking treatment for lack of means.

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To lay bare this system which “Puts up with the flagrant injustices that it provokes, trivializes, produces”, Olivier Cyran goes back to the roots of evil, by retracing, through the prism of inequalities, the major stages in the history of dentistry. With this common thread, he interweaves what constitutes the heart of his remarks: the testimonies of victims, as chilling as they are edifying, including those of the scandal of low cost Dentexia centers. But also some dentists. A rare word. And for good reason, the national order of dental surgeons, which has also refused to respond to the requests of Olivier Cyran, keeps a firm hand on its troops. It is therefore under cover of anonymity that they express themselves here, like Paul Lafargue (a pseudonym). Dentist on the left, he hides nothing of his aversion to some of his colleagues eager for earnings, unscrupulous and contemptuous of the most disadvantaged.

“Easy money”

More than anything, his angry criticism targets “A flawed diet” in which he struggles daily to the point of exhaustion, torn between two contradictory injunctions: the care to be brought to the patients and the profitability of his practice. “The need to pay my bills obliges me to multiply the acts and therefore to reduce the time devoted to each patient”, he concedes. In this race for money, many of his colleagues have little qualms about the time to spend on scaling (conservatory treatment, which is not very profitable) or worse, to sterilize their equipment. Not to mention the sorting – denounced by the Defender of Rights in 2018 – that they operate to exclude the least profitable “clients”: beneficiaries of social assistance (CMU or AME), children, the elderly, the disabled, whose care is too much. time-consuming. “My colleagues prefer to make easy money by placing implants rather than keeping the existing ones”, sums up, bitterly, Paul Lafargue.

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