When this salon owner started offering teeth whitening in her upscale salon, she thought it would be a nice addition to her lineup of eyelash extensions, temporary tattoos and custom makeup. However she was shocked when an inspector for the Alabama Board of Dental Examiners ordered her to stop the service, accusing her of practicing unlawful dentistry. Her ongoing lawsuit with the state has waded into the murky area of regulating teeth whitening products that are increasingly offered in settings outside the dentist’s office, such as salons and mall kiosks.
The dental industry claims it’s a health and safety issue, the beauty parlors say the dentists are just trying to brush them out of a lucrative niche. She declares that as an entrepreneur she only tried to beef up her services with this new service. The lady while blow drying a customer’s freshly cut hair opened up how frustrated she felt that even before she had it going, she was already being threatened that they will shut her down. She believes that this is a cosmetic service and they are on the right side of the law.
But it was revealed by the current consumer adviser and spokesman for the American Dental Association, a dentist for over 43 years, that when it comes to those bleaching trays or ultraviolet lights, it’s hard to tell if they are safe and hygienic. People in white coats facilitating the whitening by handing customers the trays to put into their own mouths or adjust the lights over their teeth are seen in many salons now. But what the ADA is worried about is this , customers wrongly seeing these salon employees as health care professionals. We can never tell the levels of sanitation being done for these tools. This is an unregulated thing you are faced with.
A lot of the similar products are readily available in stores that consumers can just buy and use in the comforts of their own homes. In due course we feel this boils down to a consumer rights matter as consumers should have the right to whiten their teeth as they want to just as long as the procedure is safe. Whitening for teeth conducted at a beauty parlor or mall shop using bleaching trays or ultraviolet light would entail a rate from between a hundred to two hundred dollars. It will take you four hundred dollars or maybe more with a dentist.
In this court case consisting of the dental board of Alabama against a firm that supplied whitening products to a lot of mall stores and beauty salons, a Montgomery judge has ruled in favor of the dental board after affirming that whitening can only be done by those with a license and this has to be done under strict dental practice and training only. This Birmingham attorney, the same one who represented the Alabama board in the case, revealed that this same matter is being dealt with in states like Louisiana, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wyoming and New Mexico, and that many have reached the same finale as this judge from Alabama.
Right after a slew of complaints about mall kiosks doing whitening the Tennessee board of dentistry changed its rules to clarify that whitening can only be performed by licensed dentists or hygienists and dental assistants under their direct supervision last month. It’s amazing, we never touch the customer’s mouth, never touch the customer, period, and we don’t see how that could possibly be practicing dentistry, said a salon owner, who was visibly agitated as he discussed the situation.
Ohio’s dental board approved, after establishing that while it does have some concerns about unfettered use of the supplies, whitening done by those who are nondentists is OK just as long as they do not touch the person’s mouths and that these consumers position the light and put the material on their own teeth all by themselves. The board decided that simply providing a consumer with the materials to make a tray and demonstrating to them how to apply materials to their teeth for whitening aims is not what dentistry is all about.
Not until the past four or five years whitening has taken root even as this ADA spokesman speaks about whitening practices on a cruise he was one about seven years ago. The American Dental Association has a policy but that’s not enforceable in any way, he said. Governments of states and dental boards will have to determine how they will handle this.
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