My intent is to prevent other people from having dental work done that is not in their best interest. I am teaching by my own dental tragedy by stressing how vital it is to give informed consent prior to any dental treatment being proposed or recommended. Does the treatment warrant the risk? Is the dental professional recommending the treatment competent and honest or are they trying to generate fees only?
There is nothing that can be done for myself at this point. I will struggle physically and financially for the rest of my life to try and keep some sort of restoration on the lower left side of my jaw. There is no way to restore my healthy teeth.
I trusted and believed these dentists (all referrals from one another – in my opinion the “good ole’ boy network) and it was the worst mistake of my life. The teeth that these dentists destroyed were healthy and the ultimate future they delivered to me is not good.
I want to change the system of monitoring and regulating dental professionals from the “self-serving & self-regulating” system of review by their peers. It is not in the public’s best interest with present system in place (look at the minutes of the meetings and what the consequences are for a dentist with respect to reprimands). It is minimal. They can destroy your healthy teeth and basically get a slap on the wrist if that.
The entire process of working with the State in my opinion is that the Dentist is perceived to be the victim. It is so difficult to demonstrate that you are the victim. The onus is on you? In my opinion, there is no incentive for this department to perform. They are paid regardless of what they accomplish. Do they perform their jobs with conviction, knowledge and ethics?
I know that this department is over worked. I have been able to establish some rapport with employees and have been advised that it is at a point where they need to arbitrarily close cases because they do not have the ability to properly investigate and discipline. In my opinion, the Florida Department of Health are picking and choosing. If the case is too involved, they close it. Keep in mind, there were 4 dentists involved in my dental complaints and they are all “buddies”.
I have no legal right to find out why my complaints were tossed. The dentists have the ability to see my complaint and all back up. I am not able to see how they responded or how the Florida Department of Health determined that these dentists that destroyed my healthy teeth practiced competent, legal and ethical dental treatments in my mouth.
Other victims of bad dentistry and their experiences with the Florida Department of Health are now contacting me. They are finding my teaching website on the Internet. This is just the tip of the iceberg. People will start coming forward.
We have more than 364 dentists in the West Palm Beach area. This makes no sense in relation to population. What does make sense is creating the need to create dental needs in patients in order for the dentists to support themselves. I am not saying that all dentists are like this, but they are out there and the public needs to be made aware of it.
It is not in anyone’s best interest to allow anyone to take away an individuals right of freedom of speech.
It is people like myself that will change a system or least give the public access to information that is not readily available in order to make informed decisions with respect to dental treatments.
I never agreed with anyone to not discuss my dental treatments or my experience with the Florida Department of Health or to not publish the dental treatments that these dentists performed in my mouth and ultimately destroyed my healthy teeth. There is no documentation that I signed that prohibits myself from discussing the details of my complaints or their investigation or lack of.
I have never told anyone to not treat with the dentists that destroyed my healthy teeth.
I notified all the dentists involved and the Florida Department of Health at the launch of the website. I did not go behind anyone’s back. I repeatedly asked them for the information that is missing from my files with respect to their dental treatments and to answer my questions. So far, no response.
These dentists that destroyed my healthy teeth did not allow me the right to:
Give informed consent
Were not honest in what could go wrong (root canals, breakage of teeth roots, loss of teeth)
Did not provide adequate follow up care
(Tolley – dishonest about what could happen with moving my teeth with braces and subsequent bridge work, Mohaupt – root canals, Kaplan – implant becoming uncovered and no follow up, Blake – over treatment with 5-unit bridge and no x-rays of bridge (more than 7 cleanings were done in his office Palm Beach Prosthodontics)
It is such a joke. Dr. Kaplan’s attorney sent me literature (view under his link) stating that the implant surgery sites need to be covered with tissue until they heal (approx. 3 months).
It is a known fact, that a crown on tooth only lasts 10 years (if you are lucky).
It is also a known fact that root canal teeth do cause the roots to become brittle and breakage occurs, which results in the loss of the tooth.
With respect to dental implants, this is not a recognized specialty by the Florida Board of Dentistry. This Department has no way to monitor or discipline dentists for this work. At present, any general dentist can perform these procedures. How is the public being protected by this department?
I am prepared to go to Tallahassee and appear before Congress if this is what is required to change this system.
I am working with a local government congressman to change the present system of self-serving and self-regulating monitoring and disciplining of dental professionals.
To date, Governor Bush and his counterparts refuse to meet with me and continually blow smoke up my skirt.
08/05/05
I just legally won the right to keep my teaching website available to the public. Dr. Leonard Tolley and Dr. Richard Kaplan hired the same attorney (Bonnie Navin who specialized in medical malpractice, general insurance defence, admiralty/maritime, equine law, and nursing home litigation) to file a nuisance and frivolous lawsuit to harass myself into pulling my website.
Note: Bonnie Navin is no longer working for this law firm, McLintosh, Sawron, Peltz, and Cartaya P.A. Does this have anything to do with her lawsuit filed against myself and then withdrawn at the last minute before she faced the judge?
Their actions failed and in fact, they helped to publicize my website that alerts the public. Good job!
Two unbelievable attorneys, James Green, local ACLU, and Paul Levy of Public Citizen stood up for me and fought for my freedom of speech and the right to teach and alert the public on my dental treatments.
©2005 Law.com
From: http://www.law.com
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The following article appeared in the Daily Business Review.
Former Patient's Online Complaints Draw Slander Suit
Dan Lynch
Daily Business Review
1-26-2005
In a case testing First Amendment rights in the Internet age, a dentist and
an oral surgeon have filed suit in a Florida trial court to stop a disgruntled
former patient from criticizing their care on a scathing Web site called
dentalfraudinflorida.com.
At issue is a site created by Elaine Prentice. On the site, Prentice, who lives near West Palm Beach, blasts the care she received between 1996 and 1998 from dentists Dr. Leonard Tolley of Lantana, Fla., and Dr. Richard Kaplan of West Palm Beach. Kaplan, who's also an oral surgeon, treated Prentice from August 2002 until March 2003.
In their Palm Beach County Circuit Court suit, the dentists claim the site is slanderous, a "public nuisance" and violates state law requiring that state disciplinary complaints be kept confidential if they are dismissed.
The suit represents the latest salvo in what is becoming a widening war, fought increasingly on the Internet, between doctors and patients. In the past, disgruntled patients have picketed the offices of medical professionals they felt had provided poor care. Several years ago, a Boca Raton dentist filed suit against picketing patients.
Now, however, with the cost of disseminating such complaints relatively cheap on the Internet, unhappy patients increasingly are publishing their complaints on the Web. Some doctors and medical groups in turn are posting the names of patients they consider litigious in order to warn other doctors.
Robert Jarvis, a professor of constitutional law at Nova Southeastern University near Fort Lauderdale, said, "These days, anybody is a publisher. On the Internet, there are no checks and balances."
On Prentice's site, she has posted a photo of herself and her dog, Mani, as well as a list of complaints about the care provided by Tolley and Kaplan. Prentice said the dentists were paid $18,200 to perform dental work that she deemed unsatisfactory. The site costs Prentice $20 a month to maintain. She launched the site in October.
"This Web site," Prentice wrote, "is my personal tragedy delivered to me by several dentists in West Palm Beach, Florida. I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit that I allowed these dentists to do this dental work in my mouth. I was not smart enough to see the reality of what their goals and intent were. It certainly was not to promote healthy dental care or 'do no harm.' In my opinion, my best interests never even entered into their dental planning/recommendations and ultimate dental work they performed."
Prentice was critical of the dentists for their work on braces, a five-unit bridge, two root canals, surgical removal of two teeth and two implants. She said that her "guts are telling me that the back implant needs to be removed, area grafted with my own bone and if I am pursuing implants, then have them placed correctly by someone skilled and well experienced."
Prentice's Web site also includes the following: "Fraud is the intentional perversion of truth or a false representation of a matter of fact which induces another person to part with some valuable thing belonging to him or her to surrender a legal right."
PATIENT COMPLAINT TOSSED
In their slander complaint, filed in November, Tolley and Kaplan maintain that Prentice started her Web site "to publicly embarrass, humiliate or otherwise in an egregious manner reduce the reputation of the plaintiffs."
The doctors say Prentice filed a complaint against them and three other treating dentists with the Florida Department of Health's Board of Dentistry in September 2003. According to their suit, the dentistry probable cause panel of the health department closed the investigation last May, with a finding of no probable cause, and so informed Prentice.
Their lawsuit includes as an attachment a letter from Samuel Dean Burton, assistant general counsel for the state department of health, informing Prentice that her complaint had been dismissed.
The plaintiffs allege that Prentice's Web site discusses "confidential matters that relate to" the Health Department's review of Prentice's complaint that may not, under state law, be publicly aired "until 10 days after probable cause has been found to exist." Since no probable cause was found to exist, they argue, Prentice therefore has no legal right to publicly disclose the information.
But in a response to the complaint filed Jan. 14, one of Prentice's lawyers, James K. Green of West Palm Beach, cited a wealth of decisions holding that the First Amendment right to free speech supersedes any act of any state Legislature designed to protect confidentiality by inhibiting such speech.
The dentists are represented by Bonnie A. Navin, an associate at McIntosh Sawran Peltz Cartaya & Petrucelli in Fort Lauderdale.
Prentice, an office worker, is being represented on a pro bono basis by Green of West Palm Beach, operating under the auspices of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Paul Alan Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
The case is before Circuit Judge Catherine Brunson. Navin said negotiations are in progress. Neither she nor Green would discuss details.
FIRST AMENDMENT TRUMPS
Two constitutional experts not involved in the case say the lawsuit is doomed to fail on the theory that Prentice's Web site violates the state dental discipline law requiring confidentiality.
They contend that Prentice's constitutional right to express her point of view trumps any such state law provision. "Prior restraint violates the Constitution," Jarvis said.
Bruce Rogow, another Nova law professor, agreed. "If it's defamatory, [the dentists] have a remedy at law -- damages," he said. "But you start off with a presumptive First Amendment right to speak."
But they also say the two doctors have a solid cause of action if they can demonstrate that Prentice's statements are false and have damaged them in a tangible fashion.
The complaint, however, makes no specific allegations of inaccuracies in Prentice's Web site and also makes no specific claims of damages to the doctors' practices.
Much of what Prentice wrote on the Web site is stated as opinion and may be constitutionally protected even if the site's content is professionally damaging to the doctors. "Opinion is protected speech," Rogow said.
Rogow noted that there's also the important question of whether Prentice has enough money to make her worth suing. "It does you no good to win an award for damages if the person you win from lacks the money to pay you," he pointed out.
In a similar case in 2003, the state's 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach permitted a neurologist, Hooshang Hooshmand of Vero Beach, to proceed with a defamation suit against a Pennsylvania woman. He alleged that the woman made false and defamatory statements about him in e-mails and on an Internet chat room designed for sufferers of her rare neurological disease.
Dr. Hooshmand was a nationally known expert in treating the disease, but the woman had never been his patient and did not live in Florida. In that case, the issue on appeal was whether a Florida state court had jurisdiction -- which the 4th DCA said it did.
On her Web site, Prentice explained that her goal in operating the Web site was merely to "teach. ... I have no financial rewards or incentives related to my teaching Web site." She said she had invited both Tolley and Kaplan "to post their responses."
Rogow suggested that the doctors' lawsuit already may have backfired. "Every
time somebody tries to stifle speech," he said, "they end up advertising
it."