Two local oral surgeons and their teams provided free oral care to more than 2,100 patients in Tanzania and Kenya last year as part of the U.S. Oral Surgery Management (USOSM) Medical Mission Reimbursement Program. Treatments varied in each location by need and included services such as tooth extractions, implants and lesion removal and pathology. Participating USOSM surgeon partners included: Elevated Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery’s Randall Russell, DDS, and Colorado Oral Surgery’s Michael A. Hale, DDS.

Life-changing oral surgery in Tanzania

Dr. Russell treats patients at Elevated Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery in Aurora, Colorado. He is actively involved with medical missions; his last trip taking him and his family to Tanzania. During the trip, Dr. Russell was the only oral and maxillofacial surgeon on the care team, which also included multiple dentists, an orthodontist, a CRNA and their families. Dr. Russell, his wife Heidi, and their children, say they consider themselves “very fortunate to have been able to participate and treat the amazing people of Tanzania.”

“In Tanzania, the dental care shortage is critical. According to the Dental Legacy Foundation – the nonprofit that we partnered with – in rural areas of Tanzania, only one dentist serves an average of 400,000 people and 76% of children under 12 have never seen a dentist,” said Dr. Russell. “There’s so little dental care available and such a tremendous need.”

Dr. Russell and his team brought essential dental care to more than 1,500 patients, providing dental cleaning and hygiene education, fluoride treatments, extractions, restorations, root canal therapies and pathology diagnosis and removal. In addition, Dr. Russell treated two cases of baseball-sized ossifying fibroma, which is when a rare and benign tumor made of bone-like substances forms within the connective tissue of the jawbone.

In these cases, the lesions were so large that the patients’ teeth would not come together, preventing them from chewing. Dr. Russell and the surgery team removed the lesions and completed facial reconstruction, giving their patients the ability to chew food for the first time in their lives.

Treating 600 patients in five days

Dr. Hale is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon with Colorado Oral Surgery, which has locations in Parker and Denver, Colorado. Dr. Hale has completed previous medical mission work in Haiti and the Samoa Islands. This year, during a span of just five days, Dr. Hale and his mission team treated approximately 600 patients from the Eldoret community in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Although it is a significant urban area and the second largest medical destination in the country, Eldoret has extremely limited dental care options and substantial dental needs.

“It was a very moving experience,” said Dr. Hale. “Hundreds of children, many with visible facial abscesses and severely decayed teeth, were given priority. As a team, we extracted more than a thousand painful, hopeless teeth; restored hundreds of teeth that could be salvaged; bonded bridges for patients who were missing anterior teeth; and removed various lesions that could be managed with local anesthesia. We worked non-stop from 7 am to 7 pm, each day, treating patients of all ages.”

Dr. Hale’s wife and two of their children assisted the dental care team with tasks such as helping with sterilization and sanitation and providing tooth brushing demonstrations.