Society's Child
James Crow told WSB-TV that he and his mother took his daughter, Elizabeth, to a Caarrollton dentist to have a tooth pulled. What ensued he could have never imagined.
Not allowed inside the exam room, Crow waited with his mother in the lobby.
"We were sitting out in the waiting room and all of a sudden, we heard somebody screaming," Evelyn Crow told WBS.
The father rushed into the room and found his daughter bound with a tool called a "papoose board."
"I couldn't see my kid in the body bag just strapped down to the bed, I couldn't handle it," Crow told WSB.
"This little girl was frightened. I had to carry her out, she was shaking so bad," his mother added to the local news station.
An employee of the office told WSB that parents are required to sign a release form before the papoose board is used. Crow said he didn't recall being notified.
"The only thing they said was they were going to put her on some laughing gas," he said.
A spokesperson for the Georgia Board of Dentistry told WBS that the tool is technically legal to use. Regardless, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry doesn't recommend its use under normal circumstances.
Comment: It's truly sickening that someone so ignorant as to what would traumatize a child is allowed to practice dentistry. Without parental consent, no less!
Reader Comments
Wow, overreact much?
Granted that looks a little freaky and yes, they should have gotten consent from the parents, but to compare this to some form of torture is a little overboard in my opinion.
There may be more to this than what is being reported here. Perhaps the girl was in danger of hurting herself or the people who were performing the procedure on her that required immediate action.
I would like to know the girl's general mental state as they were bringing her in to the dentist's office. She may have had so much anxiety, that may or may not have been fed into by the parents themselves, that it was immediately apparent to the dentist that restraints were going to need to be used.
Also this, "Crow said he didn't recall being notified." He didn't recall? That's sounds like typical political backpedalling to me.
I can't say one way or the other, but to be so quick to judge on such limited information is inflammatory and not level-headed.
I have never heard of such a restraining method for children undergoing a dental procedure. I had extensive dental work done on me as a child andI couldnt imagine a dentist doing this to me. As a matter of fact I never encountered an uncaring, rough, assembly line, get er done type dentist until I was in Navy bootcamp. Makes me wonder if the dentist that restrained the child had military dentustry training. Regardless of the dentists training this was handled wrong and at the very least a parent should have been asked to try and calm the child before a drastic measure like a full body restraint was used.
I was taken aback when it was said that the parents, or one of them, couldn't go back with the kid.... that alone would be enough to point me towards a new dentist. Is this guy the only one in town?






Did dentistry become a BDSM genre ? ?
150 years of mercury poisoning has finally come to the surface . . .