Skipping a dentist appointment because you can’t get to the office is nothing to smile about, especially for seniors. The statistics about seniors and oral healthcare are alarming: one in four people age 65 and over have no remaining teeth and nearly one in three suffer from untreated tooth decay, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Considering that poor oral health is linked to cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, stroke and oral cancer, access to regular dental care becomes even more important for older individuals.
Enter the husband-and-wife team of Amir Ghorbani DDS and Lily Sarafan, who started Home Care Dentist in 2008. The company makes dental “house calls” throughout California and Pacific Palisades to patients of all ages, but mainly to homebound seniors.
Home Care Dentist provides essentially every service that a “brick and mortar” dental office does, Sarafan told the Post, including cleanings, fillings, dentures, whitenings, crowns, extractions, root canals, X-rays and veneers. What sets the business apart from conventional dental offices, however, is that patients can get great dental care without leaving the house.
“We’re going back to a different era when a majority of people got medical care at home,” Sarafan said. “Dental offices aren’t usually fun to visit. We take the core services of the [potentially] scary environment and take them to the comfort of your living room.”
The company’s three full-time dentists are capable of such mobility thanks to cutting-edge dental equipment made into collapsible and transportable packages that fit easily into any vehicle and can be quickly taken inside of the patient’s home. The equipment, including both a patient and dentist chair, takes about 10 minutes to set up and requires a space of six square feet and access to an electrical outlet.
As a bonus, there is no waiting room and patients can carve out up to 80 percent less time for an appointment than they would spend going back and forth to an office.
The majority of Home Care Dentist’s current clientele is senior citizens who have a hard time getting out of the house to visit an office. Yet Sarafan expressed the company’s desire to expand its services to people of all ages in the Palisades and notes a house-call dentist could be a convenient option for busy professionals as well.
After all, as Sarafan said, “home is where the health is.”
For more information, visit homecaredentist.com or call (800) HCD-8614.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
