Part 2 of 7 Elusive Numbers We asked for death totals, but most states weren’t counting

A dental patient dies about every other day in America, according to a first-of-its-kind estimate by The Dallas Morning News. It is surely a rough calculation. It is based on data from one state, Texas. And we have no way to know, for example, whether patients here enter dental offices with more health risks than patients elsewhere, or if dentists here engage in riskier practices than others. Why estimate? Because many state governments, which are supposed to oversee dentists, have failed to keep meaningful statistics.

And why Texas? Because it alone clearly required dentists to report all deaths that might be treatment-related and produced a detailed accounting of those reports. It has the added benefit, for estimating purposes, of size — it’s the second-largest state, with about one-twelfth of the U.S. population.

Since 2010, Texas has received at least 85 death reports. Projected out to the whole U.S. population, that’s a little over 1,000 deaths.

For every Texas dental patient who died, about six more were hospitalized and survived.

All but three states require dentists to report some deaths, our investigation found. When we requested numbers, however, a majority told us they didn’t know and didn’t have a good way to count.

Even if they did, we’d miss the big picture. That’s because most states have narrow reporting rules — requiring disclosure only if a death is sedation-related, for instance.

So dentistry’s greatest dangers remain shrouded in mystery.

“There is currently little to no understanding about type or frequency of patient safety issues in dentistry,” wrote Muhammad Walji, a professor at the University of Texas dental school in Houston. The statement introduced a federally funded project he’s leading that aims to document and analyze dental harm, as the medical world has been doing for decades.

Whatever the number of deaths and injuries, it’s a tiny fraction of all dental visits. And it’s certainly no reason to avoid the dental chair, which would create its own health risks.

But our death estimate is a big number in terms of public expectation. That expectation, as longtime malpractice insurance official Lewis Estabrooks put it, is: “Someone should not die from going to the dentist.”