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Dentist of the Back Roads

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A Bite Out of the Bayou

Dentist Gregory Folse provides dental care to underserved elderly patients in and around Lafayette, La.

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In Abbeville, Folse pulls up to a little house with crawfish traps stacked out front. He's here to adjust Elaine Sherman's dentures. He washes his hands at her kitchen sink.

"So you were hurtin', Sweetheart?"

* * *

When a nursing home has a small beauty shop that offers water, good light and a little quiet space, Folse, 47, tries to set up there. In the beauty shop at the River Oaks Retirement Manor in Lafayette, southwest of Baton Rouge, there are also bingo supplies and a priest's vestments.

He checks the chart of his next patient. The 74-year-old man suffers from dementia and is delusional. Sometimes such appointments "can get pretty wild," the dentist says.

But he thinks that everything, not just dental school, but also his years as a cowboy and his experience riding along with his country doctor grandfather, Phillip Robichaux, prepared him for this work.

A nurse gently but firmly brings the patient. His gum disease is advanced, and some of his teeth are so loose he could swallow them or inhale them. A timely $100 extraction can save $50,000 worth of surgery, hospitalization and complications.

"Those are bad. I'm going to take those out for you," Folse says. At first, the man balks.

"How bad?"

"They are real loose."

"Not to me."

"I want to take 'em out. I don't want them to make you sick. They are infected."

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