Eleven years ago, back when I was only three years old, I had received a tooth extraction due to tooth decay. It was my left lateral incisor, letter G to be exact. I have no memory that recalls the event. However, both of my parents describe it like so: I consulted with a dentist about the situation, I went into an operating room, had some procedures before the extraction, and finally had my tooth removed. This happened during my time in South Korea.
Fast forward five years and I had moved to the United States and had been living there for about three years. It was my third-grade year of elementary school and I was heading home from school. During the past few days, I had been experiencing moderate pain on the left side of the roof of my mouth. I had figured that it was just one of those incidents when you consume crunchy food and your mouth becomes slightly scratched for a bit. But no, that wasn't the case. I had been picking on the spot and felt a hard bump in the area. During the car ride, I told my parents that I had a tooth growing behind my front row of teeth. At first, they didn't believe what I was saying until they had a closer inspection. And to everyone's surprise, there it was. To clarity, my #10 lateral incisor was growing behind my #9 central incisor.
Now, in hindsight of the situation, I found it quite odd that my parents didn't find an orthodontics plan right away. Sure, we had gotten consultations with several local orthodontists, but due to unstable immigration issues (which I cannot provide details of), my parent's never had time to figure out a place that we knew we would be reliably able to visit. Nonetheless, we had finally decided on an orthodontics plan during the spring of 2019, which comprised of having expanders via springs in the space where #10 is supposed to be to try and create space for the tooth to come forward. Now, I'm fourteen years old and I'm currently in the orthodontics plan. However, now that the tooth has come forward (albeit with a slant outward), my whole maxillary row of teeth has flared and my bite is ruined. I can only hope and pray that my plan will conclude in a successful end with a proper bite and a good looking set of teeth.
During the meantime of this whole ordeal, both my parents and I had been doing research about the incident and why my primary incisor had come out incorrectly. It turns out that the dentist that extracted the tooth eleven years ago never placed a space maintainer to preserve the gap for the missing tooth to erupt, and thus I had a situation where all of the other teeth merged together and left no room. Now, I am not an expert in dentistry by any means, but after doing some research, I concluded that having a maintainer is usually necessary to maintain the correct spacing of the teeth. Even an article by Dr. Brett Saltzman from the University of Toronto stated that "If the maxillary or mandibular primary central incisor(s) is lost prematurely after the eruption of the primary lateral incisor but before the eruption of the primary cuspid, a space maintainer is necessary." So why did my dentist not perform this vital step during the procedure eleven years ago? Well, my father had done some research regarding this situation and found out that many other parents are frustrated online due to their dentists seemingly performed medical malpractice on purpose for their orthodontist counterparts to receive more customers, thus more money. This is all speculation, but I have found many more examples of this situation online has led me to believe that some of this may be true. I want you to keep in mind how I had struggled with my teeth for years of my lifetime. For five years, I had been struggling to consume many foods due to having a tooth behind another. For five years, I have had numerous occasions when people would ask me if I had a double tooth, out of curiosity, or to simply embarrass me. I had occasions of people calling me a shark seemingly in an attempt to make my situation even worse. Due to all of this unnecessary and preventable struggle, both mental and physical in my lifetime, I am thinking about possibly taking this to court. But, here is the problem. The extraction had occurred many years ago, and it will be very hard to get the orthodontics to give me the documents, and without witnesses besides my few family members, this will not be a reliable source of evidence to bring into court. And worse yet, my father told me that since judges are not professional medically knowledgeable people, oftentimes a third-party dentist will attend the hearing to determine if the defendant had, indeed, performed malpractice. Although hard to believe, my father told me that this third-party dentist would, in many cases, be biased in favoring the defendant, making it very hard to successfully sue a dentist in Korea. And even so, is the dentistry even required to release documents to customers regarding things that are decades old? And am I even eligible to file a lawsuit for an even as such? Please, any information will be very helpful. I apologize if there are any grammatical or medical errors in this plea, but forgive me, I am only a fourteen-year-old. Any further information will be provided as either edits or comments upon request.
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from https://www.reddit.com/r/Dentistry/comments/gd4v0c/serious_i_need_your_help_im_thinking_about_suing/
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