Rural Dentistry in the North Country

By Jim on February 24th, 2008

I remember when Derek and I went up to Colebook hunting, it’s quite nice up there but I can see how it might be hard to get young dentists to set up a practice there. I am not sure though how the state is going to be able to fix the problem…the bureacrats in Concord might end up making things worse…perhaps I’m just being cynical?

Bruce Katz’s Colebrook dental practice has no computers, and patient records are kept in a desktop file of lined yellow pages clipped to small film strips of molar x-rays. Patient appointments – up to 30 a day – are neatly hand-printed on a daily calendar.

Katz, 56, who sports a long, bushy white beard and has decorated the office with photographs of mountains he’s hiked, looks like the denizen of another age. His practice, while modern in its standards, is run much as it was 30 years ago, when Katz first left dental school in Philadelphia for the North Country. He knows his patients’ first names, the ages of their children and their job histories. He takes walk-ins and emergencies without appointments. He’ll clean his patients’ teeth, drill their root canals, or build dentures from scratch, referring his patients to specialists or labs only in rare cases.

Business relationships with his patients run in both directions. During a single day of practice this week, he arranged to buy 10 pounds of honey, a trailer-load of firewood, and a quarter of a beef from patients he treated.

To Katz’s mind, it’s an ideal life, in what he calls “the forgotten end of the world.” He works long hours and his patients don’t always pay their bills right away. But he likes his varied work, enjoys the low costs of rural living, and books his winter weekends solid with cross-country skiing trips.