Service for people with disabilities

A couple of years ago a newspaper commentator wrote that even though the current era compares unfavorably in many ways to American life in the 1940s and 50s, we are better off in one way. "We are kinder to one another," she said, remarking on how far we've come in how we treat people with disabilities or non-mainstream looks and lifestyles. We may sometimes verge on a mindless political correctness in our kindness, and we may sometimes practice such kindness through clenched teeth, but all in all, she said, we are better at it than we were forty years ago. The kindness has certainly extended to new groups of dental patients. At UOP, the Special Needs Clinic of the Department of Dental Practice has become symbolic of the school's outreach to formerly underserved communities. Since its founding in 1985 as an adjunct to the department, the Special Needs Clinic has wracked up an impressive list of accomplishments: It has included disabled teens and adults among the populations that UOP routinely serves in its community dental programs; advised state agencies on how to deal with disabled adults and their dental problems (and won more than $600,000 in consultant contracts from those same agencies); produced a preventive dentistry x-raying program that is used as a video on how to teach dental hygiene to developmentally disabled people that later shocked the department when it won the equivalent of an Oscar in its field against competition on far bigger budgets.