On Saturday, Dental Care of Westminster will offer free dental care to veterans on a first-come, first-served basis.
Beginning at 8 a.m. and running until noon, the Veterans Free Dentistry Day event will offer veterans with valid identification can receive on free cleaning, filling or extraction, according to practice manager Cambria Sies-Olsen.
“The important thing would be to have either a veteran ID or an American Legion membership card,” she said. “We have the paperwork to fill out the rest and will go over any medical history when they are here.”
Free Dentistry Day is a national movement. This will be the second day of free dental care offered by the practice, according to Sies-Olsen — in 2018 they offered care to the entire community.
“We actually had patients from as far as West Virginia come for that one,” she said. “We had 47 patients and did over $15,000 in dental work last year.”
Sies-Olsen wrote in a media release about the event that the kind of routine dental care being offered can also help identify many other health issues, from oral cancer to Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
This year, the practice’s dentist, Arif Masood, felt it was important to address the dental needs he was seeing in the local veterans community specifically.
“I do get a lot of these folks, they have no coverage, they have a lot of pain and many issues,” Masood said. “There are people who need dental care who don’t have money to come even for an extraction — forget about implants or crowns, just the basics, a simple cleaning.”
The event is being offered in partnership with American Legion Post 31, in part because the Legion recognizes the difficulty many veterans have in getting dental care, according to Post Commander Adrian Gamboa.
““The VA has an eligibility requirement, dental care for the most part is reserved for veterans who are fully disabled or with injuries related to the mouth,” he wrote in an email. “Our veterans have sacrificed so much on behalf of our country, they deserve access to high quality health care, and that includes dental care.”
And that, Masood said, was another reason he wanted to dedicate this free denistry day to those who had served.
“There they are, they have protected you and your country,” he said. “It’s good to recognize them, it’s good to recognize what they have done for you and it’s a small gesture on our part.”