Hoverboarding While Dentisting

I like to say we’re living in the future. Computers in the palms of our hands. Wireless… well, everything. Technological breakthroughs everywhere we look, being incorporated not just into our daily lives, but also into medicine.

However, one dentist appears to have taken it too far. Seth Lookhart is accused of a number of legal and ethical violations, including: fraudulently billing Medicaid, needlessly sedating patients, and in at least one instance, pulling a patient’s tooth while riding on a wheeled "hoverboard" scooter and recording the incident.

According to a lawsuit filed by the state of Alaska in 2017, he joked that it was a “new standard of care.” But the State did not find his “joke” funny. Nor did the patient, who had no idea either that he was riding a hoverboard while performing her tooth extraction, or that he filmed the incident, until after she was tracked down by Alaskan authorities.

Lookhart’s alleged behavior was not only dangerous to his patient, it was a gross violation of her trust. While I look forward to many more medical and technological breakthroughs in the future, let’s leave the hoverboards out of the dentist’s office.

Photograph by Ben Larcey.