Dental Profession Hits Back At Mail Journalist Platell
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- Published: Wednesday, 24 January 2024 10:08
- Written by Guy Tuggle
- Hits: 1534
The dental profession has reacted with incredulity to an article by Daily Mail journalist Amanda Platell, whose January 19th column sought to blame mothers, and not government underfunding of NHS dentistry, for the admission of children to hospital for tooth extractions and clearances.
Under the heading ’Telling the tooth’, Platell wrote -
’The British Dental Association blames Tory NHS cuts for more than 100,000 children in five years having teeth so rotten they needed hospital surgery.
The only ones to blame for that are parents who feed them junk food and sugary drinks. As a report showed, children go to primary school having never owned a toothbrush — let alone learned how to use one’.
More children are admitted to hospital for the extraction of carious teeth than for any other condition.
Platell is correct to implicate the effects of junk food and sugary drinks for the prevalence of decay, however, to suggest that parents are ’the only ones to blame’ when over 40% of children don’t see a dentist is highly inflammatory, especially since for many children and their parents, finding an NHS dentist, let alone one with the capacity to take them on, is a hopeless challenge.
The British Dental Association (BDA) immediately posted Ms Platell’s comments on its X (formerly Twitter) site stating ’Sorry @amadajplatell Scientific evidence and official data is unambiguous - oral disease and deprivation go hand in hand.
Government can save children pain and the NHS a fortune through effective investment in services and preventative programmes.
Or they sit by the sidelines and ignore it’.
BDA Chair Eddie Crouch also seized on Ms Platell’s crass comments adding ’the Government;’s own data shows prevention pays for itself. Which makes it all the more puzzling why tried and tested policies have not been taken forward’.
Charlotte Waite, Director of the BDA in Scotland added her weight to the BDA’s lambasting of Ms Platell’s column.. She wrote ’As a dentist who has extracted thousands of teeth from children in my career this column is utterly ludicrous. No attempt to consider the pain that these children face or the time and money required to manage a preventable disease’.
Ms Platell’s comments have all the hallmarks of a ’culture war’, a type of highly emotional, divisive political campaigning across a basket of issues that seeks to deflect blame away from government failures and on to individuals and groups. It frequently turns one school of thought and beliefs against another.
A long standing Mail columnist, Amanda Platell was press secretary to William Hague during his brief term as leader of the Conservative Party from 1999 - 2001. In the years that followed, she made regular appearances on television shows and frequently reviewed the Sunday papers on Andrew Marr’s programme.
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