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Comment by Timothee | Hacker News Reader

Put a dentist in a van and drive to wherever you'd need?

"Yeah, my dentist is a guy in a van."

There would definitely have to be some great marketing for this to not seem shady.

I'm surprised nobody has done this, actually. I live in Alaska and have a friend who is a dentist. He works exclusively in remote villages with a portable kit of equipment he flies around with on small chartered aircraft. It would definitely fit in a van.

There aren't very many licensed dentists that have to bother much about finding customers.

I think the idea would be to charge a large amount to make it worth the dentists while to do so. So high population density high income areas. New York and maybe San Francisco?

We actually do have this where I work. I don't know the schedule, as I would never trust my mouth to someone I can't easily return to with problems, but it does actually exist.

Here in the UK, a group of Hungarian dentists did this with inflatable surgeries (and could offer Eastern European rates too): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1051660/Deflated-c...

The already have something like that in the Bay area. I was up near Genentech a few months back and they had a huge trailer setup in the parking lot. It was a portable dentist office setup for employees to use.

I assume it shows up once or twice a month.

Dentists seem to have about 5 different rooms, pay dental hygienists to do 90% of the work, then stop in for about 5 minutes during the course of the 45 minutes you are there.

A van wouldn't cut it - you would need a bus.

You should take it for granted that people mean the hygienist. "Dentist" is sort of a colloquialism referring to the whole operation. You're spot on though, as a single dentist operates at a higher level, that dentist would be underutilized overseeing just one chair.

Can a hygienist practice independently?

They do this for New Zealand school students. A truck with a dental clinic inside it comes to the school and everyone gets a check-up.

Like mobile dog grooming. I like it.

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