Inside the 2016 WREB Dental Examination

[Yazata]

I just had a fascinating experience Saturday May 21. I was a volunteer patient for the 2016 Western Regional Examining Board Examination at the University of the Pacific Dental School in San Francisco. All new dentists need to pass the WREB in order to become licensed in California and many other states as well, from Boston to Oregon. (It's called 'Western Regional', but it's become nationwide. States like NY and PA use it.) I think that at UoP, passing the WREB is a condition for receiving the Doctor of Dental Surgery degree as well. Part of the licensing examination is a grueling computerized written exam, based on fake case histories with complication curve-balls thrown in, that the students have to create treatment plans for. The other part is a practical exam practiced on live patients who require specific procedures the students are being examined on. Hence my being there in the middle of it.

https://www.wreb.org/Candidates/Dental/d...dures.aspx

As this was the only place in Northern California the WREB was being given, aspiring dentists from other dental schools were there for the exam. Foreign dentists from countries that don't have a reciprocity agreement with California who want to practice dentistry in California or presumably other states have to take the WREB too. So it was a big operation. There were hundreds of us volunteer patients, each one paired up with a particular student.

It's possible to come in off the street to be screened as a volunteer, but most patients were friends recruited by the dental students. In my case, my dentist's daughter was graduating from the U. of the Pacific dental school and he asked me if I'd be willing to be her examination patient.

My first experience of the UoP dental school was a month ago, when I received a full set of x-rays of all my teeth as part of the screening process. A very large and nice modern building in kind of a down-market and even skid-rowish downtown neighborhood. But Twitter's headquarters is just down the street and TV cameras (and a helicopter!) were all over on Saturday for the opening of a new flagship Apple store by Tim Cooke (the line to get in was a block long). So maybe it's becoming more hip. The neighborhood's strange mixture of sordid and stylish is quintessential San Francisco. The dental school is something else entirely. Inside it's ultramodern and expansive, very stylish in that minimalist Scandinavian-design sense.

http://dental.pacific.edu/

It was very much hurry up and wait. I checked in and then sat and sat. My dentist arrived to be there to support his daughter who was taking the exam. (Turns out he's a professor at the school, so he knows everyone and has some clout.) His daughter was taking her written exams all morning in a sealed location with no cell phones allowed, so she was out of touch. Even us patients weren't allowed to bring cell-phones in, they were very strict about that. At noon the school had pizzas delivered and supplied everyone with lunch.

Then in the early afternoon the poor girl came out to collect me for her practical exam. She was as cool as a cucumber. Her dad was anxious, I was anxious, but she was zen-like. I was impressed!

She led me to a huge room filled with Dilbert-like cubicles, each one with a dental chair in it. Hundreds, it looked like, each with its dental student desperately working on somebody. Dentistry on an industrial scale. My student worked on me and worked on me for several hours, obviously afraid to leave anything undone. (Imagine the conversation: a haughty imperious professor asks why she didn't do X and she says she was in a hurry... It just wouldn't fly.)

But being able to prioritize is part of what they are being examined on, so she finally slapped a sticker with her number on it on me and sent me out to another smaller room also full of cubicles and dental chairs, this one full of high ranking dental professors from various dental schools, department chairmen and such. The state's dental licensing people are in on it too. None of them know which number belongs to which student. Three big-shots independently examine each student's work and grade it. They read my charts my student had prepared, peered in my mouth and poked the things she'd worked on with their dental probes. No expression, no conversation, just hard-nosed inscrutibility. Then that was it, they thanked me and I could go home.

My student escorted me out, cool as ever. No visible worries, though her dad seemed to think that she was anxious as all hell and was just hiding it well. I don't know, but she truly impressed me. The tension in that place was like electricity in the air and if I was a dental student I would have had a heart-attack for sure. I expected to see sparks of anxiety if anyone touched anything. I went shopping afterwards to relax myself.

I still don't know if my student passed and neither does she. Results take about two weeks to come down. But I really really hope she succeeds, she will surely be one of California's best new dentists.

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[C C]

[...] The other part is a practical exam practiced on live patients who require specific procedures the students are being examined on. Hence my being there in the middle of it. [...] There were hundreds of us volunteer patients, each one paired up with a particular student. It's possible to come in off the street to be screened as a volunteer, but most patients were friends recruited by the dental students. In my case, my dentist's daughter was graduating from the U. of the Pacific dental school and he asked me if I'd be willing to be her examination patient. [...] Hundreds, it looked like, each with its dental student desperately working on somebody. Dentistry on an industrial scale. My student worked on me and worked on me for several hours, obviously afraid to leave anything undone. [...] They read my charts my student had prepared, peered in my mouth and poked the things she'd worked on with their dental probes. No expression, no conversation, just hard-nosed inscrutibility.

Wow. And to think my dad -- a strict patron of only having his hair cut in manly barber shops up until then -- once fretted years ago over merely being a "practice subject" for cosmetology students at a local vocational school.

Despite the photos of an ultra-modern facility at UP's Dental School, I still have a lingering mental image of some cavernous, Victorian academy filled with sinister steampunk dental instruments. Illuminated by the dim but crackling hues of a Frankenstein light-show transpiring overhead.

[Yazata]

Despite the photos of an ultra-modern facility at UP's Dental School, I still have a lingering mental image of some cavernous, Victorian academy filled with sinister steampunk dental instruments. Illuminated by the dim but crackling hues of a Frankenstein light-show transpiring overhead.

Believe me, I did too. I imagined dim flickering florescent tubes like in a David Lynch movie (Eraserhead!), bloody gauze and unidentifiable body-parts, screams and the high-pitched sound of power-saws on bone, along with maniacal laughter by sadists in blood-stained white uniforms, with me being chained into a 19th century dentist's chair while they ready their surrealistic drills and saws.

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Like I said, the neighborhood is pretty hard-core, so before I went there I was kind of imagining a dodgy dental school that suited the location. The U. of the Pacific dental school building is recent construction, so I wasn't familiar with it. And to tell the truth, I have a terrible fear of dentists anyway, who I've tried to avoid all my life unless the toothaches get too bad. So it's easy for me to imagine the worst. That's how my teeth and gums developed all the cool pathologies that the graduating dental students have to demonstrate that they can handle.

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Seriously though, I was totally wrong about the University of the Pacific's dental school. Everything about UoP was great. The only scary thing about my time there was all the students' contagious fears that they might flunk the all-important exam. The school truly impressed me. It's obviously an important fixture in California dental training.

[Image: Scumbag-dentist.jpg]

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