Thursday, March 17, 2016

French Dentist

Hope you drank your milk....

"The ‘butcher’ of Chateau-Chinon: Dentist goes on trial in France" by Sarah Kaplan Washington Post  March 09, 2016

Chateau-Chinon, a village of about 2,000 people 200 miles southeast of Paris in the Burgundy region of France, is located in what officials term a ‘‘medical desert,’’ according to the AP. Residents had to travel long distances for teeth cleanings, root canals, braces fittings, and the like. So when Doctor Jacobus Van Nierop was bought in by a head hunter for the regional council in 2008, residents cheered his arrival.

Nothing in his credentials or his demeanor seemed to indicate that anything about him might be awry.

As she sat in her dentist’s office, eight of her teeth newly yanked from her jaw, dentures painfully affixed to a mouth still gushing blood, Sylviane Boulesteix tried to figure out what had just happened to her.

Just a few hours earlier she’d gotten a call from the dentist’s office, letting her know that Van Nierop was ready for her in the operating room. That surprised Boulesteix, the older woman told the French daily Le Journal du Centre and Agence France-Presse, because as far as she was aware there wasn’t anything wrong with her teeth — she just needed to have her braces fitted.

Confused but not yet concerned, she settled into the exam chair and waited for the only dentist in Chateau-Chinon, France, to tell her what was wrong.

Then, without warning, he made seven or eight injections into her gums, she recalled, then painfully pulled out eight teeth in one go.

‘‘After that I bled for three days,’’ she said, touching her cheek at the recollection. But when she went back to Van Nierop’s office, he refused to relieve her pain.

Van Nierop, a charismatic Dutch dentist who seemed the savior of Chateau-Chinon’s teeth when he arrived in the rural French village, turned out to be a ‘‘butcher,’’ residents claim.

Is he related to Napoleon?

Now he’s on trial for the alleged mutilations of Boulesteix and some six dozen other patients over the course of four years, according to the Associated Press.

The list of complaints against Van Nierop is long: unnecessarily pulling teeth, misuse of anesthetic, overcharging patients, abscesses, procedures that left patients with infections or bits of tools remaining in their mouths.

‘‘It’s unthinkable, right?’’ Therese Zbinden, another plaintiff, told Le Journal du Centre.

No.

The man the French media have dubbed ‘‘the dentist of horror’’ has tried to block his prosecution on psychological grounds, the AP reported; the dentist claims he suffers from a borderline personality disorder that is complicated by the fact that he is transgender.

Then what was he doing playing dentist?

He also says he has attempted suicide multiple times.

Then he's a terrorist, too. Already was when he was yanking teeth.

During his imprisonment in France, Van Nierop has staged hunger strikes and once, before he was to be questioned by an investigating judge, swallowed several razor blades

These are the kinds of guys I saw put to death. Accommodate his ass and rid the world of a scum.

‘‘I’m totally blocked from the inside and I don’t want to explain it all,’’ he told the investigating judge, according to court documents cited by the AP ‘‘You can lock me up for years . . . it will not change.’’

Asked how he felt about the damage he allegedly did to his patients, though, Van Nierop was unmoved.

‘‘It does not affect me,’’ he said....

Like this article does me when you think about it. 

That's why the reading the newspaper is so unfulfilling.

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