A Minnesota woman has sued a dentist for allegedly performing a total of 32 procedures — four root canals, eight dental crowns and 20 fillings — in a single visit, which she says left her disfigured.
Kathleen Wilson filed a civil malpractice lawsuit just before Christmas accusing Dr. Kevin Molldrem, of Molldrem Family Dentistry, of inflicting significant injuries with substandard medical treatment in mid-July 2020. Wilson’s suit also claims Molldrem administered an unsafe amount of anesthesia and falsified medical records to hide it.
Molldrem did the wrong things for the right reasons, outside expert Dr. Avrum Goldstein wrote in an affidavit, explaining that while Molldrem made the correct diagnosis, he undermined the treatment itself.
Goldstein called that much dental work in one visit “impossible to achieve … if done properly” and said treating every tooth in five and a half hours is “inconceivable.”
“Virtually every tooth in her mouth” was decayed, Goldstein wrote after reviewing Wilson’s medical records, noting such extensive damage as “something that is quite rare.”
This meant she needed the work, he said — just not all at once. Doing that many procedures in a single visit did not alleviate her susceptibility to disease or prevent her from losing teeth, Goldstein wrote, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
“Katie required a slow, thoughtful, careful and measured response to her disease,” Goldstein said. “Trying to fill every hole in every tooth in her mouth in one visit is not only the antithesis of what was indicated, it is not humanely possible to achieve in an effective or constructive manner.”
To keep Wilson pain-free during the arduous, lengthy appointment, Molldrem administered nearly twice the recommended maximum dose of anesthesia, Goldstein noted — 960 milligrams instead of the allowed limit of 490 milligrams.
Wilson said that as a result, she suffered disfigurement, pain, embarrassment and distress, on top of incurring the medical costs of fixing the damage elsewhere. She’s now seeking at least $50,000 in damages.
Neither Molldrem nor the attorneys involved were available for comment.
With News Wire Services
