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In the News

Cosmetic and General Dentist serving Boulder and Denver, Colorado

AllSmiles - Despite disability, Boulder dentist at the top of his field
Daily Camera 04/19/2005

It’s mid-morning at Dr. Joel Schaffer’s Boulder dentist office and, as usual, the place is bustling with patients.

One sips coffee in the waiting room, next to as colorful aquarium bursting with huge fish, while dental assistants busily prep patients in four high tech treatment rooms. Schaffer makes the rounds between them in his wheelchair.

Thirty-two years after Schaffer picked up and moved to Boulder from Long Island in pursuit of better skiing and a better life, his practice is thriving. He’s considered one of the top 100 dentists in the nation by Woodward/White Inc., a national organization that ranks health care professionals, and he was named among the best Denver dentists by 5280 Magazine in 2004.

But there was a time when he thought this day would never come.

"Physically, I really didn’t know if I could do it, and I didn’t know if patients would be OK with it,” says Schaffer, who lost the use of his legs on Aug. 10, 1982.

He’d already been in practice for nearly a decade, had paid his dues and acquired a loyal following, when he set out for a motorcycle trip to Yellowstone that morning. He hadn’t had breakfast and was at roughly 10,000 feet in northern Colorado’s Poudre Canyon when he blacked out, presumably from altitude sickness. His bike hit a ditch, plunging him over the handlebars.

The spinal cord injury left him paralyzed below the waist, and for two years, as he underwent physical therapy, he considered giving up dentistry.

At the time, only a small percentage of people returned to the work force after suffering a spinal cord injury, and there were very few health care professionals with disabilities.

Even as recently as 1995, a federal report found that just 17.4 percent of working-age wheelchair users had jobs.

Statistics on wheelchair users or people with disabilities in the health-care fields is scarce, but one 1996 study found that just 0.2 percent of medical school graduates have disabilities.

“If you are in the middle of your career when you get injured, a lot of people don’t go back to work,” Schaffer says.

Once he made the decision to return to his practice, he faced an uphill battle. He found a device that enabled him to use a hand-held button, instead of the traditional foot pump, to operate his drill. He attached belts to his wheelchair to hold him in securely as he did his work. And, with the help of Kathleen Moineau, who had been his business coordinator and close friend for 23 years, he began to rebuild his practice.

“We’ve come along way together,” says Moineau, a warm, chatty woman who is on a first name basis with almost every patient who walks through the door. “He lost a lot of his patient base. There were days when we would see only one patient in here.”

Today, his Colorado Brite Smile, at 2880 Folsom St., Suite 202, boasts six examination rooms, each equipped with video goggles for watching movies during exams.

“I think it is good for my kids to see that he is able to have all this,” says Irene Hillson, whose daughters Sarah, 10, and Karen, 8, have been coming to “Dr. Joel” since they were toddlers. “He is just a really good dentist. He knows what he’s doing.”

Last year Schaffer was awarded the prestigious title of Diplomate, shared by only 50 other dentists worldwide, by the American Board of Aesthetic Dentistry.

"It’s not my disability that makes me unique," he says. “It’s the things that I’ve earned."

But it’s his patients reactions to brighter or straighter smiles that keep him in business, with little thought of retirement yet, at age 59.

"It really changes the way they react to people because they aren’t covering up their teeth anymore," he says. "It changes the way the person feels about themselves."

Dr. Joel L. Schaffer provides cosmetic dentistry in Boulder, CO. This website is for information purposes only and is not designed to, and does not provide dental or medical advice. The content is not intended to substitute advice from a trained professional. His office serves dental patients from the Boulder and Denver, Colorado area.

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