Sprint legend, now Dancehall music producer, Usain Bolt recently revealed the harrowing experiences he had with poor dental care as a child.

In an interview with The Insider, Bolt said that as a child growing up in Sherwood Content, Trelawny, substandard dental care led to damaged teeth at age 10 and “general anxiety about future dental work”.

“If you watch my career, I had broken teeth through my younger age that I couldn’t get fixed because it wasn’t easily accessible,” Bolt is quoted as saying.  In outlining the harsh conditions of Jamaican dentistry which he was subjected to as a child, Bolt said his first trip to the dentist was petrifying.

“It wasn’t a good experience as a kid to get your teeth pulled because we did not have all the necessary numbing agents to help… It was a lot more painful than it should’ve been as a kid,” he said.

Like many Jamaicans across the economic spectrum, Bolt’s experience in Jamaica resulted in him developing anxiety about dental care as he grew older.

It was only in 2015 that he developed the courage and decided to get his teeth fixed in Germany.  “I went to Germany when I finally decided to fix my teeth properly, and just the equipment and how it was done quickly and done well was just amazing,” Bolt told The Insider, noting that he was fearful prior to undergoing that procedure.

The Clockwork producer in empathizing with his Jamaican compatriots noted that he recognizes that people are always fearful about dental care and shy away from the dentist as a consequence. “Because a lot of people don’t go the dentist… Because they’re always slightly worried about what’s going to happen,” he said.

Bolt’s experiences and awareness of the dental care crisis in Jamaica, has led him to partner with industry leader in digital dentistry and 3D printing technology company SprintRay. for which he is Global Brand Ambassador for the next five years, to establish “Bolt Labs powered by SprintRay”, an initiative focused on expanding access to high-quality digital dental care, especially in rural communities, in the island.

“I understand the need for this in the rural areas of Jamaica…We get a bus and travel around the rural areas to the less fortunate and just the people who can’t really travel miles to get there,” he explained.

“The SprintRay Foundation, in partnership with Bolt Foundation, will establish dental clinics, including 3D dental labs and a mobile unit, which will further address the critical dental needs of both adults and children, as well as those located in more remote areas of Jamaica…. dental work can now be completed in a fraction of the time and cost, and without multiple offices visits,” SprintRay said in a release.

In 2019, The Gleaner newspaper reported on the national dental care catastrophe in Jamaica, which Bolt is now seeking to address.

The Gleaner noted that there was an alarming shortage of registered dentists in Jamaica, which had “led to a surge in botched services as patients pay a heavy toll chasing after dirt-cheap options” in the country which has “only 25 per cent of the number of dentists required to serve the population”.

“There are currently 302 registered dentists in Jamaica, but Chief dental officer in the Ministry of Health Dr Irving McKenzie Irving said that there is need for another 900 dentists,” the newspaper reported.

The report also revealed that “fracture of the jawbone, serious lacerations, and damage to soft tissue are some of the evidence of this illegal practice of dentistry”.

In 2015 the newspaper also noted that children in Kingston were suffering due to the lack of several basic supplies affecting the health sector and that reports had surfaced that patients were being asked to purchase their own needles to take to the dental clinics, “while some facilities have just put up notices that dental services are not available”.

At the time Dr. Irving had said that dental care was one of Jamaica’s most unmet needs and that “a lot of clinics quickly run out of resources, because of the demand”.

Dr. Irving had also pointed out that there was a shortage of dental surgeons, and so, many dental clinics were without specialists.

Several Kingston-based health centres were afflicted by a myriad of woes including the unavailability of dentists, and shortage of needles, suction tips and gloves.

At one clinic, sources had indicated that from early in the year before, the facility had operated with only dental nurses present who were only able to treat children, but we’re still unable to carry out some procedures, due to a shortage of supplies.

“One mother who was present with her two children said she had been trying to get appointments for them for close to a year. The younger of the two was finally seen on the day of the news team’s visit,” The Gleaner had noted.

As far back as 2011, reports of Jamaica’s major dental-health crisis were reported.

At the time Dr. McKenzie described it as a silent epidemic, as many Jamaicans were “suffering in silence”.

He told The Gleaner that the problem stemmed from the fact that people were either unable to afford proper oral health care, or fail to recognise its importance to their overall health resulting in many becoming “dentally disabled” due to the extraction of too many teeth.

Dr. McKenzie had pointed out that “with only about 15 per cent of the Jamaican population having access to health care, of this amount, only six per cent really has proper dental coverage”.

The Gleaner had also noted that while scarcity of dental equipment and prohibitive costs, of material were cause for concern, the problem was exacerbated “by the disproportionate distribution of practising dentists across the island” where some 90 per cent of dental practitioners were concentrated in urban centres such as Kingston, Montego Bay, Spanish Town, Mandeville, Portmore, and Ocho Rios

“You have 162 dentists and about 2.62 million people. When you work it out, a rough estimate of dentists to the population gives you one in 17,000, whereas the international benchmark you are supposed to have is one to 2,500 of the population,” Dr. McKenzie, said.

In further outlining the gravity of the situation, he had said some 70 per cent of the island’s dentists are in private practice, “which in real terms means they are not accessible to the majority of Jamaicans”.

“Even though the ratio is one in 17,000 in the population ratio, based on the demand in the public service, it is about one in 53,000 because the others can’t go to the private practitioners,” McKenzie had explained.

“So most of Jamaica, about 80 per cent, lives in a dental-shortage area, meaning you don’t have access to dental care, which is denied primarily because of lack of a dental facility, and where the facility exists, lack of equipment. Therefore, anyway you take it, it becomes lack of access,” he had added.

In This Story: Usain Bolt

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