914 ASTS dentists travel to Haiti to give care and comfort

Published Feb. 19, 2015
By Staff Sgt. Matthew Burke
914th Airlift Wing Public Affairs

NIAGARA FALLS AIR RESERVE STATION, N.Y. -- Service before Self.

Members of the Air Force Reserve learn this Air Force Core Value early in Basic Military Training and practice it throughout their career. At a minimum, Service before Self tells us that professional duties take precedence over personal desires.

Often times however, a humanitarian trip to assist those who are less fortunate can provide an opportunity to weave professional duties while enhancing a sense of self.

Such opportunities were prevalent for two dentists from the 914th Aeromedical Staging Squadron here, who traveled to the Macieux region of the Republic of Haiti to provide much-needed dental care to inhabitants during the month of January, 2015.

Col. Victor D. Brown, 914 ASTS Commander and Maj. Stanley N. Michel, general dentist, 914 ASTS, provided dental care to citizens of the under-served region during the trip.

"We had five and a half working days where it was pretty much all oral surgery, extraction of teeth," said Michel. "These are teeth that are non-restorable. They were broken, abscessed, causing a lot of pain and infection to these individuals. We were able to diagnose, treat and provide pain medication."

Although the purpose of the trip was initiated by a civilian sponsored organization, the skills performed are common practice in a deployed or field environment. The dentists used limited resources and makeshift facilities to perform care.

"There is a lot of crossover to field medicine," said Brown, who has been traveling to Haiti for more than 20 years. "I've attended several medical exercises around the globe and there are valuable skills that go back and forth."

For people in first-world nations dental services are something they take for granted, even to the point where those procedures are actively avoided.

"The whole experience left me very humbled," said Michel, a Haitian-American whose parents emigrated from Haiti in 1978. "Seeing how people live in these austere conditions and then coming back here--it makes me feel very blessed."

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