Ask recently retired dentist Thomas Boettcher about the advances his field of medicine has seen since he moved his office to Lincolnshire in 1983.
“It’s been an exciting time to practice,” said Boettcher, of Highland Park. “It’s almost getting magical now, some of the stuff that we can do.”
Raised in Madison, Wis., the 66-year-old graduate of Cornell and Northwestern had a football scholarship, played professional baseball in the Minnesota Twins’ minor-league system and has worked and studied in Australia and Hong Kong. But the father of two and grandfather of three has called it a career, hoping to spend more time with the little ones.
Q: Is the average Lincolnshire mouth in good shape?
A: I think everybody is pretty much OK. It’s a real high-dental-hygiene area. They get it. Now, some people are given a correction, about what they need to change to do better, and they choose not to act on something. A lot of real Type-A guys, they fix things themselves, so sometimes it’s really hard for them to get help. But a person’s genetics is such a big thing. It makes you susceptible to stuff. Sometimes, it’s embarrassing for successful people, because they have problems.
Q: It’s 2016, but drills…still sound like horror-movie sound effects. What will it take to make that stuff bearable?
A: The holy grail. They’ve been working on it since the ’70s — something that would have the same effectiveness, and be cost-effective. Lasers have come on the scene, it had to be 10 years ago, and I got involved with lasers, both for soft tissue and for teeth. What we found was that patients were not ready for that yet. It’s a conundrum right now. I imagine there will come a time.
Q: You worked around the Pacific in the 1970s and early 1980s, long before the Internet brought the world to each others’ fingertips. What was it like to come home from a completely foreign culture, on the other side of the planet, and explain your experiences to people who might never go there?
A: It was exhilarating. We recognized that we’d had an experience that the vast majority of our friends and our parents didn’t have. My parents, getting to a place like that, it had to do with war. Now, high school kids and younger are going overseas.
— Ronnie Wachter, Pioneer Press
Twitter: @RonnieAtPioneer
