This video discusses what dental patients should look for to help avoid a non-sterile dental office that can transmit many kinds of diseases and infections.

Hi this is Dr. Jeff Dorfman at The Center for Special Dentistry in New York talking about 12 ways people can differentiate good from bad dentistry and good from bad dentists. Over my 30 year career in dentistry, and with over 20 years professorships between Columbia and NYU dental schools, I have come across a lot of my former students who come to me and tell me stories about the horror of what they witnessed in dental practices, and it’s just not right, and there are some basic things you need to know. Basic stuff: this is a sink, and this is how a dentist should wash their hands before treating you. You should see them wash their hands. You should see, these are gloves, they should put on clean gloves, they should put on a clean mask before even beginning to treat you. Over here, you should see the bracket table should be clean. I’m not wearing gloves as I point to this right now, but instruments are in sealed plastic bags. The dental drill is not already laid out here, it is in a sealed sterile plastic bag. So are the handpieces, the burs, that go into the drill. This is all sterile—this is what you should be looking for. This is sterile plastic placed after chemical disinfection before every patient. This is Dr. Jeff Dorfman at The Center for Special Dentistry and these are things you need to look for in a dental office.