Opinion ID: 2804390
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Dental history

Text: Newberry, then living in Ohio, began seeing Silverman for dental care in 1986. No later than the mid-1990s, Silverman performed a root canal on one of Newberry’s teeth. Approximately 10 years later, Newberry came back to Silverman complaining that the tooth on which Silverman had performed the root canal was hurting. Silverman X-rayed the tooth, after which he opined that Newberry had bitten down too hard, bruised a nerve, or developed cancer. He recommended that Newberry continue monitoring the situation. Several years later, Newberry returned to Silverman with the same complaint. Silverman again assured him that the discomfort had nothing to do with the root canal. Silverman conveyed the same information to Newberry by telephone after Newberry had moved to Kentucky in 2005. Finally, in November 2012, Newberry visited an endodontist—a specialist in root canals—who No. 14-3882 Newberry v. Silverman, et al. Page 3 discovered that the root canal that Silverman had performed in the 1990s was incomplete. A portion of the tooth’s root remained, which had caused the area to become abscessed. The endodontist resolved the problem, and Newberry has suffered no further discomfort with regard to the tooth in question. Within days of discovering that Silverman had not performed a complete root canal, Newberry sent an email from Kentucky to Silverman’s office in Ohio requesting his dental records. Silverman’s office emailed back and informed Newberry that his records were inaccessible farther back than 2003 because the records were stored digitally, and that Silverman’s current software was no longer compatible with records before that date. Newberry and Silverman emailed back and forth about Newberry’s records several times over the course of the next month, and Silverman was eventually able to find a few more records. Silverman, however, sent only one X-ray of the tooth on which he had performed the root canal, and that was taken during the original procedure. In December 2012, Newberry asked specifically for all of the X-rays of that tooth, but he was told that they had been discarded at some unspecified point in the past. The only explanation that Silverman offered for discarding the records was to reduce the size of Newberry’s file.