AHP Newsgroup: The IAED Issues an Urgent Alert Notice for Texas, in the USA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: International Association of Equine Dentistry (IAEDGlobal – USA Chapter)
Re: Pending legal and legislative matters affecting equine dental practitioners and horse owners in Texas
The International Association of Equine Dentistry (IAED), a global organization of committed and often-allied veterinary (DVM) and equine dental technician (EDT) practitioners founded in 1987 in the U.S., is urging all of its professional members in Texas to alert their equine clients, including breed associations and concerned resident horse owners in every equine sport discipline in the state, to become actively involved and participate in important upcoming legal and legislative proceedings that will likely soon impact the future availability, convenience, cost and quality of equine dentistry services in that jurisdiction, currently home to over 1 million horses.
This ongoing controversy has been gaining legal momentum in recent years, but is also losing credibility rapidly with many horse owners, both in Texas and elsewhere. Still without any prior public outcry that would presumably justify its action, and apparently lacking due consideration for the expected financial impact, and the overall cost- and quality-control consequences of regulatory enforcement, the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners (TBVME) continues to press its intent for severely restricting or eliminating all non-veterinary practitioners from the profession that EDTs have collectively preserved, advanced and promoted over the last six hundred years, despite any individual EDT’s own established level of competence, prior experience or acknowledged credentials.
Arguable legal maneuvering by the Texas Vet Board, presided over by Executive Director and attorney Dewey Helmkamp, would subsequently allow only licensed veterinarians or their hired vet-technician employees to practice this specialized discipline legally in that state for the foreseeable future. Such action sets the legal stage for yet another U.S. jurisdiction to allow veterinary special interest lobbying to prevail over traditional public habit of long standing and eminent practical common sense, and in this case also to overrule Texas’ established right-to-work mandate or the state’s resident horse owners’ (presumably protected) freedom of choice in selecting available practitioners for dentistry services that are regularly needed for the optimal health care and maintenance of their prized equine stock.
This has become an all-too-tiresome routine in many jurisdictions globally. It continues to sap both public funds (Helmkamp is alleged to have requested $140,000 in taxpayer funding from the Appropriations Committee solely to investigate and prosecute EDTs in Texas, and a related case defense by the MN vet board last year cost an alleged $200,000) and huge private expenditure as well in prolonged, often futile legal disputes that should not be happening, wasting time and effort better directed to more pressing social concerns. By comparison to local and global economic crises, regional war and famine deaths, disease outbreaks and the displacement of refugees, terrorism and environmental threats, the issue of who should be allowed to practice equine dentistry legally seems trifling, if not blatantly petty in the extreme. Yet, settling the issue remains elusive still in many locations because of the lure of potential free-market manipulation, ego and turf protection, the possibility for income stability virtually guaranteed by biased law enactment, and the susceptibility of legislators to guidance by presumed “experts” through effective lobbies that have a clear vested interest in the market’s ultimate control. Perhaps most importantly, it speaks to the matter of any democratic process needing constant scrutiny and its own level of maintenance for quality control, sustained practicality and continued fairness to persist for all the parties affected.
Using alleged “protection of the public’s best interest” by allowing only degreed and licensed vet practitioners exclusivity in equine dentistry as the disguising veneer for such lobbying has become the overly-worn tactic of convenience used by many biased vet boards on a global scale since the emergence of power tool use in the profession during the late1990s, which supposedly reduced the inherent physical demands of this fairly exacting equine health care specialty. Coupled with technical advancements in the profession, many of which derived from the accumulated prior specialized work of experienced EDT practitioners, the frequent need for sedation to effectively and humanely practice modern thorough equine dentistry with power equipment for routine floating of equine teeth has become the pivotal ‘justification’ for the disputed veterinary stance about who should be allowed exclusive right to practice in this old, accepted traditional profession.
The veterinary position being promoted in Texas by the Board dismisses all prior training and experience accumulated by non-vet practitioners there to date, virtually wasting that resource by summarily re-defining EDTs as outlaws henceforth, and instead offers the prospect of dental services that are likely to be costlier and be provided in the future only by a reduced total number of licensees. In addition, vet practitioners have no existing or proposed requirement to prove their individual competence in this specialty to the paying public beyond their graduate DVM degrees, which may or may not have addressed the discipline at all while attending vet school. Somehow this intended action is supposed to make wise legal sense for the public’s benefit, rather than appear to be the free-market manipulation that, in effect, it actually is. In many of the U.S. states, vet schools were initiated by and at public behest (through the land grant colleges), to provide the health care practitioners that the public needs for its livestock industry to thrive; evolving into a vast funded lobby that dictates self-serving law revision to the public was not the original purpose behind those land grants. It should not be so now.
The IAED has posted information to its currently evolving website, now available for public viewing at www.iaedonline.com in its forum menu, about an approaching administrative hearing for the pending suit “Mitz et al v the TBVME” that will occur December 15-17, 2008 at 300 W. 15th Street, 4th Floor, Austin, Texas. The Texas Vet Board will be asking a presiding judge to determine that Carl Mitz, an IAED Certified EDT practitioner of 24 years experience and a specialist in miniature horses who is also an IAED Board Director, along with several other Texas EDT practitioners, have each “practiced veterinary medicine without a license”, thus enabling the state’s Attorney General to issue each of them, and all others in the future, a Cease Order forbidding any equine dentistry practice under threat of prosecution. Current Texas law would levy a fine at $5,000 per day, plus prison time, for a felony conviction under such an order.
The IAED is strongly encouraging its members in the state, along with any and all Texas residents with a vested interest in protecting their own right of choice for equine health care service in dentistry (or other contested disciplines) to attend this hearing on the dates above, overfill the courtroom, and voice their justified concerns about administrative fairness, public involvement in law formulation and mandated cost increases without any public input or a requirement for demonstrated veterinary competence to the television and press media expected there in an anticipated street rally.
There is more at stake here, of course, since nothing political is ever just easy or simple, apparently. The Texas State Legislature meets every other year and will be in session in 2009, but the following session won’t convene until 2011, another two years away. Rep. Sid Miller, who is Chair of the Agricultural Committee, will be introducing a Bill at this upcoming 2009 session to make equine tooth floating an “exemption” to Texas’ Veterinary Practice Act in a manner similar to branding, dehorning, artificial insemination, tail docking, castration and farriery. The proposed bill has widespread popular support among horse owners aware of the equine dental practitioners’ heated controversy, including backing favoring continued EDT practice by the state’s Farm Bureau, but any introduced Bill is always susceptible to tabling or alteration that suits the need of specific oppositional lobbies while going through the committee hearing process before voted acceptance and subsequent enactment into law.
For this reason the IAED encourages interested parties to not only attend the December hearing, but to also contact Rep. Miller, your other state Representatives and Senators, the Texas Vet Board and the Texas Veterinary Medical Association to express the public need for an equitable, sensible and prompt solution to this controversy that actually does serve the public’s real best interest and that of their horses. The details for making those contacts and further information about the matter are available at the IAED website mentioned above. It is hoped that a significant number of Texas residents participating directly or otherwise in the State’s vast equine industry will involve themselves actively to determine their own future course, and maintain the availability, cost-effectiveness and caliber of services for this very essential profession.
Christine Griffin, CEqDT, IAED Secretary
760-703-4860