Dental Records Request: Fill & Download for Free

I’ll give you two slightly different examples from the UK: myself and my friend S.About three years ago, I had a cough, and it wouldn't go away (spoiler alert: I’m fine). After a month, I went to my GP, expecting to be given some prescription cough medicine and told to call back in a couple of weeks.Ummm… nope. About two weeks later I was lying in a big, doughnnut-shaped scanner and having weird stuff pumped into my arm that made my mouth taste like tin and interesting areas of my body feel all warm and tingly.Three days after that I was back in my GP’s office, being told that my lungs were fine and dandy, that I had no tumours in my body - though there were a couple of interesting striations in my abdominal muscle that they’d want to look at again in a few months - and that they were going to keep looking at less urgent things. Was I available in three weeks for a gastroscopy?Well, how’s a chap to say no? Of course I was. I also said yes to a rather baffled phone call from my dentist who said he’d been asked to forward my dental records and was I OK with that?One sedative and a big tube down the throat later, I was diagnosed with a hiatus hernia, causing acid reflux which was irritating my trachea, and told I didn’t need surgery because it could be controlled with diet and Lansoprazole - and so it turned out to be. The same acid reflux had also, it transpired, been eroding my tooth enamel, hence the request for dental records.I got a lot more interest, involvement and action than I expected.My friend S’s case is, as I say, rather different, largely because he fell between the cracks of a medical controversy. He suffers from myalgic encephalomyelitis, and had the bad luck to start doing so during the fraught period at the end of the NHS’s belief that it was a psychological condition.He was snapped at by an eminent senior neurologist and told, I kid you not, to pull himself together because the consultant ‘didn’t believe in ME.’ He had appointments cancelled because of theoretical arguments between old-school neurologists like that on one hand and more current immunologists and neurologists on the other.His GP knew he had ME. His clinical psychologist knew he had ME. But his formal diagnosis for NHS treatment and income protection insurance purposes was delayed because, at the last moment, the classical neurologists gave a little bit of ground and psychologists were no longer permitted to diagnose the condition, and he had to start again with new referrals.So it took him about three very sticky months to get in with a team who could and would actually help him. He’s now in the hands of experts, however, and making good progress.No system - private enterprise, public sector or any mix of the two - is perfect.

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.Dental records are one of several methods of scientific identification. Unlike fingerprints, and in some cases DNA, there is no national database of dental records for comparison.Original question:How are dental records found if your body is unrecognizable after death?When we use dental records for identification we need a PTB or “Presumed To Be” name from the investigating agency (usually the police).This is used for when we are pretty sure who the decedent is, but they are not able to be visually identified, typically from injury or decomposition. This is our ‘go-to’ method with thermal or fire deaths, because often the fingers will not be present, or are too charred to get prints from. Occasionally, we will use dental records where there are several decedents and co-mingled remains from mass fatality event.Either the medicolegal death investigator or the police will ask the NOK (Next-of-kin), or someone who knew the decedent well, who their dentist was. Then we send a request for records. We specifically ask for x-rays and the dental charting (with legend - as each office seems to have it’s own abbreviations). We will ask them to be overnight shipped (if not local) to our office. But now, since most offices have gone digital, they will be emailed.If there is no one who knows the dental office, then we would move to another method of identification. I guess if it was a smaller urban area or town with a limited amount of dentists, we could call around. But with HIPAA, we would probably have to send a request to each office before they could even tell use if that person was a patient.We then ask our forensic dentist to come and do a comparison.Earlier I said there was no national database for dental records - but there is something close.I introduce to you- a potential time suck - if you are like this sort of information.NAMUS- is a national database that is used for this purpose.This interesting website has sections for missing persons, unidentified persons, and unclaimed persons.Anyone can search! There are fascinating cases to explore.To enter cases you need to be employed by a police agency or medical examiner/coroners office.Prior to 2003 each individual police office or coroner office kept these files. Sometimes the FBI would be able to look. But it was a tedious process and you would need to request from each department. Obviously this is not efficient. So they established this agency and it has been online since 2007.So if you great uncle john went missing in 1970, you can look him up. Maybe he is listed as a missing person, or an unclaimed one.I just discovered today, there is a list of living people who are unidentified. So I guess you could plan your own Overboard! movie escapade. Currently there are 10 people who are either unable to tell the authorities, or do not know who they are.I am not sure how long they wait and what the requirements are for a police agency to list a missing person, since I don’t work on that side.But we (coroners / medical examiners) can list decedents (and even individual body parts if that is all we have) that are unidentified. When we do this, it will also generate a list of missing people who could fit the description.Back to the dental comparisons.If we have an unidentified person to list, we will have done everything we could do prior to listing them in NAMUS. Including getting a DNA profile, fingerprints, and our forensic dentist (or our forensic anthropologist) will have made a chart of the teeth. All of this will be included and is searchable.Some of the missing person listed, will include a dental record also, but there is no easy way to search to compare. We would need to go through the list of possibilities and if there was dental records they could be compared. But the list of possibilities could be in the hundreds.But lets say they found the headless body of Bill Smith- they were able to identify him through either fingerprints, DNA, or other method. Years later a head or skull was found in a different jurisdiction. NAMUS will help ‘connect’ the two (or more) investigating agencies.There are people who say there is too much government, but in this case I think they did something right. This website was a great idea.I, personally, only have once case on my NAMUS ‘dashboard’ that I have entered. It was skeletal remains, and I don’t think it will be solved anytime soon, but now there is more of a possibility than if it was in a file drawer.

Dentists do not automatically send records to any data bank and no such bank exists. Dental records are used to confirm identity, not to identify an unknown subject. That means the coroner or family already has some form of identification and just want something more concrete to confirm. Dental records are easier to obtain by authorities than DNA, fingerprint, tattoos, etc. Usually I would receive a request for xrays of a person from the police or county coroner. My job is to confirm that it is my patient of record and send requested info to that entity. What they do with that information is beyond my knowledge or control. If you’re concerned about privacy issues, then don’t. Health care providers are bound by HIPPA regulations regarding releasing protected medical information.