Dental Clinic Earns its Chops on Same-Day Dentures
Published Apr 17, 2008
If you drive by Sexton Dental Clinic on West Palmetto Street in Florence, you may conclude there’s something free for the taking inside, considering all the people in line. Yet most of the folks in the crowd are there for one thing and ready to pay for it: same-day service for lower-cost dentures.
“I don’t know how or why he came up with the idea, but it was one amazing idea,” says Paula Haselden, the clinic’s controller. She’s talking about Dr. C.L. Sexton, who in 1923 opened in Florence what was probably the nation’s first one-day dental laboratory for dentures. Today, the clinic employs eight dentists, including one in a satellite office in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“We do have a big line in the morning,” Haselden says, “because we tell denture patients to be here between 6 and 6:30 to guarantee that they get it all done in one day.”
After patients complete medical forms, see a dentist, pick out their dentures and have impressions made, they wait around for the finished product.
Sexton Dental may see as many as 120 denture patients a day, a vast majority of them from out of state, and from 200 to 300 patients daily in total, Haselden says. The clinic also performs implants, bridgework, crowns, hospital dentistry and oral maxillofacial surgery, plus simpler procedures such as fillings, cleaning and bleaching.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
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