They don't do it for the money or the perks of the job, and the travel possibilities are dubious. So, what is it about the area of forensic odontology that appeals to you? Tracey Porter conducts an investigation.
Russell Lain, a scholar of English, math, and science, recognised early on the profession that was required of him.
Whilst the notion of a profession in literature piqued my interest, the obvious route for students earning excellent HSC grades in Sydney in the late 1960s was a future in medicine.
Only the Sydney University student had a different plan. "I didn't want to be a doctor, with people dying and nothing I could do to help,†he adds.
So he took a new path, working for a decade in private practice before devoting his attention to using teeth to identify the deceased.
Chris Griffiths is another person who began his career in forensic odontology (FO) with a whisper rather than a roar.
Professor Griffiths was already a dentist with the RAAF and stationed at the fighter base in Butterworth, Malaysia, when he was requested to utilise dental records to identify buddies who had crashed their Mirage fighter planes on top of one another.
They just stated to me, 'Right, you're the senior dental officer; you identify him.
Whilst he recalls having to insert a knife into someone he knew as "quite common," it obviously struck a nerve, since Professor Griffiths subsequently helped create the template for FO best practice globally as the Australian representative to Interpol's Disaster Victim Identification Standing Committee.
The duo has been called upon to help in a number of catastrophes, including the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires. Furthermore, they have both worked on identifying unknown victims in murder instances such as the excavation of Russian-Jewish children's mass graves in Russia, the identification of young Indonesians killed in the Occussi enclave in East Timor, and Australia's own Backpacker Murders.
Dr. Lain recalls vividly his baptism by fire, which began when he was helping at the (then) Institute of Forensic Medicine in Glebe and was required to identify the victim of an incineration case involving a police pursuit.
He realised that he could do the job and yet manage. His first case in the diploma course was a bit of a surprise, as my colleague postgraduate student and he was expected to do a complete post-mortem and give a provisional 'cause of death' on a dead person who had no face. I lost a scalpel blade in the corpse and had to spend some time retrieving it.â€
As Australian law demands positive identification of dead people in a variety of situations, FO practitioners usually offer expert advice to police and the legal profession. Such demands may include the criminal court system, inheritance problems, life insurance, and company ownership succession.
Such a job involves analysing bite marks, determining the age of a dead person, dealing with dental negligence, and doing cranio-facial trauma studies.
Because visual identification alone cannot always be relied on for victim identification, Interpol accepts three identifiers for a dead individual that may legally stand alone as a single identifier: fingerprints, biology (DNA methods), and odontology.
Professor Griffiths is the head of the Faculty of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology at the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) and the FO at the Westmead Centre for Oral Health. He claims that in many instances, fingerprints are impossible to acquire, whilst obtaining DNA may be very time-consuming, adding an extra degree of pain to families anxious to begin the mourning process.
This increases the value of the job done by individuals in this area, he says.
Both guys claim they were attracted to this kind of job because they felt compelled to assist others in their neighborhood. Few jobs, they think, are more gratifying than completing an identification so that the corpse can be given to the family, identifying a victim so that a prosecution can take place, or helping to the conclusion of a missing person investigation.
Whilst admitting that such a job is not for everyone, Dr. Lain claims that many FOs pay a significant personal cost for taking on such work.
He used to think that he was immune to the stress of dealing with the deceased–remembering that we often deal with decomposition, incineration, or mutilation instances that cannot be recognised visually–but he knows that after 30 years of performing this job, it has taken its toll.â€
There are presently approximately 20 specialised dentists operating as fully certified FOs in Australia, despite the fact that there are rarely requests for mass catastrophe victim identification. The bulk of those who work on missing person cases are employed by the health department, the attorney general, or the police force.
According to Professor Griffiths, with an odontology service in each state and territory, the industry also depends on a few volunteers as well as a backlog of 'forensic sleepers' who may be called upon if the worst happens.
Because the use of dental methods for human identification is simple in principle but complicated in practice, this group is usually made up of oral health professionals who have completed one of the numerous brief forensic dentistry training courses available.
Attendees in such courses typically participate in a mock disaster exercise in a mortuary, as well as exercises in tooth identification, antemortem and postmortem radiographic matching, and age estimation from radiographic evidence, to ensure that if called upon to assist with dental charting in the event of a mass disaster, they will know what to do.
Both forensic experts advise that you test the waters for a time before committing completely to this kind of specialisation.
FO job, according to Dr. Lain, is most suited to personality types who are somewhat "obsessive compulsive, or at least with a strong eye for detail and correctness. A 'gallows' sense of humour, on the other hand, helps to handle the occasionally unpleasant sites.â€
Professor Griffiths believes that the key is to recognise early on that you must cut off and compartmentalise what you do.
He added that one has to convince yourself that what has happened to these individuals has occurred; you can't alter it, but what you can do is attempt to identify them as soon as possible so they can be returned to their families.
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