Tooth Wisdom

Editor's Note:  This is the first official installment of the "Meet the Merchant" series, which profiles businesses providing goods and services we use here. To read the story that helped bring the idea about, click here. 

BY MATTHEW MERITT

One could say Warren Eng’s love of racquet sports has at least a little to do with his successful Horseheads dental practice, now in its 33rd year. 
 
While still in dental school in Baltimore, Dr. Eng broke his two front teeth during a racquetball match. The root canals eventually required to save them added a perspective not all dentists can claim. 
 
“I understand what a trauma-induced toothache feels like,” he said, recalling the unusual sports injury during a conversation at his Horseheads Dental office on Westinghouse Road. ​

That empathy has no-doubt come through to the thousands of patients who have settled into Dr. Eng’s exam chairs over the years – all at the same Horseheads Village Plaza location where the former Washington, DC-area resident opened his practice in March 1988. 

Child patients he had when he first opened now bring their own children to him for dental care. “We are kind of like family with our patients,” Dr. Eng says. 
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He enjoys getting to know more about his patients than their dental histories. “Interacting with the patients, knowing what their jobs are, what their lives are like. I’m interested in talking to them and finding out who they are. I think that’s the fun part, when we have time to talk.”
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A similar curiosity led Dr. Eng to science as a child. He kept busy exploring a marsh near his home, examining various items under a microscope received as a gift and, of course, looking at teeth. 

“I remember as a child my tooth came out with a cavity in it, so I looked at it and poked at it ... to see what decay looked like. I put it in my father’s vise downstairs in the shop just to see how much I could twist that vise before the tooth cracked.”

A child’s love of science and observation prompted Dr. Eng to get an undergraduate degree in zoology, but dental school beat out veterinary school for graduate study. After that, a chance meeting at a seminar in Philadelphia led to a job as an associate dentist in Horseheads, about a mile down Westinghouse Road from Dr. Eng’s current location. 

A tray with hand instruments and other materials is set up to construct a crown.

"We are kind of like family with our patients," Dr. Eng says.

With advanced technology like the Primescan optical scanner used to fabricate crowns, Dr. Eng and his patients can opt to have them made in the office and in just one visit.

​“I had no idea where this place was,” he recalls about what would become his new home. “I said, ‘What the heck, I’ll go up there.’”
 
Upon entering the professional world, the freshly minted dentist brought along some new tricks of the trade from dental school. While younger dentists wore gloves, it wasn’t standard practice. 
 
“The term ‘wet-finger’ dentistry really was wet finger at the time,” he says. 
 
So Dr. Eng brought his own gloves as well as his own curing unit used for hardening new tooth-colored fillings. These units made the filling process less time sensitive. “The doctor who employed me said, ‘What is this?’  I said, ‘It’s a light curing unit.’ It kind of revolutionized the industry in my opinion because now it’s ubiquitous.”
 
Today Dr. Eng is the established practitioner amazed at new dental technology. Curious as ever, he welcomes items like his new Primescan optical scanner. The digital impressions it makes eliminate the need for uncomfortable impression material and can be sent via the internet instantly to laboratories, where things like crowns, night guards and bleaching trays are made. Using the optical scanner in conjunction with the in-office, computer-aided milling machine, Dr. Eng is able to fabricate most of the crowns and other dental restorations in-house in one appointment.
 
Changes forced by the COVID interruption have been more of a challenge. But even in those, Dr. Eng sees potential for long-term improvements in patient care. “Face shields, I think they are going to be here to stay,” he said. 
 
He also added an air purification system as a preventative measure. “It neutralizes all the bacteria and viruses and spores in the office-air space. … If someone sneezes and the droplets travel farther than three feet, the germs get neutralized,” he said, adding, “In some ways, we’re practicing differently now than we were prior to March 2020.”
 
He must be practicing even more differently than other health professionals in earlier generations of his family, including an uncle who was a dentist in Hong Kong and a great grandfather who, his mother told him, was the first western-trained dentist in China. Moving to other specialties, he has an uncle who was a radiologist and a grandfather who, again according to mom, as a physician treated the last emperor of China. 
 
So, Dr. Eng’s career is part of a family tradition, comfortably set for decades in the pleasantly familiar rhythms of small-town America. He sees his practice less as a business venture and more as a piece of a safe, prosperous community.
 
Dr. Eng says he will always enjoy improving his clinical skills while embracing new technologies and techniques. But in other areas he’ll stick to the tried and true. He still enjoys racquet sports, having moved from racquetball through tennis to pickleball, which he plays often with his wife, Hency. 
 
A picture hanging on a waiting room wall for the last 15 years gets to the core of Dr. Eng’s work. It’s a third-grade boy’s school project, depicting various parts of a tooth with construction paper and yarn. That boy, now grown up, remains a patient. When other patients glance at that project as they walk in, they can see what characterizes the work Dr. Eng and his staff do: carefully getting to know a patient’s teeth and taking the time to get to know them like family. 

Nicholas Goodwin, a patient at Horseheads Dental, poses next to his elementary school project hanging on the wall of Dr. Eng’s office.