Niagara dentists provide care, comfort in Haiti Published March 3, 2015 By Staff Sgt. Matthew Burke 914th Airlift Wing Public Affairs NIAGARA FALLS AIR RESERVE STATION, N.Y. -- A humanitarian trip to assist the less fortunate provided an opportunity to weave professional duties while enhancing a sense of self for two dentists here. Col. Victor D. Brown, 914th Aeromedical Staging Squadron commander and Maj. Stanley N. Michel, general dentist, 914th ASTS, traveled to the Macieux region of the Republic of Haiti to provide much-needed dental care to under-served communities during January. "We had five and a half working days where it was pretty much all oral surgery, extraction of teeth," said Michel. "These are teeth that are non-restorable. They were broken, abscessed, causing a lot of pain and infection to these individuals. We were able to diagnose, treat and provide pain medication." Although the trip was initiated by a civilian sponsored organization, the skills performed are common practice in a deployed or field environment. The dentists used limited resources and makeshift facilities to perform care. "There is a lot of crossover to field medicine," said Brown, who has been traveling to Haiti for more than 20 years. "I've attended several medical exercises around the globe and there are valuable skills that go back and forth." For people in first-world nations dental services are something they take for granted, even to the point where those procedures are actively avoided. "The whole experience left me very humbled," said Michel, a Haitian-American whose parents emigrated from Haiti in 1978. "Seeing how people live in these austere conditions and then coming back here--it makes me feel very blessed."