A fear of going to the dentist is fairly common. Would it comfort you to know someone could be pulling out your tooth while riding a hoverboard?
How would you know? You could be lying there, blissfully sedated and putting your trust in the hands of a medical professional – and they could be taking the piss. It’s okay, it’s just your teeth at stake.
One such Alaska dentist has been found guilty on dozens of charges, including reckless endangerment, illegally practicing dentistry and medical assistance fraud, after a video emerged of him riding a hoverboard while extracting a tooth.
Check out the news report below:
Seth Lookhart, the 34-year-old Anchorage dentist, was found guilty on Friday, January 17, of all 46 counts he faced, as reported by KTUU.
The charging document pertaining the hoverboarding incident read: ‘Seth Lookhart performed a dental extraction procedure on a sedated patient while riding a hoverboard and filmed the procedure and distributed the film to persons outside his dental practice.’
NBC News reports that Lookhart sent a video of the procedure to eight friends, joking it was ‘a new standard of care’. After pulling out the tooth in the video, the dentist shoots off down the corridor before grinning to the camera.
While Lookhart’s attorney defended him during the trial, he didn’t shy away from acknowledging the client’s moronic behaviour.
As per Anchorage Daily News, defence attorney Paul Stockler said:
I want you to know that as his lawyer, I apologise for what he did on that hoverboard. It’s unacceptable and you can be assured that when I agreed to represent him, I got in his face and told him what I thought about him for doing this, which I think needed to be done.
Lookhart’s idiotic hoverboarding wasn’t the only thing to get him in hot water – he was also found guilty of defrauding the Alaska Medicaid program by pushing for far costlier sedation over anaesthesia, billing taxpayers $10,000 for the procedures.
Following a five-week trial, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Michael Wolverton issued a guilty verdict, calling the state’s evidence ‘simply overwhelming’. The judge also noted the dentist’s text conversations, which echoed the fears that unless someone was there, nobody would know he was behaving dangerously.
Lookhart will be sentenced on April 30.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.