“There is a lot of shame around oral disease,” says veteran health-care journalist Mary Otto (left). “In addition to the suffering it causes, oral disease confers a real stigma upon its victims.”

That stigma, she says, is rooted in inequality of access to care – a problem Otto, 62, examines in her book Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, published in March. Otto recently sat down with Incisal Edge dental lifestyle magazine to discuss broadening the availability of care.