Luojieqi’s new year morning homework

Dental offices on College Avenue. Photos by Ellery Roberts Biddle.

Why Are There So Many Dentists’ Offices on Somerville’s College Avenue?

Walking on College Avenue, from the Davis Square T stop to the main campus of Tufts University, one cannot help but notice that nearly half of the businesses from Davis to Powderhouse Square are dental practices. Is Somerville just a smile-conscious city, or is there something more to it?

“It used to be called Doctor’s Row,” says Carol, the administrative lead at the offices of Anthony Parella. “I knew a lady who was about 100 years old. Her husband was a doctor, and his practice was in their house, on the first floor. It went on like that for decades.” Parella, who specializes in cosmetic dentistry and periodontics, has a small private practice on the main floor of what was once a single-family home. The second and third floors of the building have since been converted into apartments.

“It’s very rare to see a practice just disintegrate,” Carol explains. “When someone retires, a new doctor usually comes in and takes up the practice.”

Somerville dental offices, via Google Maps.

As with other types of businesses, the city maintains specific zoning and licensing requirements for privately-owned healthcare practices — while not impossible, dental office staff say that licenses aren’t easy to come by. Rather than filing for new permissions when starting a new practice, many of the dentists in the area have established their practices using pre-existing infrastructure that has made it easier for them to move in, change the window dressing, and get to work.

But is it really practical to have so many dentists in such a concentrated area? Like a fabric district or jeweler’s row, dentists in Somerville look a bit like a real-life illustration of the economic theorem developed by Harold Hoteling which suggests that when located next to one another, stores offering similar goods, pricing and services can generally expect to evenly split their surrounding clientele.

“It’s all about what the patient’s looking for,” said Deanna, who works as a receptionist at Somerville Dental Associates. “Most want the exam, the x-rays, and the cleaning. Some people just want a cleaning, like a one-time deal. But not all practices will do that for you.” Deanna pointed out that larger corporate practices in the area often can’t guarantee that a patient will see the same dentist at each visit.

She also spoke to the question of referrals, explaining that some practices offer specialist services, while others do not. “We regularly refer patients to our neighbors, when we can’t give them the services they need.” If your dentist can’t provide you with periodontic treatment, she can easily refer you to a colleague down the street.

This seemed due in part to the unique services each practice offers, and to the distinct patient populations they tended to serve.

Private practices like those of Lorna Lally and Anthony Parella reported that families and Tufts students made up the majority of their clientele, and that nearly all of their patients either had dental insurance through an employer or parent, or that they paid for services out-of-pocket. Both practices offer both general and pediatric services.

Outdoor wall advertisement for the Braces Place, part of Dental Associates of Davis Square. Photo by Ellery Roberts Biddle.

Dental Associates of Davis Square, a corporate practice with orthodontics, periodontics, cosmetic and general dentistry all under one roof, sees patients from throughout the surrounding area. Although they have fewer student patients than other nearby practices, office manager Kayann explained that their model attracts families with growing children, particularly given the offering of orthodontic services. Most clients had some kind of dental insurance, ranging from private plans to MassHealth.

When asked about competition with other businesses in the area, Kayann described their marketing strategy, which targets both older and younger audiences through both print and online advertising, and television commercials mainly on Spanish and Portuguese channels. Patients could request a Spanish or Portuguese-speaking doctor if they wished to do so.

Every staff person I spoke with emphasized the value of being located next to a major public transit stop. Deanna pointed out that most people don’t visit the dentist more than two or three times a year. “So they’re willing to travel for it. And the T makes it easy.”

None of the staff at the five practices that I visited seemed concerned about competition with other nearby offices. “It’s a diverse enough area with a high population density, ” said Deanna. So we all manage to do all right.”

The new Ed Portal

Despite the freezing temperatures and light snow on the afternoon of Saturday, February 23^rd, the grand opening of the Harvard Ed Portal in the Boston neighborhood of Allston was a lively and cheerful affair. Well over 200 people attended the event from 1-4pm, along with several members of the Harvard and local city press, with organizers and students from Harvard University mingling with families from the Allston-Brighton community.

The new Science Room at the Ed Portal

Both Harvard President Drew Faust and Mayor of Boston Martin J. Walsh were in attendance and gave short speeches in recognition of the event. The afternoon also featured musical performances and dances by various student groups, and an enthralling lecture on the piece “The Rite of Spring” by Harvard Professor Tom Kelley from his upcoming HarvardX course. For the children, there were painting exercises, fun science experiments, and other activities led by Harvard student volunteers.

There were lots of children and many activities for them to take part in.

Professor Tom Kelley gives a lively demonstration of the dances and music in the Rite of Spring.

The Harvard Ed Portal is a brand new 12,000-square-foot space at the corner of Western Ave and North Harvard Street in Allston intended to serve as a community center and place of learning for the residents of Allston and Brighton. The space contains a theater space for performances as well as many smaller rooms for workshops and activities for children.

Entrance to the new Ed Portal in Allston.

This grand unveiling was the latest in a series of efforts from a task force led by Professor Rob Lue, faculty director of the Ed Portal, to extend the many resources available at Harvard University to members of the Allston community. In total, Harvard has allotted $8.3 million towards the building of the Ed Portal and other projects aimed at the local community. Many Harvard students have also taken on roles as organizers to carry out community projects and serve as mentors to children.

President Drew Faust addresses the packed audience.

At the new theater podium, speaking to a mostly standing audience, President Faust asked attendees to consider the question, “What is a Harvard? How do we think about what Harvard is?” She then went on to paint a picture of Harvard as “the unending pursuit of knowledge” and the Ed Portal as a place where the community around Harvard could take part in this pursuit as well.

A sign welcoming President Faust and Mayor Walsh.

Mayor Walsh echoed the question again in his speech and stated, “To me growing up, Harvard was someplace that very, very smart people went to, got a good education, and went on to do great things…went on to become presidents, and kings, and prime ministers. Today, what is a Harvard to a lot of people in this room is that Harvard is in reach of every person in this room.”

In his speech, Mayor Walsh acknowledged the sometimes-strained relationship between Harvard University and its neighboring communities as well as the city of Boston when he said, “I want to thank Harvard. I know that sometimes there’s been a bit of bickering back and forth. But this is one of the things that come out of bickering. It’s a great opportunity.” The frank statements elicited a lot of knowing chuckles and applause from the audience, many of whom were residents of the neighborhood.

The statements alluded to a long history between Harvard and Allston reaching back a quarter of a century when Harvard began buying up land in Allston across from the Charles River. While Harvard Business School and the new Innovation Lab are already in Allston, many new developments are planned as Harvard expands into the neighborhood, including a new home for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and potentially new residential spaces for students.

Many residents of Allston have been upset about this encroachment of Harvard into their community and concerned about what the continuous march of development means for them. Many have complained of how this has resulted in higher living costs for current residents, pricing many of them out of the neighborhood.

One sign of this was seen in an advertisement found outside the Ed Portal promoting the Continuum, a brand new retail and apartment complex across the street. It had the word “gentrification” scrawled across the front. It remains to be seen how Harvard’s plans will continue to change the face of Allston and its residents in the coming years. However, the Ed Portal, as Mayor Walsh stated, has been one good outcome of the tensions between the university and the city and will hopefully be a entertaining and inspiring place for the community for years to come.

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My Takeaways from this experience:

Attending the event was a somewhat stressful experience, as I tried to juggle food and drinks in one hand and my phone in the other, which I was using to both record audio and take pictures. My audio quality was terrible as I couldn’t get close enough to the stage and was too close to the rooms of children. I think being an actual journalist may be difficult for me as I am by nature quite non-confrontational. Although, I imagine some credentials and a badge could make me a lot more willing to push past crowds and even try to interview folks. I did not attempt to interview anyone for this piece.

I also didn’t have time directly after the event to write up the article and so cheated and wrote it several days later (still taking up only 4 hours in total for event + writing). Trying to coordinate WordPress and images on my iPhone turned out to be extremely frustrating due to the opaqueness that is iPhoto Library app. It’s amazing to me, even as someone who does UX and usability, how much anger something like poor or purposefully obfuscated application design can elicit.

My on-the-fly audio reporting debut: in which I attempt to rush to cover a talk about … how to stop rushing and meditate.

Reporting time: About four hours, non-contiguous, interrupted by technical hurdles and existential crisis.

The federal government is embarking on a massive study of young people’s use of marijuana, a project that some say could be a game-changer.

With the goal of following roughly 10,000 young Americans over 10 years, the so-called ABCD (Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development) study will try to answer important questions about how pot impacts young people’s brains, which are still developing into their mid-twenties.

“It’s a great initiative and one that’s likely to change what we know and think about substances, specifically marijuana,” says Dr. Staci Gruber, a Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor and leading marijuana researcher.

The study would start tracking young people at the age of 9 or 10, before they begin ingesting substances such as tobacco, alcohol and pot. Using brain-imaging and other techniques, the $150 million study would attempt to discern differences in those who consumed substances and those who didn’t, or consumed infrequently.

“One of the main questions we’re trying to answer is what these kids look like before they start using substances, and then how much do the substances alter or effect this period of brain development,” said Dr. Susan Weiss, associate director for scientific affairs at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), one of the agencies leading the study.

But for all its scope and ambition, can ABCD overcome perceptions of bias and limits on ethical research to provide much in the way of weighty new insights?

Some may believe that decades of research and widespread use have already revealed the risks of marijuana. There’s scientific consensus that most adults can occasionally use pot without serious health risks, and that heavy use by young people is linked with cognitive impairment and psychotic episodes.

But some important findings remain less than conclusive, according to a report by the RAND Corp. for the state of Vermont. The evidence linking pot to stunted brain development, for instance, is “fairly weak and somewhat inconsistent,” the Vermont report says.

Skeptics may point to scientific constraints on ABCD’s findings and value.

Ethics prohibit scientists from giving intoxicating drugs to 9 year-olds. That means ABCD can’t conduct the kind of “gold-standard” double-blind experiments in which subjects are randomly given drugs or placebos. As a study merely observing young people, ABCD can’t show that pot causes anything — good or bad. For all its reach, the study can only establish an association between, let’s say, pot and depression.

That lack of demonstrated causality has left a significant hole in marijuana research. Policy makers are thus relegated to a “fog of uncertainties” about pot’s impact on public health, according to the Vermont report.

Still, some scientists see great potential value in such a large study, which could firm up associations now tenuous because of small sample sizes and other shortcomings in design. ABCD will also take the important step of studying kids before they start consuming substances and studying occasional or infrequent users. “This initiative is absolutely groundbreaking,” Gruber says.

What’s more, the study will use brain-imaging technology such as fMRI, and should offer something decades-old studies haven’t: research on the increased potency of pot and new methods of consuming, such as vaporizing hash oil.

Such a study, Weiss says, has never been more timely. With four states legalizing pot and the movement poised to spread across the country, policymakers need clearer research — particularly on those who appear most vulnerable to pot’s risks — than ever before.

It’s likely that legalizing weed will even be a topic for presidential candidates next year.

That’s precisely what worries some who say marijuana is still caught in a values debate, not a scientific one; a debate that one day will appear inexplicably musty in its archaic views. Federally-funded research has historically focused on the harms of marijuana, especially among very heavy users, instead of its seemingly more moderate risks — even possible benefits — for occasional consumers.

A recent report to Colorado officials noted that pot’s illegality has injected both a “funding bias and publication bias into the body of” research literature on pot use.

Weiss says ABCD won’t be biased. Previous NIDA research may have focused on harm because preventing abuse is the agency’s mission, she says.

Infamous article by America’s first “drug czar,” the man most responsible for prohibition of pot.

But she points to the agency’s interest in research on the therapeutic uses of cannabidiol (CBD), one of the non-intoxicating chemicals in marijuana. ABCD will aim, she said, to answer questions not steer policy. “If it turns out marijuana doesn’t do anything bad to the brain, then that’s just fine,” she said.

The ABCD study involves federal agencies besides NIDA, which could bring different perspectives less focused on harm.

Prohibition is hardly ideal, Weiss, said with its racially-skewed history of enforcement. (A national ACLU study found that African-Americans were four times more likely to be arrested for pot possession than whites, although they consume at roughly equal rates.) “Nobody wants that to happen,” she says.

But the question of legalizing weed — or how best to legalize — is complicated, she says, by questions about pot’s impact on young people’s developing brains.

So researchers are trying to move quickly, by federal standards. The National Institutes of Health announced earlier this month one of ABCD’s first funding opportunities, $2 million for a study coordinating center. Applications are due in April.

Of course, there’s a possibility much of the policy debate may be resolved by the time the study is completed in 10 years. Or, there’s a chance that waiting for its results could be used as an argument against legalizing. “That’s why we’re trying to get it going as quickly as possible,” Weiss says.