‘Wisdom Teeth Guru’ feels pull of retirement
Oral surgeon spent 35 years working in Santa Fe
In the summer of 1986, Dr. Edward Urig needed an X-ray machine to examine broken jaws, so he haggled with Century Bank in Santa Fe to sell him one it had recently seized.
He got a $1,000 bargain.
“I got lucky because another oral surgeon had just up and walked out of his practice,” Urig said. “It was probably worth $3,000.”
The bank also sold Urig an old barbershop chair with a hand pump, allowing him to examine some of his first fractures.
After 35 years as an oral surgeon in his own practice, as well as Santa Fe’s emergency rooms and volunteer clinics, Urig, known to some as “the Wisdom Teeth Guru,” is retiring this month.
“Of course, I stopped counting,” Urig said. “But I can estimate pretty strongly that I pulled 39,000 sets of wisdom teeth in my career.”
Urig, 67, grew up in Colorado Springs, Colo., and decided he wanted to be a dentist while studying at the University of Northern Colorado. There he met his wife, office manager and bookkeeper, Debbie Urig, who grew up in Santa Fe.
“Medical school and especially the residencies are really, really tough on physicians. As an undergrad, most of my friends who had gone on to medical school and all the doctors I knew growing up got divorced,” Urig said. “The dentists were not. I didn’t want to get divorced.”
The Urigs moved to Santa Fe after he finished his oral surgery residency at the University of Iowa and started looking for a spot to set up a practice. The first broken jaw he examined on the old barbershop chair was the son of an upholsterer, who later helped spruce up the workplace.
“I saw a pair of old dentist chairs going by on the back of a truck. I stopped them and said, ‘Don’t take those away, drop them off, and we’ll swing a deal with the dentist,’ ” Debbie
The Urigs moved to Santa Fe after he finished his residency.
Urig recalled. “It had just so happened that Ed’s very first patient was a jaw fracture whose father was an upholsterer.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Urig says he was called into the emergency room four nights a week, mostly for jaw fractures from fights and car accidents. During the day, he kept growing his practice by pulling wisdom teeth through, well, word-of-mouth advertising.
“I probably gained 20 pounds taking dentists to lunch to be able to grow my practice with referrals,” Urig said. “For oral surgeons, wisdom teeth are what pays the bills.”
One of Urig’s more memorable patients was Joni Brenneisen, who put off having her wisdome teeth removed until she was 55 due to a fear of needles and operating rooms.
“I have always been scared to death of needles, but he was able to talk me into it,” Brenneisen said. “I was hiking in Bandelier the next day. When I found out he was retiring, I started brushing my teeth three times a day because I can’t imagine finding anyone as good as him.”
By the mid-’90s, when Urig moved his practice to Hospital and St. Michael’s drives, he had noticed many of his trauma patients had a need to treat and repair facial scars long after surgery, so he started studying cosmetic surgery. With a laser treatment, he started resurfacing the edges of face wounds to make them less noticeable.
In addition to his private practice, he volunteered at a cleft palate clinic for children and for the Villa Therese Catholic Clinic, which recently broke ground on a new midtown facility after more than 80 years on the grounds of what is now the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.
Urig has one more day of follow-up appointments for recent surgeries before retirement. The Wisdom Teeth Guru said he’s looking forward to time with his two kids and other activities not involving oral surgery.
“So much of a man’s identity is in what he does. I had a hard time letting that go,” Urig said. “When you finish a career as a doctor, it’s not just about you walking away from the work. It’s about all the patients.”