Dr. Jack Haden can be considered a friend, mentor, sage educational instructor, and “father figure” to many who know him. Jack Haden, Brendan Stack, and Harold Gelb are genuine pioneers in the diagnosis and treatment of temporomandibular disorders (TMD). Each of these men is an icon in the field of dentistry, and Jack is solidly one of that trilogy.
Jack was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1932. During the depression years, his family lived, at times, in a dirt-floor shack in the Ozark Mountains. In 1942, his family moved to Kansas City, Kansas. He attended Prescott School, which was a city dumping place for nonperforming students----A VERY TOUGH PLACE.
He learned tennis in the city park and found that it was an avenue for a better life. In high school, he was captain of the tennis team and a state finalist. He is still a tennis champion, and at age 77, he continues to excel at a high level of tennis competition. He is an active golfer and still plays quite well with a great deal of enjoyment and enthusiasm. He was the sports editor of his high school newspaper, which oddly enough was named “The Pantograph.”
After completing pre-med and pre-dental school studies, Jack was admitted to an osteopathic school but was denied entrance to dental school. He was told that he had applied too late and that there were almost 1000 applicants at that time due to the G.I. Bill being offered to the Veterans of the Korean War. At the last minute, the dental school notified him that he had been accepted. Little did we know that the course of dentistry was changed on that day.
After graduation from dental school, he served an internship at Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. He served in the United States Army until 1964 and then established his dental practice in Kansas City. Over his career, he has maintained a fantastic memory for the details of anything that he has read, seen, or done in dentistry. His uniqueness and inquisitiveness allow him to improve on what he has learned. Even though he is now retired, he has not lost his enthusiasm for dentistry.
In 1985, he established a teaching center right next to his office and has trained over 3500 dentists there. Dr. Haden has lectured extensively worldwide and has been widely published. He was a founding board member of the Society of Occlusal Studies and a founding member of the American Academy of Craniofacial Pain (AACP) and is a past president of the Academy. The Haden-Stack Award was established by the AACP in honor of Dr. Jack Haden and Dr. Brendan Stack. The award is given annually to a member who has contributed to the professional advancement of TMD and the AACP.
Dr. Haden readily acknowledges that a great measure of his success can be attributed to his wife, Christine Diane Haden.
The following is a quote from Dr. Haden:
There was a problem. Every existing articular system used a system that found centric [relation] by posturizing the mandible to its further most, upper most position. No telling how many patients I pushed off of their disks. Then the great awakening-I went to Dr. Bill Farrar's office in Montgomery, Alabama. I found out the jaw had a disk that was supposed to stay between the head of the condyle and the fossa. Gracious me…I had a whole new way of treating patients and a new approach in doing dentistry in general. What a great man. What a genius to be the first person in history to discover how the human jaw functions. The small editorial that I wrote in CRANIO (October, 2008, Vol. 26, No. 4) could never start to extol all of his contributions to make the human race more pain free.
I have given you only a small glimpse of Dr. Jack Haden, the person and the professional. His colleagues owe him a sincere debt of gratitude for his numerous contributions to the profession of dentistry.
Jack Fong, D.D.S.
Amarillo, Texas
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