The first time Abe Abdulwaheed, E97, D02, ventured into political advocacy, he was a little clueless about how the system worked. “I heard they were going to cut Medicaid, so I put on a cheap suit and went up to Beacon Hill,” the seat of the Massachusetts legislature, he recalls.

Abdulwaheed, whose dental practice focuses on patients receiving coverage from MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, appeared without an appointment at the office of a state senator to argue against trimming dental benefits. The vote was being held that same day. And while he did get to make his case to the senator, that wasn’t enough to stop the cuts from going through. “You lost, kiddo,” the senator told him.

That was some 20 years ago. Abdulwaheed—who often goes by a shorter version of his name, Abe Abdul—is now president of the Massachusetts Dental Society (MDS) and he’s become more savvy. During the 2023-2024 legislative session, two measures that he authored, supported by MDS, were signed into law.

“The sharpest instrument that exists to helping the dental profession and to improving access to care for patients is through the legislative process,” he says.

He’s learned the lessons that anyone working for change needs to know about persuading policymakers and the public. “Without advocacy, without the voice of the healthcare providers and the patients, the system doesn’t work,” says Abdulwaheed, who is the cofounder and president of Lux Dental Inc., a practice with three locations in the Boston area.

As a “Double Jumbo” with degrees from the School of Engineering and the School of Dental Medicine, he drew inspiration for the name of the practice from the Tufts motto, Pax et Lux.

As it is, he adds, there is much about the nation’s healthcare system that is faltering. “There are so many aspects of so many issues that get left out,” he says, particularly those surrounding access to care for underserved communities.

“And that’s simply because there isn’t enough advocacy for those issues. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t speak out, you will never get a solution.”

‘Tufts Opened My Eyes’

The legislative victories on Beacon Hill include a law that allows foreign-trained dentists who aren’t yet licensed in the U.S. to work as dental hygienists in Massachusetts, a move designed to address the dire shortage of hygienists that has followed the COVID-19 pandemic; and a law that provides a path for dentists and hygienists who may have been disciplined for mental health or substance-use issues to regain their licenses after treatment, an option already available to physicians and some other health care professionals in Massachusetts.

In 2022, Abdulwaheed was a founding member of a committee that campaigned for a Massachusetts ballot initiative on dental insurance reform. The proposal, which requires dental insurance carriers to spend at least 83% of premium dollars on patient care rather than administrative costs, was approved by a significant majority of voters.

He considers that campaign a pivotal experience. “That really energized me,” he says.

Yet his first lessons in civic engagement came at Tufts. “Tufts opened my eyes,” he says. The School of Dental Medicine is located in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, and Abdulwaheed, who was raised in Hong Kong and is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, observed many of the elderly residents there didn’t seem to realize that using tobacco and hard liquor can cause oral cancer.

He helped establish a program known as the Chinatown Outreach Initiative to increase awareness and education about oral health and conduct cancer screenings. 

Abdulwaheed also participated in the Sharewood Project, a free health care organization founded by students from the School of Medicine, and received an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, which requires recipients to create a community-based project that addresses the social determinants of health.

Establishing Priorities

After that first impromptu appearance at the Statehouse, Abdulwaheed set to work learning the ropes of political advocacy and spent over a decade as the vice chair of the political action committee of the MDS, which represents more than 5,000 dentists throughout Massachusetts. “Legislators deal with so many issues; how do you get to put your issue in front of them and make it a priority?” he asks. “Because if it’s not a priority, it never happens.”

Winning voter approval for the insurance reform question in 2022 was a huge task, he says. Along with orthodontist Mouhab Rizkallah, the author of the referendum, “We organized. We raised millions of dollars. We activated patients. We activated our profession, and we passed the ballot initiative with 73% of the voters approving.

“But we don’t have millions of dollars for every issue,” he says. That’s where lobbying and partnering with legislators comes in. Abdulwaheed worked on both of the recently successful dental-related bills with Massachusetts state Rep. Tackey Chan of Quincy.

“Our healthcare system, and I don’t mean just dentistry—I hate to say it, but it’s broken,” Abdulwaheed says. “We really need to depend on our doctors, our dentists, our hygienists, our nurses, our physician assistants, to advocate for change. One day we will be patients, and we ourselves will also suffer.”