PG dental community mourning loss of pioneer

The BC Government paid for a mobile trailer and had Lo travel to Mackenzie to treat patients because there weren’t any dentists in the community.

After finishing that adventure, Lo returned to Prince George to start his own practice, later on in the early 1970’s founding the Lakewood Dental Group, which still exists today approaching its 50th anniversary.

Lo saw the need for more dentists in the city and the region and started to recruit more to come to the north, which was not easy to do at the time.

Lo dealt with the same challenge which still exists in 2021, trying to attract professionals to Northern BC.

Dr. William Vansickle who goes Bill, was recruited when Lakewood Dental was in its early days to try and help with the massive waiting list of patients.

“I came to Prince George in 1976, and back then there was about 4,000 people on the waiting list to get dental care, we’re talking pages and pages of names and phone numbers,” says Vansickle.

And that he did, along with Vansickle, Lo helped grow the number of dentists in the region, and the number of specialists.

“Frank was a great guy, and a fun guy to work with,” says Vansickle. “Frank was all about having fun, I just remember always giggling from his jokes.”

Lo did not start off as an orthodontist, instead colleague and son-in-law Dr. Robert Elliott says he offered for any of the dentists in the late 1970’s at Lakewood to become the facility’s ortho specialist.

“Nobody wanted to give up their lives and go back to school to specialize,” says Elliott. “So what did Frank do? He decided to go himself.”

Frank Lo was the oldest student in the ortho program at Western University in London, ON. He moved his family across the country while he did school to specialize before once again returning to BC’s Northern Capital.

When he returned to the city in 1986, he became one of the first orthodontists in the city, founding what is known today as Lo and Elliott Orthodontics. Only adding Elliott to the name when Dr. Robert Elliott joined in 1997.

Now, his legacy lives on with talented dental specialists Frank Lo helped draw to the city and the Lakewood Dental Group like Dr. Kerim Ozcan and Dr. Heinrich Tillmanns.

Lo and Elliott is another one of those legacies now onto their third generation of patients, some first seen by Dr. Frank Lo now being seen his by daughter Dr. Francine Lo and her husband Robert.

And his impact on the city doesn’t end there, Lo was very community minded and gave generously to help those who couldn’t afford dental work, and causes in the city like the construction of the Northern BC YMCA, and helped create the CNC Dental Hygiene Program.

“Frank wanted those who worked in the north, to be trained in the north,” says Elliott.

And he did it all while being a first-generation Canadian who exemplifies what it means to truly be a Canadian.

Dr. Frank Lo was the only one of eight children to make the trip to the great white north from Hong Kong, and according to his son-in-law did whatever it would take to be a true Canadian.

Frank started as one of few, helping give better access to those in Prince George to dental care. What was once 13 dentists at the Lakewood Dental Group in the 1970’s is now more than 80 in 2021.

by Caden Fanshaw

PG dental community mourning loss of pioneer

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