Dr. Heba Saleh

Some dentists are drawn to a single corner of the field; Dr. Heba Saleh chose the whole map. A graduate of the University of Detroit Mercy, she practises comprehensive general dentistry at Midland Dental Center — the checkups, cleanings, fillings, and steady maintenance that quietly determine how healthy a mouth stays over a lifetime. It is unglamorous work by some measures and, to her mind, the most consequential kind, because most dental problems are small before they are big, and the dentist who sees you regularly is the one positioned to catch them.

Her defining habit is translation. Dental findings tend to arrive wrapped in jargon and shadowy X-ray images, and she refuses to let either stand between a patient and their own information. At Midland Dental Center that often means turning a screen around: pointing at the exact spot on an image, naming what it is in ordinary words, and setting out the choices — including the choice to wait — before anything is scheduled. Patients describe leaving her appointments able to explain their own situation to a spouse over dinner, which is precisely the outcome she is after.

That combination of breadth and clarity makes her a natural first point of contact for families joining the practice. She monitors gums, watches old fillings age, and tracks slow changes visit to visit, using the clinic's state-of-the-art equipment to see what a mirror alone cannot. When something surfaces that suits a colleague's interests — a root canal, a complicated extraction, an orthodontic question — she hands it across the hall rather than across town, and stays involved as your ongoing dentist while that piece of care is completed.

She is particularly gentle with patients who have stayed away for years. Midland Dental Center's guiding principle — treat each patient as we would want to be treated — rules out lectures about lost time; what you get instead is a calm inventory of where things stand and a short list of what actually matters first. With a multilingual team, weekend availability, and a location at Midland and Eglinton that most of Scarborough can reach easily, the practical barriers to coming back are lower than people expect. Her job, as she sees it, is to remove the emotional ones.