A Winding Path to Dentistry: Rhoney Stanley '80, MPH '95

To say that the path that Rhoney Gissen Stanley DDS ’80, MPH ’94, took on her way to becoming a holistic orthodontist was circuitous would be an understatement.

Rhoney grew up the daughter of a dentist in Mount Vernon, NY and attended Mount Holyoke, before transferring to University of California – Berkeley. It was there, at the epicenter of a burgeoning counterculture, that she met Owsley Stanley, the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and underground chemist who became well-known for manufacturing LSD in a basement lab in a San Francisco suburb when the drug was still legal. Through Owsley, she also met virtually all of the musicians and artists who were a part of the San Francisco scene.

Rhoney, who also served as secretary for the Grateful Dead, typing their correspondence and their lyrics, became an assistant in the underground lab. “I weighed and measured the chemicals,” she recalls. She says that Owsley, who was also known as Bear, insisted that, in order to work in his lab, she take Organic Chemistry.

“When he thought I knew enough, he told me to drop out and we started working,” she says.

In 1970, 19 members of the Grateful Dead and the band’s stage crew, Owsley among them, were arrested. While Owsley was in prison, Rhoney gave birth to their son, Starfinder and made the decision to return to the east coast and apply to dental school. “My good friend Richard Alpert [later known as Baba Ram Dass, the author of the influential Be Here Now, which helped to popularize eastern spirituality and philosophy] told me that I needed to realize that the child would be my responsibility and that I shouldn’t look to others,” she recalls.

“I had gone back to school to take all the premed courses,” she says. “I was commuting there with a woman who was going to apply to dental school. That’s where I got the notion. When you see the light, you follow it.”

At what was then known as Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery, Rhoney struggled with both how few women there were in her class and on the faculty – she remembers how grateful she was for the guidance she received from Dr. Letty Moss-Salentijn -- and with the work itself.

“Dentistry was difficult for me,” she says. “It’s very three dimensional and mechanical. I had to teach myself that. It didn’t come naturally to me.”

Because there were so few women in her class and because working mothers were expected to minimize the impact that children might have on their professional lives, Rhoney says that she didn’t feel supported. It wasn’t until she attended a class reunion many years later that a few of the other women in her class, now working mothers themselves, acknowledged the challenge that she faced. “They said, ‘we didn’t realize at the time how difficult it must have been to go to dental school while taking care of a child.’”

After graduation, Rhoney practiced in the Bronx with her father. She also became active in a number of professional organizations, serving as the editor of the newsletters of both the American Association of Women Dentists and the Holistic Dental Association. In order to incorporate both eastern and western influences in her practice, she became certified by the NY School of Acupuncture for Physicians and Dentists. “Three times per year I meet with dentists from all parts of the US to study with an osteopath and to learn techniques to balance our patients through hands-on table training with each other,” she says.

Rhoney is now semi-retired and a grandmother. She lives in northern California in order to be close to her son, now a veterinarian and veterinary acupuncturist. He also heads the Owsley Stanley Foundation, which preserves and releases Owsley’s “sonic journals,” 1,300 live concert soundboard recordings from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s of artists including Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and more than 80 others.