• 
• 

Not golf. Not travel. Not rest. Not even volunteer work. Although he spent a short stint as an unpaid advocate for foster children, the families' problems were "really beyond the scope of my education".

What he knew - and loved - was dentistry.

So three years ago, Kurtzman outfitted his ageing Nissan Pathfinder with the latest in portable dental technology and began treating frail, elderly patients and dementia sufferers in the familiar confines of their nursing home rooms.

All of which, at age 74, makes him a trailblazer - in the large and growing population of under-served elderly patients he treats and in the way he's living his own life.

"As my practice and I got older, my patients got older," Kurtzman said. "I began to notice a lot of patients coming to the office who shouldn't have. By the time they got there they were exhausted, and whoever brought them was annoyed."

And then there were elderly women and men who couldn't even make it to a dental office for care. A recent survey of older Los Angeles County residents revealed that nearly a third hadn't had a dental exam in the past three years, largely because of cost and transportation problems.

"I saw this unmet need," Kurtzman said, "and it ate at me."

The bearded travelling dentist, who spends three days a week on the road in Los Angeles County, also is part of a new wave of "retirees" searching for meaning through so-called encore careers.

In recent years, the high cost of living and the lack of savings have translated into more Americans saying they will need to work beyond the average retirement age of 63.

But in a new national survey released Wednesday, nearly 10 per cent of baby boomers polled said they are currently pursuing work that matters in the second half of life, work that they want to do and that society needs doing.

And half of those surveyed who are not currently involved in late-career jobs like teaching, public service, health care and work in non-profit organisations said they are interested in making such a change.

"What's at work here is the intersection of several powerful forces," said Marc Freedman, chief executive of Civic Ventures, the San Francisco-based non-profit that teamed up with the MetLife Foundation to survey 1,063 men and women from 44 to 70.

"There is the necessity of longer working lives to continue drawing an income and getting health benefits," he said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. "And the search for meaning. Purpose is as important as income."

According to the survey, those involved in service-oriented second careers trend toward the higher end of the socio-economic scale and are more likely to be college graduates. They value flexibility, and three-quarters said they are earning sufficient income and benefits.

Wednesday was a typical day for Kurtzman: a 6am workout at the YMCA, breakfast with friends and then off to west Los Angeles to smooth off a broken front tooth in an Alzheimer's patient he's never treated before.

Then he headed to the San Fernando Valley to examine and clean the teeth of another Alzheimer's patient he's seen regularly for several years. After that, it was a Santa Monica nursing home where he took impressions and prepared several teeth for a patient who needed a new bridge.

He ended up back in west Los Angeles at a board and care home for his most challenging patient of the day, a physically disabled woman who needed an abscessed tooth pulled but could not sit up without difficulty.

The solution: do the dental work in her own bed.