(I am fortunate in that I’ve always had dental insurance when I needed it, and I don’t think I’ve ever had dental work done that I didn’t need. Curiously enough, the dentist we had when we were kids wanted to do a fluoride treatment, but my mother wasn’t having it – not because of the cost, but because she didn’t think it was a good thing, in the same way she didn’t think it was good to put fluoride in drinking water. The city I live in still doesn’t put fluoride in the drinking water due to popular opinion.)
I was shocked by US dentists’ aggressive attempts to sell me tooth-whitening services, often during a medical exam, blending a sales-pitch with the medical advice they were giving me
I’ve fired dentists for doing this to me.
I want my teeth functional and pain-free, full stop.
My two most recent former dentists are my former dentists because they strongly recommended caps for some pain I was getting in the biting surfaces of my molars, which have heavy enamel decay but are healthy otherwise. My new dentist painted some of the stuff they put over cavities on the teeth instead and I’ve been pain-free ever since.
Ah dentists. When I was a kid in the 70s, I went to one and we found out – in spite of no problems all the years up to that point – I had six “bad” cavities. My parents trusted him, and I got them filled.
Those are the only teeth I’ve had problems with since*. One of them is now gone after a comedy of bullshit that went “Filling > Crack > Crown > Cracked Crown > New Crown > Infection > Root Canal Through New Crown > Infection from Root Canal > Extraction”
They then strongly recommended either a bridge, which would fuck up the two teeth around the missing one, or an implant (“The cost of which was going to double the following year, so I needed to hurry”). I opted instead to get off the merry-go-round of madness and for now to go with neither. Will I regret it? Probably.
*If you discount the four wisdom teeth I had removed when I was 16. They said from the xrays they were going to grow in sideways and mess up the rest of my teeth. Even though it was only two of them, they recommended taking out all of them at once. So we did. One of them hadn’t formed roots yet, so it was spinning in the socket as they tried to get a grip on it. It was hellacious. They were bastards and I never went back to them.
I think a lot about the flyer I once saw posted in one of the campus student centers at the university I attended (one with a highly prestigious medical school and therefore a LOT of naively cutthroat pre-med undergrads): “Pre-med too hard? Switch to pre-dental!”
(I went back to my dentist after a year without insurance absolutely 100% sure I had a host of new cavities and/or gingivitis because of the sensitivity I was having… he told me I was brushing too hard and to focus on being more gentle, and if it still hurt in six months we’d look into alternate solutions. A bit over a month later, my mouth is pretty well back to normal. Apparently you’re not supposed to be wearing out a toothbrush every three months?)
After a few years of not having insurance I got it again and went to see a dentist. He told me I needed fillings - a lot of them - and I guess I believed him. I was probably 19 or 20. He said they were super urgent and set about doing them. After a few sessions my insurance ran out and then he told me I could come back and get the rest next year. All of a sudden, not so urgent. How about that.
From February 1999 – Reader’s Digest Cover Story “How Dentists Rip Us Off” – the best article ever written on this topic. Was going to provide a link – there used to be many – but someone has paid google to remove all traces of it. An undercover reporter describes his experiences traveling the country visiting 50 different cities and dentists randomly selected from the phone book. This after a complete dental exam at a well known University dental school. He has no real dental issues. He informs the dentist that he’s new in town and his employer provides direct reimbursement full dental coverage. He gets estimates for 'needed" work from $1600 to $20,000 (in New York City). Here’s a link that might work:https://www.scribd.com/document/301575142/how-dentist-rip-us-off
Funny you should mention that.
When I was a kid and had braces, they pulled the top two back molars and the wisdom teeth behind came in like normal teeth.
They did not pull any bottom teeth and those wisdom teeth stayed in my jaw. Until last year.
I had to see a specialist for something and he showed me the full X-ray of my lower jaw. The one on the right had a low level infection next to it and should have come out a long time ago - I’m in my early 50’s - so we agreed on having that one done. The procedure itself was fine as I was under general anesthesia. Of course, insurance wouldn’t pay for that part, but I happily coughed up the dough to not be awake. And my wife took a post-op photo of me looking extra stoned.
What ticked me off was that my regular dentist didn’t catch it.
I’m glad you were able to get that troublesome one out - if I were you, make sure you mention to your dentist you want them to make sure to watch that other one carefully.
I went to Bangkok last Christmas and made an appointment at a private dental clinic with the mandate to “fix anything that needs fixing and repair anything that is going to give me problems in the future”. Nine visits in a twelve-day stay and at a cost of about $2500 USD, everything is done. Last two wisdom teeth pulled, two crowns, and numerous other little things done. All of my dentists’s were western trained, as well as top graduates of the best Thailand schools. Almost no waiting for an appointment. The only funny thing about it was that the female dentist was too tiny and weak to pull my wisdom teeth so they called in another specialist, a guy with big muscles. He popped them out no problem. I had a specialist for every different procedure.
If you need dental work done, fly to Asia. You get a nice holiday out of it and it will still be cheaper than getting it done in the West, and probably better quality as well, since there is lots of competition.
I love my dentist and her assistants, no problem. But I remember once asking my regular dental assistant a question:
“If money were not an object, would gold be a superior to ceramic as a filling material?”
The assistant – who was a seasoned vet, and a smart cookie, with whom I had good rapport – seemed unable to grasp what I was asking, although I asked several times.
She didn’t outright say “Why in the world would you do that, or even want to do that?”, but neither did she answer my question. Not that she dodged my question, exactly, although there was an element of dodging. It was more like my question was incomprehensible to her, spoken in a language she didn’t know, and didn’t want to know or think about knowing. (She repeatedly used the word “cosmetic” in the manner of a talisman.)
I don’t recall that I got an answer to my question.
Personally, I think gold teeth look cool, and if it’s the superior material, and I have to have another dental filling, then I want gold.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: dentistry is barbaric. It’s not like I’ve had major problems or anything - at 46, I’ve had three teeth (one in lower front when I was a kid and two wisdom) pulled out and one filling - I just find the idea of removing/cleaning/fixing bony protusions disgusting. I can better understand wanting to be a proctologist than a dentist. And although dentistry is expensive in Australia, because it’s not covered by Medicare, it’s not US-style expensive either. So I unquestioningly believe that many patients are being over-serviced!
The biggest recurring dental scam - teeth cleaning. Where’s the evidence that it does anything but benefit a dentist’s bottom line? Where’s the science? http://freakonomics.com/2008/03/11/is-tooth-cleaning-a-scam/
I can’t count the number of people I know who religiously went for their cleanings who eventually ended up with periodontal pockets and gum disease! Of course that leads to the “neccessity” for “deep cleanings.” All part of the plan! I once saw an ad for dental hygienist training that led to state certification --“No high school diploma necessary.” OK - Turn your mouth over to a teenage high school drop out with a metal pick and let her turn your gums to hamburger. Great idea. I haven’t had a cleaning in 25 years – get occasional exams by working professors at a local University dental school. I always ask this way – “its been a couple months since my last cleaning – how’s everything look? Was never told – " you’re really overdue!” Cleanings are a great idea for people in nursing homes and dementia patients – and for those in the general population who crave the phony sincerity of dental office employees. I had a relative who worked as a hygienist for a few years – she said they were never evaluated by how well they cleaned teeth – but how often they got their patients to return – a gold star if they came back 4X a year!
A few years ago I had root canal that was covered with a filling. It was way in the back of mouth, not visible, so I didn’t really care about appearance. More recently, my dentist recommended replacing it with a crown, because she was afraid the filling would not be permanent. The actual procedure wasn’t that terrible. And the interesting part was that the crown was essentially 3D printed in the office while I waited. The back of my mouth was scanned, a crown was generated to fit, then it was placed.
This reminds me of my childhood dentist, who kept pointing out multiple shadows on the x-rays of my teeth. We’d all look, but they were potential problems only he could see. He finally drilled and filled two molars. Every dentist I’ve seen since then never saw what he did, and those were the last “cavities” I ever had. We used to joke that we probably helped put his kids through school.
