Yay we can't trust dentists anymore. Any other ways we're turning into Russia? Maybe we can privatize everything and let a NASCAR religious corporation teach all K-12.
I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
431–440 of 585 posts
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#432My son when 3 had a fall and a few teeth were bent. Went to our local dentist who mostly had a wait and see opinion. But then calls a day later and says they’ve decided they should just come out. Two top front teeth. Would have no top front teeth for years. I went into engineer mode and while I acknowledged I didn’t have domain expertise, I asked questions and probed the whole situation. Very unsatisfactory, meanderi…
Seems like the dentist could have just searched Google for how bent teeth work.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#433My son when 3 had a fall and a few teeth were bent. Went to our local dentist who mostly had a wait and see opinion. But then calls a day later and says they’ve decided they should just come out. Two top front teeth. Would have no top front teeth for years. I went into engineer mode and while I acknowledged I didn’t have domain expertise, I asked questions and probed the whole situation. Very unsatisfactory, meanderi…
Everyone made fun of people that said, "I did my own research" during Covid, but if you've been failed by the medical system once, you're used to this.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors are technicians. Technicians with a large toolkit, but technicians nonetheless. When you compare their behaviors to IT it all starts making sense.
Add to that the fact that experience matters a lot too. The more variety of cases a doctor sees, the more the chances are that their diagnosis is going to be useful.
Yes and no, the more a doctor sees a particular diagnosis the less likely they are to consider anything else.
Honestly of all the professions that could be enhanced by AI, medicine has the most to gain. An AI can remember a much larger data set than any human and look for correlations among many more dimensions.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from the U.K. to the US and the situation is even worse in the UK. Unless you’re bleeding or have cancer it’s basically “please go away”.
So much he said she said is the UK better than us with healthcare or not?!
It's better in that it's free, but it's been defunded so much that it's beginning to fall apart.
Private healthcare is basically broken out the gate, public healthcare can be much better but it still does need to be funded.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I’m not a conspiracy nut. I believe in listening to experts (but ultimately making an informed decision). I believe in modern medicine. But that experience shook me and forever changed my trust in the dental industry. Ask anybody who’s experienced a “chronic” illness about the “experts” and they’ll tell you a tale or two. The experts are great until they have a case that is unusual. The don’t have the time or know…
House, MD was a fictional show on how the medical system is supposed to work, with abundant detective work and testing of hypotheses and pursuing a solution until one is found. On the other hand, from the administrator's perspective: "Your team of four people treat about one patient a week, why am I paying your salaries again?" In our universe, I probably won't receive that much medical care in my lifetime.
Yeah. There's a finite amount of resources and a literally never ending avalanche of patients. At some point they're going to have to make a cold calculation.
I don't really know how it works in the US but here in Brazil it's actually pretty easy to order laboratory tests and imaging studies. There's taxpayer funded public health care but it can't handle the demands of the entire population so people would rather pay for the ultrasound or CT scan than wait two years for the government to provide it. An ultrasound costs about $30, an MRI costs about $150 and the price of a CT scan is somewhere between those two.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#437My son when 3 had a fall and a few teeth were bent. Went to our local dentist who mostly had a wait and see opinion. But then calls a day later and says they’ve decided they should just come out. Two top front teeth. Would have no top front teeth for years. I went into engineer mode and while I acknowledged I didn’t have domain expertise, I asked questions and probed the whole situation. Very unsatisfactory, meanderi…
I was probably four when I fell against the sandbox in the playground and knocked one of my top front teeth right out. I carried it inside to the teacher, who had me bite on a paper towel to stop the bleeding and sent me home with the tooth wrapped in another paper towel in my pocket.
About a week later I fell against a large wooden block in the classroom and knocked the other top front tooth clean out.
I went for something over a year without top front teeth, but my adult teeth came in early, so it wasn't 2 or 3 years like it might have been.
This was a long time ago, and I still have both the adult teeth, although one of them died when I got hit in the face with a football in the third grade.
All to say that n=1 but it likely wouldn't have been the worst thing if the two teeth had come out.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Not OP, but if you have nothing to contribute but vitriol, maybe do not comment, and move on.
I have nothing but vitriol to comment towards people that perform copy pastas of anti-science, anti-intellectual, conspiracy theorist propaganda.
Similarly, I will certainly and absolutely NOT stop calling out conspiracy theorist propaganda just because conspiracy nuts don’t like it.
If you don’t like being called out for posting conspiracy propaganda, don’t post it, and don’t defend it.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#439At the very end of the article: "This article originally ran in the February 1997 issue of Reader’s Digest." Surely this should be noted in the HN title?
Hah, that explains why all the quoted prices seem low compared to what they are now.
Yeah, I read through this thinking "what the heck!" regarding the low prices.
Re: I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
#440I've posted this before, but I went to a new dentist one time and though I'd never had a cavity, the new dentist said I had nine, some of which were pretty bad and needed immediate treatment lest they require a root canal. I didn't have any money or dental insurance at the time, so I didn't go back and just worried about it a lot for a while. That was twenty-five years ago. Haven't been to a dentist since. My teeth a…
Same thing. I am always good with flossing twice a day, brushing teeth twice a day (in fact, I spend ~10 mins brushing teeth gently and carefully every day). But the dentist in SF I visited 10 years ago "saw" 4 cavities and he showed me the X-rays, which I didn't know better I should have looked at carefully. But I got 4 fillings. Credit to him, those fillings never had any issue for the last 10+ years. But I went to…
So you had fillings which lasted 10 years which were replaced for reasonable cost. The dentist, an expert at reading radiographs, could see something that you couldn’t. What exactly were you expecting here?