Always be skeptical when the person giving you a diagnosis also directly benefits from giving you a particular diagnosis. This goes for dentists, banking and so much more.
Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
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Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#12What I didn't hear often enough when listening about teeth health is how important is diet and lifestyle for the teeh health. While there was talk about brushing and regular dentist visits, the diet factor was mentioned briefly and half-heartedly that you shouldn't eat sugar. Which nobody listened to anyway (especially as a kid).
How much more is there to it is well explained in Weston A. Price - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects [0]
Just be wary of the foundation, they are quacky often. Just read the book.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544354.Nutrition_and_Phy...
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#13Always get a second professional opinion when costs starts becoming significant
Also get a second professional opinion when the recommended procedure seems too invasive just to "save you costs". Some things do need a more expensive procedure now (e.g. a crown) to save you from much higher costs later (e.g. a dental implant).
And do confront your doctors with one another's opinion. A well meaning doctor can surely stand by their treatment recommendations with arguments and counter-arguments.
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#14All dentists I've tried, found by various methods (including recommedation from a GP I trust) have been dishonest and/or incompetent. A small business, serving laypersons who cannot evaluate the work, is prone to it.
I think the only way is to stick with one dentists, so they see you as a long-term investment.
funfact: Yelp was inspired by the difficulty of finding good dentists.
Now I'm interested in DIY dentistry. Any pointers?
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#15Always be skeptical when the person giving you a diagnosis also directly benefits from giving you a particular diagnosis. This goes for dentists, banking and so much more.
Insurance is a similar one. The one who benefits from not paying is the one who chooses to accept or deny claims.
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#16After experiencing this first hand in the US it was really nice to return back to Europe where in my opinion unnecessary operations and active selling of special cleaning procedures are somewhat more rare. I just had my yearly checkup and the dentist again noticed few small inactive cavities and said we should just monitor them like last year.
Did you read the article? One of two studies they provided was from Europe.
To be precise, from the city of Zurich. Which is indeed a part of Europe, but hardly representative.
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#17> ...whose practice was a convenient 10-minute walk from Mitchell’s home,
Not a good criteria for choosing a dentist. My dentist is a 4 hour drive away. I moved 10 years ago and I prefer the inconvenience over the risk that someone else will be selling me treatments I don't need.
What I have learned over the years is that your teeth are in a constant state of deterioration and will never be perfect. There is always some treatment that can be medically justified but, often, it doesn't need to be done.
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#18After experiencing this first hand in the US it was really nice to return back to Europe where in my opinion unnecessary operations and active selling of special cleaning procedures are somewhat more rare. I just had my yearly checkup and the dentist again noticed few small inactive cavities and said we should just monitor them like last year.
Did you read the article? One of two studies they provided was from Europe.
In my experience we've got these two options here:
- socialized dentistry, where unless you're screaming in pain dentists take two peeks into your mouth and say it's fine and tell you to get out so they can take the next patient in the 200 person line outside (and shill their afternoon private practice to you if they happen to be the more shady type)
- private dentistry, where they'll always find something random that somehow materialized out of thin air since you were there 6 months ago to fix and bill you half your monthly salary for it, despite saying they fixed everything last time
Like, can we please get some fuckin middle ground...
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#19It’s really not fair to take an example of one unethical dentist and sell the story as “the truth about dentistry”.
Long form journalism tends to frame articles around individual narratives. However, the article does have this: Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zur…
Are the dental guidelines any good though in the sense of people actually brushing their teeth and eating properly so as to reverse the damage? Dentists are one of the few professions I've found that will happily chastise their customers, and often rightly so, for failing to adhere to proper dental maintenance. In that case I could understand just going ahead with a filling even if technically and ideally the decay could be reversed, simply because most people probably won't do what's necessary.
Re: Dentistry is less scientific and more gratuitous than people think (2019)
#20In my experience, the majority of dentists are criminal crooks. It‘s generally not nice to trick and steal from people, but dentists are in the unique position of leaving their victims in severe, chronic pain that can only be fixed by other dentists. I myself suffer from varying, chronic pain after a pointless visit where two "tiny" holes were drilled.
The problem is you can only evaluate them over years, which is incredibly sucky. I haven't found a solution to working out which dentists are actually the best yet, which makes me loathe to leave the one I have currently because it has been almost 10 years of good care (I can contrast with the bad ones that had fillings that fell out within 3-4 years etc.)