Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 350 posts

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#311

Post by esperent »

evilduck wrote: post #223
cj wrote: post #18

This reminds me of when I went to a dentist in SF who told me I needed to have my wisdom teeth out. I did the initial exam, and then hesitated when it came to booking the procedure. The dentist noticed my hesitation, and said something along the lines of "And after the surgery, don't forget we'll also prescribe really great pain medication!" 10 years later my new dentist says the wisdom teeth are fine and to leave th…

Starting from my mid teens, I've had around a half dozen dentists tell me that I should get my wisdom teeth removed without me reporting any problems or having any negative side effects from them. I've declined to have them removed every time and I'm still sporting four healthy wisdom teeth into my 40's which now is decades of dentists negligently telling me to get them pulled for their own profit. My family practice…

I'm in the same position, although luckily it was only two dentists who recommended that before I found a third who said "wait and see". I stayed with her through my twenties until I moved away, and now at 40 I still have all four wisdom teeth and never had any issues with them.

However, to be fair to the previous dentists, I was doing this through the Irish free dental program and they wouldn't have made that much money. I think there's very high chance of wisdom teeth going wrong and many of them default to removing them to be safe. That may something wrong with modern dentistry - perhaps dentists in twenty years will look at it as an archaic practice - but that doesn't necessarily make it a scam.

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#312

Post by lotsoweiners »

ryandrake wrote: post #235
EasyMark wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left a dentist over this "you need root planing!" whaaaaatt?? I brush my teeth 2 times a day with an electric tooth brush and they are squeaky clean. I said to schedule me for it "we can get you in today!" me: "i gotta see a man about a dog" . I go to a new dentist and say nothing, he takes me in, does the xray, etc for new patient. Says my teeth and gums look great, no cavities. Guess who I cancelled on the next day…

The real question here is: How did you manage to get a new patient appointment with the second dentist so quickly? New Patient appointments where I live (rural CA) are at least a 3 month wait.

At my suburban home in the Phoenix area I could probably walk out to the Main Street closest to me, throw rocks and hit 10 different dental offices. There is no shortage in suburban neighborhoods.

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#313

Post by rustcleaner »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #257
nextworddev wrote: post #9

Dental profession has a rampant fraud problem in general. Personally know many dentists who scare people to upsell unnecessary procedures, extractions etc.

Lock them up. Medical fraud of all types should be punished with extreme prejudice.

Perfect! Then their prison jobs could be to provide that dental care to impoverished state health program patients! (Or else they get beat with a SHU.)

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#314

Post by heavensteeth »

diogenescynic wrote: post #243
burningChrome wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> He billed my insurance just under $300 for an exam that took under 5 minutes. This is really common in health care. I injured my shoulder during hockey and went to the ER. The ER nurse told me to go to a specialty clinic that had offices all over town. Told me to bring a book since they do walk ins and it will be a while before I was seen. Brought a book and checked in. Three hours later, they took me back. I wait…

>This is really common in health care. I want to clarify it's only common is US healthcare. We're rally the only country in the world paying exorbitant prices AND getting low quality care. For instance, I once hit my head on a train while in France and had to get stitches. I was rushed to the emergency room in an ambulance, 2 nurses and a doctor immediately started helping clean the wound and stitching it up. I was i…

Can you really extrapolate those two experiences across every other country in the world?

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#315

Post by rustcleaner »

floren wrote: post #168

A few years back, shortly after moving to a new town, I went to a dentist for a cleaning & check. She told me I'd need to replace my crown -- but luckily, the hygienist chimed in, they had just bought a brand-new state-of-the-art crown-making machine so they could do it right there the same day! Then, adjusting her Invisalign-branded face shield, the dentist asked me if I'd ever considered Invisalign. I finished the…

No shit: It's been fourteen years for me since last dentist I went to, which was for swelling on the inside-side gum of my bottom-right wisdom tooth plus a little tiny sore/abcess in the gum around 2-3 teeth forward of it and about a cm down from the gum line (inside), with something feeling very hard right at the bottom of the abcess with my fingernail. I go to two offices which both fail to locate anything in my mouth. Both shill wisdom tooth extraction (I still have all), and I refuse. At home I begin to irrigate between gumline and wisdom tooth with mouthwash using a 26-ga syringe (originally pushed test cyp) until swelling is gone, and over that period that hard spot I thought was my exposed jawbone at the bottom of the abcess began extending out a bit until I managed to grasp it with a fingernail and pulled it out: turned out to be a half-cm section of jawbone which was on the inside wall of the wisdom tooth, which must have cracked off and migrated a few teeth over, to slowly pierce out the gum. I still have that bone in a baggie, a little divot on the gum just below the gum-line of my back-right wisdom tooth where that piece of bone used to be under the gum, and all four wisdom teeth!

No tooth pain, no (apparent) cavities or rot, they are yellow/stained because coffee and cigars, I hardly brush (I mean hardly) and probably floss & mouthwash 10x as often as brushing, and even that is very irregular (few times/week). I hardly consume sugar and watch carbs like it's slow-kill cumulative poison. I have a mouth built by the gods!

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#316

Post by thimabi »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #118
thimabi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most certainly not. Software rewrites usually are well-intentioned and might have benefits. Dental replacements like these are certainly not well-intentioned and only the dentist benefits from them.

Unnecessary rewrites are a way for engineers to benefit themselves (more fun than maintaining existing stable technology, updating resume with new technology) and not the company. It's not that all rewrites are this way, or that all dentists are corrupt. But both patterns exist.

You make a good point. Though I believe much of the “rewrite it in Rust” hype is about actually improving the security and/or performance of the software being rewritten.

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#318

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

thimabi wrote: post #316
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unnecessary rewrites are a way for engineers to benefit themselves (more fun than maintaining existing stable technology, updating resume with new technology) and not the company. It's not that all rewrites are this way, or that all dentists are corrupt. But both patterns exist.

You make a good point. Though I believe much of the “rewrite it in Rust” hype is about actually improving the security and/or performance of the software being rewritten.

That's the thing, there's always a justification if you want to find one. I don't think most engineers do it maliciously, they talk up whatever risks and benefits are in vogue on blogs or whatever and believe it sincerely enough themselves without ever seriously and objectively weighing the need for it.

Re: A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones

#320

Post by NikkiA »

josefresco wrote: post #176
cj wrote: post #18

This reminds me of when I went to a dentist in SF who told me I needed to have my wisdom teeth out. I did the initial exam, and then hesitated when it came to booking the procedure. The dentist noticed my hesitation, and said something along the lines of "And after the surgery, don't forget we'll also prescribe really great pain medication!" 10 years later my new dentist says the wisdom teeth are fine and to leave th…

> 10 years later my new dentist says the wisdom teeth You got lucky. Pretty much every wisdom tooth consultation goes like this "they might grow in ok, but they might not and that will cause other issues".

I'm 53 and one of them is sideways and has been sideways for 30-odd years, it still doesn't hurt and until it does it can stay where it is, only the teeth dentists have worked on have problems.

If it suddenly becomes a problem 10 years from now I'll be really surprised.

Post reply on HN