I can say why I’m not exactly fond of my dentist: I’m missing a molar I don’t need, my dentist keeps on trying to get me to spend over a thousand euros on an implant he can put in. Every visit he tries to sell me this useless implant. Every visit I say, “no thank you.” This has been going on for five years. It gets old. Other than that, he’s great at his job so I don’t know. I don’t consider him to be of the “bad rep” variety. A failed salesperson? Perhaps.
He likely does not recall every time he has mentioned this to you.
My mother in law was an office manager at a dentist. Dentists have sales quotas and have bonuses to everyone in the office for upselling.
You go in to a medical professional for health care and advice and they try and sell to you.
Ya, going to the dentist can feel like seeing a car mechanic. You come in for one thing and then they try to sell you tons of other stuff that you are not even sure you need. It can feel really scummy. There are good ones but just like car mechanics they usually own their own business. If you go to the jiffy lube of dentists they will try to sell you other shit and may make the issue you went in for worse.
You go in to a medical professional for health care and advice and they try and sell to you.
You obviously were not at my last ED visit.
I’d say it’s the experience of going to a dentist which has the reputation, not the dentists themselves. My dentist is great. I hate seeing him. Even when it’s just a checkup and clean, he puts a drill in my mouth. I’m a human being, not an ore vein.
Yep. My dentists office has the greatest people and the best service of any business I can think of. They’ve never done me wrong in any way. And I still hate going there. It’s the fucking teeth scraper. I can’t handle the fucking pick work.
I recommend reading this article “I Went to 50 Different Dentists and Almost All of Them Gave Me a Different Diagnosis”:
Went to a new dentist once and transferred my X-rays from my previous dentist. He told me I had 6 cavities.
Wow, don’t you think my previous dentist would’ve told me I had 6 cavities if I really did when he took the X-ray?
Went to another dentist for second opinion and never heard anything about 6 cavities again.
I’ve now moved on to another dentist and still nothing about 6 cavities.
However, I notice all dentists are always looking to add on extra treatments for deep cleaning or extra fluoride or whatever. It’s all about money.
You can’t trust dentists because they’re all conflicted by the business component of their work. This makes many of them scammers willing to damage your teeth to make a buck. You gotta look out for yourself, get second and third opinions and don’t be afraid to drop someone.
I agree, but now let’s look at why. Dental insurance sucks, so they can’t get paid enough to make them not need to invent work. Sure some are just sleaze, but that is true in any profession.
This is my experience also. Dentists are basically out to sell you stuff.
The only times I’ve had cavities in my life were the first couple visits to a new dentist.
There is a degree of subjective judgement involved in when a cavity gets bad enough to need a filling, but yeah, that room for judgement is also room for unscrupulous dentists to exploit patients for maximum payout.
Do they? Well most people dislike dentists because it’s very uncomfortable to have someone messing about in your mouth, and many things dentists do (cleanings, some surgeries) hurt or leave you uncomfortable for a long time after, and most people think of it as mostly aesthetic. Compared to say, a surgeon that might be similar but is saving your life, or a family medicine doc that at most puts a piece of wood on your tongue.
Also, dentists go to dentist school, not med school (in most countries at least). Dent is easier to get into, and is usually a shorter time to get your degree. Some people think this devalues dentistry, and say dentists aren’t as good as “regular” doctors because of that. It’s not valid, dentists are very good at what they do, so don’t stress it.
Which is so silly when you think about it: “this tire expert isn’t a REAL mechanic”. Okay…and?? We need both.
i bet doctors would have a bad rep if you had to have a prostate exam/pap smear every 6 months.
Real doctors go to real medical school. They learn tons of biology, pharmacology, anatomy.
Dental school deals with one body part and only a small subset of health problems.
Because doctors hundreds of years ago decided dentistry was quack science and not worthy of being in their ranks. That continues today with dental school and insurance often being separate
The SOUNDS!
I think by far that is one of the biggest issue that people have.
Being so up close and personal doesn’t help either. They have to violate your personal space more than regular doctors typically have to. Like literally the entire time you are there, they have to be up inside you.Oh yeah, and did I mention the SOUNDS?!
At least in Germany, applied dentistry was seen as of even lower rank than surgery, something that did not have to do with professional medicine at all (the vocation of the university-educated medicus). Dentistry was a crude affair practiced by barber-dentists or other non-surgeons, sometimes in public bathhouses (places often associacted with prostitution and their bathmasters ignoble company, legally barred from forming or entering guilds), sometimes in broad public on the marketplace. Dentists were traveling people and quacks, those who break teeth (Zahnbrecher), often failing at proper extraction in the first place. All those prejudices took a long time, real progress in the field (anesthesia, pedal-powered mechanical drills and other tools, hygenic measures) and lots of organized lobbying to dispel. I’m sure the reputation of dentistry in other European countries must have been similiar. Some of that prejudice might have carried over to the new world, too ?
I’m now imagining a grown man with a child’s tricycle hooked up to a drill, pedalling his heart out and trying to keep his arm still enough to get it in a patient’s mouth.
This reminds me of a joke: What do you call a person who fails medical school?
A dentist.
