Comment on Why exactly are nursing aids paid so poorly?
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoThinking of going abroad for dental implants. An oral surgeon said it used to be an issue with poor-quality knock off parts, but that the manufacturing has gotten really good.
Countries keep cost low by subsidizing doctors’ education, by the way, which is even more expensive for them when those doctors cash out to come to the US where doctors graduate with a debt of $250,000 from schools where graduation class size hasn’t changed in decades.
By the by, intensive and indiscrimnate care by specialists–where doctors want to end up instead of low-paid primary care–is definitely more expensive without necessarily leading to better outcomes.
It needs to be more than education. For instance, I know a county that subsidizes nursing school. But the nurses are paid a terrible salary and many leave to work in higher paying countries.
If they would just pay their nurses more, they wouldn’t need to subsidize the education and maybe skilled people would stay.
I did mention brain drain in my comment. The US is giving up a huge economic advantage being hostile to immigration. Raising & educating children is hugely expensive and having young educated people come to work a life time (and have more children) is an enormous boon.
Consider Los Algodones Mexico directly across the border from Yuma, Arizona. It’s been known as the ‘Dental Capital of the World’ due to the number of Dentists practices catering to American snowbirds.
Thinking of going abroad for dental implants.
Just don’t go to Turkey to hit up an Instagram dentist. That stuff is terrifying. <_<
Do wake up in a bathtub filled with ice and stitches over where a kidney used to be?
LOL almost. They basically take out all your teeth and replace them with synthetics, I guess?
I’m sure there’s plenty of good dentists in Turkey, but what’s with this trend of people getting MAJOR medical work or body modification done ANYWHERE by whoever’s got a flashy Instagram or TikTok reel? Nuts.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/turkey-teeth-leaving-brits-toothless-35327173
you just have to know which countries, and cities. maybe INDIA, some places in mexico, or thailand. i knew people who went to thailand for dental care.
bitofarambler@crazypeople.online 5 days ago
Dental work is my most common healthcare experience abroad. I cannot recommend Thailand enough, especially for dental work, nothing but 5 out of 5 dentistry for me so far.
3rd-party analyses and patient surveys rating Thailand higher than the US in health care these days are included in the health care abroad link I provided above.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 4 days ago
i had a co-worker who went there.
bitofarambler@crazypeople.online 4 days ago
That works, although the Thai medical field is so heavily regulated that scams are uncommon. They want our medical dollars to keep rolling in, and after so many great experiences I am all in.
If you don’t have a translator or have any concerns, go to an international clinic. Heavily regulated, highest-tier equipment/care, everyone is at least bilingual, transparent total fee charts available before anything takes place, they are totally worth the slight fee bump.
rexxit@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What it all boils down to is: how can you know the work done was good? You can’t. You can know it looks good superficially. You can know the dentist was nice, or that their office was clean, and that the bill was low. You can’t know if the work is actually good. You don’t know if the materials or techniques would be considered substandard in the US. Yes, other countries often have a different “standard of care”. I have seen ABYSMAL work from Asia and the Middle East. I have seen appalling work from Mexico and Central America. Yes I also see bad work done by local US dentists - primarily those who advertise themselves as being some kind of affordable, emergency, or discount office.
Dental tourism scares the hell out of me as a dentist in the US, but I understand why it appeals to people when quality care here is expensive. I have seen abysmal work from every country in the world, including the US, but the trend is you largely get what you pay for.
Why is it often worse? With dental tourism you get no follow-up care. You also have no recourse if they fuck up your mouth.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 3 days ago
I agree with much of what you said, particularly:
The reason it may be enticing for many is because of the enormous disparity in cost such that it becomes a risk assessment. Sometimes the alternative to medical tourism may be long-delayed or no treatment at all, though I realize that low-quality treatment is very often worse than no treatment.
bitofarambler@crazypeople.online 4 days ago
Fortunately, that’s incorrect and there are plenty of ways to check the efficacy of medical procedures.
You can get x-rays, MRIs and all sorts of after-care examinations done by trusted or a myriad of other doctors and dentists if you are unsure of the quality of care you received.
A very big indicator will be how you feel after the procedure, which is why I include patient surveys in all of my posts about medical care abroad. Very importantly, other than the higher-rated equipment, report accuracy and cost, patient satisfaction regarding medical care in Thailand is rated higher than in the US, for example.
I think I see where you are coming from, it is the most frequent response to high-quality medical care abroad:
This anxiety about the unknown often colors how people react to any situation outside their experience, but there are plenty of ways to ease yourself into receiving higher quality medical care abroad, like translators, medical insurance, or expat meetups so you can get used to an idea you are unfamiliar with.
Incorrect. This applies to most medical care destinations outside of the US; follow-up care is essential abroad and is usually presented in a contract and verbally confirmed with you before any diagnosis even takes place, let alone a procedure.
With Thai dental care an example, my second crown was molded incorrectly, so my dentist sent it back downstairs(in Thailand, their fabs are located in the same building as your dentist) and told me to come back tomorrow for a more perfectly printed gold crown and no extra charge. I returned 18 hours later, they scanned my medical ID card, cemented my new gold crown which fit like a glove, and I was out in 15 minutes free of charge. after again receiving the highest quality of care from a doctor and hospital i trusted and appreciated.
You can purchase as many extra bells and whistles as you want with your chosen care package, but the basic warranty has been more than enough for me; my crowns have lasted more than a decade(knock on wood with me).
rexxit@lemmy.world 4 days ago
With all due respect, you don’t know what you don’t know. In case you missed it, I am a US dentist. I spend every working day dispelling laypeople’s misconceptions about dental work. What work they have, what work they need, benefits and drawbacks, etc. Your post hits on some of the many very common misconceptions.
MRI is wildly irrelevant for dental, which is a clue that you don’t understand. Not all work can be evaluated, even with x-rays, as crown materials often hide the most important details. Bacterial ingress and leakage is, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Most docs (in both medicine and dental) are exceptionally reluctant to disparage another’s work.
This could not be further from the truth. Discomfort and success are completely different things. Some extremely high quality treatments will make you feel like shit afterwards. Often, post op symptoms are more closely a matter of chance than they are of quality. Patient satisfaction and surveys are complete worthless bullshit, as evidenced by hospitals, Press Ganey scores, etc. Docs hate chasing patient satisfaction because it is so poorly correlated with actual quality care. See Goodhart’s law. Telling the patient “no, this will have a poor outcome” gets you bad reviews, while doing a slipshod job that looks superficially good gets you patient satisfaction. I see it CONSTANTLY. Smooth-talking, kind-seeming, gentle dentists whose skills and ethics are complete trash. Patients can’t tell the difference.
You have taken your subjective experience and tried to use that to say the work is objectively good. That’s not how any of this works.
Now could that work actually be good? It could be. This is not to say that all foreign dentistry is bad, but SO MUCH OF IT IS. I know because I see it. The fact of the matter is, patients generally don’t know the difference between good and bad work. I see patients all the time who said some absolute basement-tier-garbage work was done by their previous dentist, who they adored.
Ask any orthopedic surgeon what they think of offloading post-op care to an unfamiliar doc in the country the patient is visiting from. This is a huge issue docs discuss in private - patients flying to wherever for cheap, substandard treatment and leaving them to manage the complications. It’s a big issue in places like FL and NY, but also broadly everywhere.
Many treatments, you get essentially one chance to get it right, and fixing it is either impossible or 10x as much difficulty. Getting it right the first time is priceless. You can fuck up a tooth in an instant. Destroyed. Cannot be fixed. Some errors are invisible and don’t hurt right away. Many infections are painless or hard to diagnose from typical x-rays. Many compromised teeth spend a few years feeling normal before they fall apart.
As a practicing professional who spent the majority of my training seeing a high % of international dentistry, it’s hard to watch.