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.
Why do dentists have such a bad reputation compared to other kinds of doctors?
Submitted 1 year ago by ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Zippy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He likely does not recall every time he has mentioned this to you.
lumberjacked@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Terevos@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s weird. I’ve never ever had any dentist try to sell me anything except for coming up with solutions to problems I have with my teeth. Never up selling or anything
lumberjacked@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah. It’s extremely common. Fluoride treatments, sealants, crown replacements aren’t necessary. And things like veneers, and whiting are pushed pretty hard.
IMongoose@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
spittingimage@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yep. My dentists office has the greatest people and the best service of any business I can think of. And I still hate going there.
Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
In Canada it’s two reasons:
- They don’t go to Medical School.
- They aren’t covered by Provincial Health Plans, and therefore cost money.
These are the same reasons I don’t trust Veterinarians, or Chiropractors.
KneeTitts@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wait, you dont trust quackosnappers???
fitgse@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I recommend reading this article “I Went to 50 Different Dentists and Almost All of Them Gave Me a Different Diagnosis”:
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
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.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Mostly_Frogs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is my experience also. Dentists are basically out to sell you stuff.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The only times I’ve had cavities in my life were the first couple visits to a new dentist.
hark@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
qjkxbmwvz@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
What’s the difference between a dentist and a sadist? Newer magazines…
— via Seinfeld
CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What are you, an anti-dentite!?
JustZ@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Do they? Maybe it’s more unpleasant because they’re expensive
gon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Lemmylefty@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Which is so silly when you think about it: “this tire expert isn’t a REAL mechanic”. Okay…and?? We need both.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 1 year ago
i bet doctors would have a bad rep if you had to have a prostate exam/pap smear every 6 months.
Hazdaz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?!
flakeshake@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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 (anasthesia, pedal-powered mechanical drills) and lots of organized lobbying to dispel.
JustAManOnAToilet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I know several people who are afraid of getting dental work because they are afraid that they’ll get assaulted while being put under.
It’s not so much now, but during the 80s and 90s there was an epidemic of that happening.
grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This reminds me of a joke: What do you call a person who fails medical school?
A dentist.
shellsharks@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Not sure what you mean by “reputation”. But generally I think it’s hard for anyone to like their Dentist visit. Even a “checkup” typically involves a cleaning which is invasive and uncomfortable. This is compounded by the fact that people don’t take care of their teeth so feedback from dentists is almost always poor. I don’t think Dentists have a bad rep, but I can safely say I don’t look forward to my visits 😅
iltoroargento@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
The first dentist I ever went to was great. He was good with kids and adults, did his job and was realistic about kids being kids and gave us the tools and information to make sure our teeth were healthy. I had him all the way through my braces and into high school.
My next dentist was a horrendous, preachy, asshole who loved to tell all of his patients what was wrong with them and make people feel bad for their decisions to drink soda and surmised that we were all eating too much junk food (which he wouldn’t really elaborate on when asked). My diet wasn’t perfect, but I had mostly home cooked meals with steamed vegetables, usually.
He was also Mormon and I know a lot of Mormons love to get on their high horse and take pleasure in being petty, insufferable assholes. I haven’t read their batshit book (albeit, most in that genre are similarly zany and harebrained), but there must be some discussion on how to be a bad neighbor to everyone you meet in there based on their predilictions for judgement and exclusion. He also only hired other Mormon dentists to his practice and all the dental assistants were similarly preachy and religious. It was genuinely insufferable.
I ditched that asshole once I went to college and have had a couple dentists since then who were fine, did their job and didn’t give me a bunch of flak for not flossing after every meal like a fucking psychopath.
Fundamentally, I think the issue with dentists is that when you get a bad one, they make you feel bad, which is the absolute antithesis of healthcare.
Additionally, because of the arbitrary and asinine distinction in the US between oral care and basically the rest of the body, dentistry is seen as cosmetic and unnecessary, often allowing them to charge an arm and a leg for most of their services. Compound that with the ridiculous price setting and insurance rackets baked into anything close to the health sector, and you have a lot of frustration even before patients get into the chair.
If you’re not a dentist who will practice compassionate care, at least be one who just shuts the fuck up and does their job. Of course let the patient know what’s going on in their mouth and how they can better take care of themselves or treat something they’re dealing with, but chill the fuck out with the fire and brimstone shit about missing a cleaning or not flossing all the time.
Healthcare is all about bedside manner and if you don’t have it, you’re not a good provider and your business can and should suffer (the fact that our healthcare structures are businesses and profit motivated is fundamentally opposed to effective care, anyway, but that’s the subject of another essay).
MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
You’ll be (un)happy to know that your neighbours to the north suffer from same affliction. We have universal healthcare, but teeth aren’t part of the body apparently, so that’s not covered.
Always a fun time to go to a medical professional and feel like you’re talking to a used car salesman who is trying to upsell you on a useless/unneeded procedure.
pqdinfo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I love the way this conversation is usually “What type of toothbrush are you using again?” “Uh, the spinny one you get from the supermarket, it’s disposable so I have to buy one every month, but it seems OK”, “Ah no, what you need is the $250 Philips SuperScrubacare Plus, which has bristles on the end of the bristles, and on the end of those bristles are more bristles, and on the ends of those are little robots with tiny vacuum cleaners and flame throwers. Those really kill plaque. Also stop eating so much sugar.” “Ummm OK” “Anyway, we’re done. Here’s a cheap ass regular unpowered toothbrush. And a starlight mint.”
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
disposable electric toothbrushes???