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One explanation I've heard (don't remember which news source) is that dentists just don't have as much demand as in previous decades. Due to improvements in hy
by ThinkingGuy 4y ago
One explanation I've heard (don't remember which news source) is that dentists just don't have as much demand as in previous decades.
Due to improvements in hygiene, and public health measures such as water fluoridation, children get fewer cavities and adults lose fewer teeth ("having an insufficient number of teeth" was once a major cause of men being rejected from the military draft).
So dentists have had to pivot from providing necessary care, such as fillings and extractions, to more discretionary services such as whitening and other cosmetic procedures (oh how my last dentist used to try to push Invisalign® on me at every visit!)
- fallinghawks 4y agoAnd some dentists are straight up charlatans wanting to line their pockets. When I moved across the bay I left my dentist of 10+ years and went in search of someone closer. I admit to delaying a couple years, but found a place, got cleaned and x-rayed. The dentist told me I had 13 cavities that needed to be tended to. I was pretty shocked; I don't have great teeth, but to have developed that many cavities in such a short time seemed wrong. I went back to my old dentist for a second opinion and he told me that I had 2 genuine cavities at the edges of old fillings, but the rest of it was pretty much nonsense: amalgam fillings that could be replaced with porcelain for appearance but were still perfectly good, and some slight discolorations that were not actually cavities.