I used to be very regular with dental visits, and have had an enormous amount of work done over the years. Then I went to my first PE owned dentist (by accident) and it was such a horrific experience I've basically avoided dentists since.
There used to be some reasonable balance between the dentist wanting to make money and wanting to build a secure custommer base/happy clients. PE dentists are just money extraction machines with little to no concern for how much pain is caused getting money out of your wallet.
(Just avoiding going to the dentist is pretty extreme tho - probably reasonable to get them looked at at least yearly?)
You can perhaps collect negative experiences from people you trust, and use that to narrow your selection. But you can't use good experiences, since the treatment people were happy with might as well have been a no-op and whatever problem they have would have gone away by itself in a short time. And if there wasn't a noticable pre-existing problem that was treated, but something the dentist made up on the stop, the treament someone was happy with might as well have been actively harmful, just not enough to be noticed right away.
Dentistry simply have too little credibility as a profession. If you need to pull a tooth out to make it stop hurting, sure, a random dentist is quite likely to do a reasonable job. At least compared to a random blacksmith. But as countless articles linked in this thread shows, dentists have absolutely no clue if you have cavities that need to be treated.
Haha what ??? Sure a totally rotten tooth would likely fall off by itself anyway but if that’s your baseline, we’re probably having different enough conversations that it’s not worth continuing to waste our time here.
Same guy expects me to handle the pain of all four of my wisdom teeth being removed with literally one 12 pill vial of Vicodin. Acts like I'm doctor/pill shopping.
Reported him to my stats dental board, they get back to me with "well homeopathic remedies can't hurt you either, so we won't do anything to him!"
Dentists are the scum of reality, and their usage as traditional fronts for organized crime is done on purpose and as a trope in media it is sadly true.
Wage war on them as an economic group. They are almost as bad as chiropractors. Also a traditional occupation of corrupt state legislatures/senators.
Are narcotics normally required to handle that?
I also had my gallbladder out via laparoscopic surgery with the same as pain relief. It's possible we just don't feel pain the same.
Do you expect your dentist to be listed on the stock exchange?
OTOH once in the hands of some private equity funds, they can pretty much do that to one of their properties whenever they feel like it, or even decide to take the whole PE group public if they get a wild hair.
All it takes is a little paperwork for them (the kind they are much more self-interested in compared to most decent medical professionals) perhaps including some bank notes.
At my last visit, the new doc who took care of me for my third cleaning said: "Oh, by the way, we have these cavities we've been watching that need filling." It was never mentioned to me that they were keeping an eye on anything. I just had to wonder if every patient's third visit calls for a filling!