by lys3rg0 » Wed 12 Dec 2007, 02:21:15
I've had mixed experiences with dentists, but so far i can't say i hate their guts. I avoid them whenever possible, but i'[ve had a few occasions when it got so bad that i needed stuff done professionally.
My first experience was around the age of 10. One of my baby teeth wouldn't fall, all the others around had changed long before but this one was just hanging in. The new tooth next to it was about 3 times larger, it looked like i had cracked my tooth and managed to keep just a small fragment. Turns out, the new tooth that was supposed to grow and push the old one out of the way couldn't surface because i had a bone malformation burried into my gums just below the tooth, stopping the growth. Luckily it was an "independent" thing, not connected to my skull, so i didn't need a surgeon to get it out, my dentist managed to dig around the gums and extract it little by little, in order not to leave a huge crater. Soon as that got taken care of, the new tooth grew as it should have and i finally regained simmetry.
After that, nothing major happened for quite a few years. Towards the end of college i had a few cavities fixed, one of them required a root canal thingy. A few years later one of my fillings kinda chipped, but i didn't pay attention until it started to hurt. The whole thing cost me another root canal...
Again, a few years without any problems, then, this year, same kind of problem, although this time it wasn't exactly my fault. I didn't even see the crack in the filling, because it was hidden behind the tooth, but i developed some kind of infection on my first tooth that had the root removed. So i had the whole thing redone, after about 3 months of weekly treatment to kill the germs.
I don't remember what it cost for the older stuff, but this treatment was around 30 euro, with no guarantees that it would successfully fight off the infection and save the tooth. When the treatment was done, thankfully the verdict was that i could keep the tooth. Otherwise i'd have to get it extracted with a surgeon, because, as it apparently often happens with rootless teeth, they weld themselves into the jaw bone, which makes it impossible to have them pulled by the simple procedure any dentist can do. Although i saved the tooth, the hole was too big to plug with a filling, so i had to get it covered entirely, which cost another 40 euro.
That was without any insurance coverage btw - everything was paid for out of pocket.
I know that even here, where dental work is orders of magnitude less expensive than in the states or western europe, there are conspiracy stories circulating about doctors not cleaning cavities well enough and filling teeth over diseased areas, so you'll come back in a few months to have the thing redone. However, my dentist is quite cooperative when it comes to technical, medical and chemical specifics regarding all the procedures. She explained everything in detail, answered all my questions, and i was quite happy with her services. But i'm certain that very few of her patients would have the level of knowledge/education to ask certain important questions regarding dental hygiene / treatment, let alone understand the answers or advice given. So i regard conspiracy stories as any other scary part of folklore, i'm pretty sure it's born out of ignorance or the result of a few cases where the patient was abused by his lack of knowledge and his dentist's greed.