Dentists, Price-Fixing & Why Price Shopping for a new Smile is EXTREMELY Difficult unless you know the Inside Secrets that are revealed in the book Confessions of a Former Cosmetic Dentist (aftermarket)
-A Special Report
Dental professionals often compete aggressively in areas saturated with competitors, but the public mistakenly looks at unit price of specific procedures which often does not mean they end up saving money. Even in areas where dental associations impose ‘price fixing’ on the public by telling the dentists what they should charge, you will get different quotes from each dental professional.
One of the most important factors affecting your dental bill is a person’s own neglect. If people have higher risk factors like smoking, diabetes, and acid reflux spacing out dentist visits every three or four years can lead to disaster. Repairing neglect back to health is like restoring a car left out in the elements for a few decades compared to one that was kept tucked away in a dry garage.
Besides they control you have on the health of your teeth, the dental professional you choose is very important to the quality of care and the cost. Dental fees for specific procedures can range widely but the real factor is not whether the doctor charges $1200 verses $1600 for capping a tooth. The bigger picture is the treatment planning skills and quality of treatment of the dental professional.
A new graduate from dental school usually does not have the training to match the challenges of difficult situations. This means they often have tunnel vision and they treat people on a ‘tooth by tooth’ basis. While this may be cheap, it can actually lead to a long list of issues that need to be re-done later at additional costs. In difficult situations it also leads to a result that is disappointing.
A typical example is a patient who has severely worn teeth. They often break teeth, and go to their junior dentist for a ‘quick fix’ like a single crown (cap). Years later, after repeatedly seeing the same dentist for simple repairs they have a mouth half-full of short caps, which don‘t look very nice.
The same patient seeing a dentist with more advanced training may be told they need to deal with the wear overall before simply patching one problem.
The ‘full mouth reconstruction’ can be expensive, or it can be done with a moderate fee with a technique I discuss elsewhere which also allows the person to spread the treatment out over time with a better final result than with the ‘newbie’ dentist.
Within this group of advanced level dentists are some that may be considered ‘aggressive’. This means they may be over-reacting to a relatively minor problem and recommending more treatment that you need, or they are unwilling to use lower fee procedures to spread your advanced treatment out over time.
Frankly, this is a very difficult area to explain to a layperson and dental professionals argue within their own ranks about this issue. A $50,000 smile may sometimes be the best thing you can do, and other times it can be a huge mistake. In my opinion it is a modest mistake to see a beginner for a complex situation and end up 'under-treated', but a more serious error to be over-treated by an ‘aggressive cosmetic dentist’.
Specialists argue that they are the only ones that should be treating difficult dental situations, and often this is true with some exceptions. When I refer patients to specialists the patients often come running back after they see the estimate, and other times they even get scared off on the cost for getting an appraisal. This puts the pressure on the general dentist, or primary care dentist to ‘do their best’.
In order to help general dentists provide advanced care a group of specialists offer continuing education on the treatment of complex dental situations. These courses expose the dentist to ideas that often conflict with those taught in dental school, where often the dental students were coached to avoid certain conditions because the dental school was not able to cover the training needed. The final result is a general dentist with additional training in complex situations which may provide a lower cost alternative to patients with higher demands.
One of the conflicts of interest that can affect your dental bill is the influence of dental companies on your dentist’s training. In the book, I allude to this without fingering specific groups because it comes down to the individual dentist and not necessarily where he/she received the extra training. Dentists know exactly what my theme is about and many agree that this is a serious problem. The dental labs that benefit from a dentist doing more veneers and crowns may be more than a little biased about finding ways to help these doctors sell more porcelain dental work to the public.
How the sponsored courses do this is they simply help pay for the advertising and overhead costs of specific cosmetic dental training courses. The speaker inevitably mentions the lab and the brand names of the materials used in his/her presentation. This ‘dirty’ knowledge gets absorbed very efficiently by dentists who are, on average, very fast learners. To get into dental school a person needs high marks and that comes from the ability to soak up information quickly and regurgitate it almost verbatim. Critical thinking is not always our strong point.
The problem is much of the training is suspect and this means, you as a patient may be treated by a dentist with a warped sense of what is best. As an example the general dentist may take a series of weekend courses from a specific training program and get really good at a particular procedure. Being technically good at a procedure does not mean that you should listen to them because another form of treatment may be safer/more affordable or more conservative than the one the dentist is exceptionally skilled at offering.
As an extreme example, a medical doctor may be very good at amputating legs. You may come into the ER with a serious injury that may mean your leg is sacrificed because the medical doctor is better at chopping than splicing it back together.
With cosmetic dentists, they have been trained (in my opinion, actually 'encouraged') to straighten teeth with veneers when actually there are better ways. Some of the new treatment alternatives discussed in the book will never even be mentioned by a cosmetic dentist.
The so called ‘Instant Orthodontics’ procedure is my pet peeve, and my crusade is to warn the public that this is wrong. It’s not illegal, it’s not against dental regulations, but it is wrong for your teeth. Unless your teeth are already mostly made up of filling material, the process of instantly straightening your teeth, by drilling them straight and covering the stumps with porcelain veneers is a mistake. It is costly to do, and once you’ve had it done you will need to repeatedly repair them over your lifetime.
In summary, there is much more to saving money at the dentist than calling around for the ‘cheapest’ prices. The training of the dental professional and his/her biases will make the biggest difference in costs due to the actual treatment plan proposed. If in doubt do not hesitate to get a second opinion before you commit to anything that will drastically change your smile or your bank account. By investing a few bucks on the book 'Confessions of a Former Cosmetic Dentist' (aftermarket) you'll be better prepared to understand the ways you can save a fortune on an extreme smile makeover.