Has dentistry lost its way?

Last week Tan Nguyen posted this, following on from his paper about the benefits of a sugar tax.

The ironic thing a out the post is the image was posted by an agency that assits dentist with marketing- I Googled it.

I also Googled Bruce Donof and couldn’t read many of his articles but I did find this presentation on Youtube.

Certainly there are tensions between helping patients with their oral health, meeting their aesthetic needsdesires and running a profitable practice. It’s about balance and the need for big picture thinking.

Dentists are people that have a tendency to get caught up with the minutia of life, we’re about the small things, and need to be super focussed and maybe we’re about doing stuff.

Are we losing the big picture of our real why?

Lets take a hypothetical patient with poor caries control, irregular attendance, below average OH, limited finances. They really want the nicer looking teeth as they feel it will solve lot of their problems but does not prioritise preventive appointments.

They are emotionally vulnerable.There’s a dentist in a large city with a great website that is full of hundreds of before and after cases of veneers, ortho and whitening.

At a video consultation, they are told they can be helped most probably in three appointments and the patient can pay for this by taking money out of their super; remember this patient struggles to afford/ prioritise regular care.

Oh, and they are told that their regular dentist can take care of the prevention, which remember they struggle to afford/ prioritise.

Who’s to say that if that patient goes to the capital city and has the consultation that the dentists will give the appropriate advice and not start treatment until the patient is stable.

Who’s to say that the patient will not keep looking until they find a dentist who will do the treatment. It’s hard to refuse an emotional patient in tears.

Should the treatment be done and consent “obtained” that there is a risk of it failing if preventive measures are not maintained? Is that true consent or just a note of a conversation in the file? Does the patient really understand the implications?

Does that consent let the dentist off the hook?

It’s not to say the entire profession has lost it’s way, maybe it’s the portion of the profession promoting its self most publicaly and what it promotes? Or just what we feel we need to promote in order to attract patients with marketting? Or the style of that marketing?

An error in navigation of two degrees resulted in the Mount Erebus air disaster.

Applied to our profession, 1 degree off track doesn’t help the oral health of our population anywhere near as much as we could.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Rosie