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When I was 12, I was scheduled by my regular dentist to have two cavities filled. It was the first time I had anything negative in a dental checkup. We were very poor, so my dad was pissed that it was going to be almost $400 to get them filled. He found a different dentist that was supposed to be a bit cheaper, and I went to that one instead. He was shocked to hear that I had been scheduled for two fillings. Since I was a new patient, he did x-rays, which showed zero decay. The dentist that lied about me having cavities is still in practice today more than 20 years later, and has 4.5 stars on Google.
I fear there's not really a good way to vet Dentists effectively since most people probably never find out that they've been scammed for years. I'd love to learn some new strategies though.
> I fear there's not really a good way to vet Dentists effectively since most people probably never find out that they've been scammed for years. I'd love to learn some new strategies though.
It's something the government should be doing; running sting operations against dentists with compliants against them. Unfortunately, dentists and prosecutors are in the same social circles.
I like the idea of that proposal, but I'm not sure how it would work in practice.
The problem is that the crooked dentist will argue that the "bait" patient has in fact have cavities. And then if the prosecutor finds somehow convincing evidence that the patient does not actually have cavities the crooked dentist can change tactic and say it was a honest mistake on their part.
With other crimes where "sting operations" work the situation is much more clear cut. The target of the drug sting is either selling drugs or not selling drugs. If you find drugs you can easily prosecute them. With the dental scam even if you manage to catch them red handed once, it is still a long and complicated process to prove it was a scam and not a mistake.
Or alternatively we can legislate to make making mistakes with dental diagnosis illegal the same way having large batches of drugs is illegal. That will make the prosecution easier, but will have all kind of other negative consequences.
It could be done. You do a first pass of a significant number of dentists, with people with confirmed healthy teeth, and then do a second pass on every dentist who recommends fillings. Caught scamming twice? License suspension. Repeat offender? Jail time. The odds of such a program putting an innocent dentist in jail gotta be near-nil.
There's no shortage of people who would damn-near volunteer for the work, given how many of us have had multiple run-ins with crooked dentists.
Even if it cost, say, $10k to catch each scumbag dentist, the ROI to society would be tremendous. Catch enough dentists in the space of a few months, apply appropriate consequences, and the whole culture will change.
That said, in reality the dentists would 'hire lobbyists' to kill anything like this.
Could it be done as a non-profit perhaps? I mean we clearly can’t do the licence suspension and the jail time that way but we could maybe shame the scammers?
Hahaha I love it. Extinction Rebellion but for dentists? ... How about "Extraction Action"?
The main issue I foresee is that there's just so much to be outraged about in the world now. People are using shameful behavior to distract from worse shames - it's been weaponized!
So, making a significant impact in a crowded 'shame market', across a tightly controlled media landscape, generally requires a highly skilled dedicated team.
I was wondering about this problem since this thread; specifically, wouldn't it be rather easy to use big data techniques to catch dentists who are way outside norms?
And after looking into it, it seems that insurance companies, Medicaid etc have been doing exactly this, and catching some pretty big fish. It's new for me to give insurance companies much credit for doing anything good, and I feel weird now. Real enemy of my enemy stuff.
I wonder if there is room for a service that just performs X-rays and passes them through some kind of AI model as a kind of a "dental fizz-buzz." Surely they wouldn't have any perverse incentives in that case.
Oh man. I would dearly love to see scumbag dentists lose their ability to easily scam vulnerable people, often desperate and in pain.
That said - I'm sure they have tight regulations on who is allowed to X-ray teeth, and diverse ways to keep their own in line should they threaten the apple cart.
Ever heard of nano silver fluoride? ... Exactly. (Unless you saw the HN story on it here recently [0].)
Whether it's oxen in a slaughterhouse, deer pierced by a hunters' arrows, or herds that die off because their grazing lands get taken for crops, animal lives are sacrificed so that more humans can live.
Everything you eat requires killing. We are only weird about killing for meat because as conscious life we are biased towards conscious life. Meanwhile, we don't blink an eye if we take down an entire field of corn, or even take town an entire forest to grow that field of midwestern corn, because its unconcious life and not valued by our moral principles.
The secret is to just treat things with respect. You can be respectful of the animals you raise up, you can respect the land you sow. Unfortunately this world lacks a lot of that common respect towards life these days, but maybe this thinking will change in the future and we can live in a more balanced way.
?? We are not carnivores. We are literally some line between herbivores and omnivores. Carnivores have to kill or they will most likely starve to death. Vegtables and fruits are the natural foods of earth for herbivores and omnivores and some carnivores. You are not killing when you eat plants and fruits. Fruits and vegtables want to be eaten for their seeds to spread. It is not a question of concious vs unconcious. Killing animals when you don't need to is already morally unaccepted in society. Animal life and plant life are completely different. To combine them and act like it is the matter of concious vs unconcious bias is completely wrong. An animal will run till exhaustion to avoid being eaten. A fruit tree is there to be eaten. Plants and fruits don't have a central nervous system where they 'feel' pain. Humans are literally animals. Eat a fruit and plant the seeds and see what happens. Eat an animal and plant the bones and does a new animal come up?
You are killing when you eat plants and fruits. Are you foraging in the woods for these things? Or are you buying them from the supermarket, from an orchard where the farmer killed a thousand acres of native flora and all the fauna dependent on that flora to grow these fruits and nuts fit for shipping across a continent?
Everything has a cost, and we should be conscious of them so we can work on mitigating them, no matter if the cost is to intelligent or unintelligent life. Most of the biomass on earth comes from unintelligent life.
You are still conflating killing animals for food & growing plants/vegtables/grains as if they can be equivocated. These are 2 drastically different things especially when it comes to morality and ethics.
But why is it disingenuous? Both are masses of living cells. Both die after damage or neglect. I'm just highlighting our species' biases. My cat for example is intelligent but has no such biases, eating rodents, insects, and catgrass with the same violent gusto. I'm just pointing out its a bit of a human fallacy to label some organisms as off limits and others for our harvesting, when no other forms of life do this.
It's best to be aware of this bias so you can treat these other ecologically important organisms with similar respect we reserve for intelligent life. Conservation efforts for example are often more successful if the animal is perceived as cute, which is kind of sad. I'm not saying don't cut down that corn field for harvest, chop it all, but be aware of what these and other behaviors of the farmer are doing to the rest of the organisms in the area, such as native flora, or microbial life that in turn contributes to your corn yields.
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