quote:Rose Matthews, 24, found herself left in the lurch and needing the kits when her dentist stopped a procedure midway and told her it could not be completed on the NHS. Being unable to afford the fee, she endured an 18-month wait for NHS treatment. The hole in her drilled-out tooth was tackled using a kit once a month.
Good heavens. That is... unconscionable for a dentist to start treatment then stop halfway. Shouldn't he have made sure the procedure was covered FIRST?
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Ugh, nasty. I wish more people would train to be dentists - there just aren't enough of them. But then, it's not exactly the most glamorous job. Very worthwhile though.
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In several young families in our ward, the father is a dental student. In each case, it's not 'cause it's what he's "always wanted to be" but because it pays really well and the hours are family-friendly.
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quote:Rose Matthews, 24, found herself left in the lurch and needing the kits when her dentist stopped a procedure midway and told her it could not be completed on the NHS. Being unable to afford the fee, she endured an 18-month wait for NHS treatment. The hole in her drilled-out tooth was tackled using a kit once a month.
Good heavens. That is... unconscionable for a dentist to start treatment then stop halfway. Shouldn't he have made sure the procedure was covered FIRST?
I wonder if the original intended procedure was unexpectedly found midway to be far insufficient, and that much more extensive work would need to be done.
That isn't a terribly infrequent occurrence in general surgery, and it would seem quite odd (to me) if there weren't more to the story along these lines.
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posted
Okay, that would make more sense-- but wouldn't he then have some kind of obligation to make sure she recieved some kind of care for the drilling he had done, to make sure it didn't cause further infection/damage?
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posted
I do not know what the professional guidelines for British physicians would indicate, but if she were my patient, I would feel I had that sort of obligation.
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quote:"It's like making custard, as long as you read the instructions you are fine," she says.
What contrasting imagery with the rest of the article. Yummy, delicious, flavorful custard...Mmmm! That picture at the top of the page...anti-Mmmm!
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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I hope this doesn't derail this thread, but does anybody know why other animals don't seem to have this problem? Excluding pets, other animals don't get dental care at all during their lives and I don't see a mouth full of black junk when, say, a monkey opens its mouth. I've also never heard about our ancestors having terrible dental problems and they surely didn't have dentists 500 years ago. Do our teeth rot so easily now because we eat so much more sugar and crap?
Posts: 1327 | Registered: Aug 2007
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posted
Reasons for modern dental issues have been discussed pretty exhaustively here at Hatrack, and it seems to be associated with some widespread tension. I'm sure you'll want to read through the major threads before you pursue it further, Threads.
Below are the ones I could find quickly. I believe some very long preceding threads may have been deleted at some point:
posted
Hm...I went to the dentist this morning and got my teeth cleaned. Two fillings scheduled, but they are both redos of old fillings that were past their expiration date.
No real contribution to the thread here, except that the dentist is a paperless office and I got to see them enter everything into the computer system. Pretty cool.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I am extremely lucky genetically as far as teeth go. (Which is good because I got screwed in the eyesight department) I've never had a cavity in my life and I almost never floss.
I do brush my teeth a bit obsessive compulsively though, as does my father.
Dad's also never had a cavity. His dentist called over his staff one time to see an example of "perfectly flossed teeth" and my father has never flossed a day in his life...
(the toothy grin just seems a ppropriate here...)
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I do believe the part about genetics. I have a friend with absolutely wimpy teeth. She flosses and brushes and she's still had to have a root canal in over 20 of her teeth. They are just weak.
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posted
I think that's actually what they're called. They're little plastic things that have a short length of floss already attached to them. So you don't have to deal with the stupid dental floss box. They're really convenient. Of course, I was unable to floss like a normal human being for years before I got the metal bar removed from my bottom teeth, so now I'm all, "YAY, FLOSSING!"
I actually prefer real floss because my teeth are very close together and it usually takes a bit of effort to get the floss between them. The floss picks don't have enough tension on the floss to get the floss in.
I don't think I've ever written "floss" so much in my life.
Posts: 1753 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
One of my teeth was shaved down. My orthodontist took my braces off, then went, "Oh that tooth still looks a little crooked." And she used a power tool of some kind to shave the bottom "straight", without asking my permission or that of my parents (I was like, 15). I'm sure I'll have to get braces again (my teeth never lined up quite right to begin with and they're starting to shift noticeably now), and when they do I'll be guaranteed a crooked tooth now.
Posts: 1547 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Mine were sanded in between with actual sandpaper. My lower jaw is just too small for my teeth, even though I had braces. I mean, they were straight, but they weren't PERFECTLY straight, and I was obsessing over it. So they shaved down kind of the tops of the sides, where they pressed against each other a lot. It's cool though...because now I can floss with ease!
posted
*LOL* I'm sure it doesn't help that all my adult bottom teeth came in behind the baby ones. So for a while I had two rows of teeth. Like a shark! RAWR! Fear me!
posted
I have kind of unusual teeth, in that they're on the small side of things. When my wisdom teeth came in, all they did was push my teeth a little closer together. Nothing got shoved out of alignment, nothing had to be pulled; it was nice. My teeth are also unusually sturdy. They aren't wearing the way people's teeth usually do, and while I had a few cavities while I was in junior high, I haven't had any since then. Every time I switch dentists I get to hear about how great me genes are.
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quote:Originally posted by pH: *LOL* I'm sure it doesn't help that all my adult bottom teeth came in behind the baby ones. So for a while I had two rows of teeth. Like a shark! RAWR! Fear me!
-pH
KPC had that, but with both sets of teeth, top and bottom.
I saw when Bridey was born that she has the same thing. You could see clearly 2 rows of tooth buds. (You can still see the second row of buds behind her erupted teeth.) *sigh* Thank heaven for Healthy Families, she will always have dental insurance...
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:In several young families in our ward, the father is a dental student.
It so happens that every dentist I've been to in Virginia has been LDS. And they all knew each other. And 3 of my former employees' husbands were LDS dental students who all knew my dentists, too.
The Big Book of British Smiles immediately popped into my mind, too. After I gagged.
I'm one of the lucky ones - I never floss and I have 1 tiny cavity. My best friend is the most diligent person I've ever met about oral hygiene and she's had so many root canals, etc. that I've lost count. She's understandably bitter about it.
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posted
Hmm...I wonder if mine is? I didn't think to ask. *thinks* How would I do that? How do you find out if your dentist is LDS?
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Bring up Parley P. Pratt in conversation? That was my hs music teacher's sure-fire "Mormon test". Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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It's the South. We're all up in each other's business.
I found out through a very Southern series of conversations. The first dentist was the brother-in-law of one of my employees and they had the same last name, the second one told me he knew the first from church and so on.
My vet's sister is a neighbor of my great-aunt's in Georgia. My OB's husband is Aerin's plastic surgeon's partner. The photographer at our NICU reunion is the wife of Andrew's grad school advisor (he commutes from Richmond to NYC). It used to really baffle that I know things like that, but after so many years down here, he's getting used to it. It still baffles me how little he knows about people in NYC.
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posted
This is what you get under nationalized health care. Now why didn't Micheal Moore cover this Sicko?
Posts: 407 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote: This is what you get under nationalized health care.
No, this is what you get when there is a shortage of dentists working in the nationlised system.
Prviate care is available, and not having the NHS would not suddenly mean people who couldn't or wouldn't pay for dental work suddenly could or would.
There is a serious problem in some areas with a shortage of NHS dentists (probably becasue they can make considerably more money in private practice).
I think there are NHS dentists available for children everywhere, but adults in some areas have problems (I had to wait 6 - 9 months after moving for a NHS dentist place to become available, which was not a problem as there was nothing wrong).
Once you have got a NHS dentidt you are expected to go for check ups every 6 months (free if you are on a low income or pregnant and cheap if not). If you do not do this, then you will be stuck having to find a dentist quickly when things go wrong. Unfortunately that is not easy.
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posted
If you guessed 'wage controls' as one of the big reasons there aren't a lot of dentists, you win.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I suspect there are not plenty of dentists, even given that.
And of course, when lots of people are spending long times in line to see a dentist, there is a shortage of dentists, period. Shortage isn't defined by "if people would just do something different there would be enough to go around", a shortage is when demand exceeds supply, and demand clearly exceeds supply significantly.
edit: yep, I was right. Go read the Report of the Primary Care Dental Workforce Review. They estimate that there are nearly 2,000 too few dentists in the UK (of all sorts) currently (well, 2003), and that if current trends continue, that is likely to rise to somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 too few dentists in the next few years (in 2011).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I wonder whether there is a dentist shortage in the US? It has always been like pulling teeth (*wince) to get poor kids dental care everywhere where I have worked in the States.*
Kids would come to the ER with dental abscesses and dental decay so bad they required general anesthesia in an OR to be treated.
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*(I am not yet seeing patients in Canada, so I cannot compare)
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Edited to add:
Ah. This is from a US source on the same UK issue:
quote:Sally J. Cram, a spokeswoman for the American Dental Association and a practicing dentist in Washington, said an ADA survey released in 2006 found that about 30 percent of American adults said they had not seen a dentist in the past year.
She said the reasons “run the gamut from people who are very frightened to people for who dental and oral health is not a priority; some folks who don’t have the money; some folks who live in an area where there isn’t a dentist nearby.”
David Albert, a dentist and the director of the division of community health at Columbia University’s College of Dental Medicine, said as many as half of all Americans don’t have dental insurance.
“Access is a big issue in the United States,” Albert said. “Even if you have medicaid coverage, finding a sufficient number of dentists that accept it is difficult.” -- from MSNBC, Dentist shortage has Brits pulling own teeth
I recall that in a city of ~225,000, we had only one dentist who was still accepting Medicaid, and he was not taking new patients. Although there may (or may not -- I'd like to see the actual numbers) be an overall shortage of dentists in the US, there does seem to be an effective shortage. That is, a substantial number of patients do not have access under the US system (as noted in the quotation above).
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Have y'all heard about the kid in Maryland that died from an infection in his tooth?
He was on Medicaid, but his mother couldn't find a dentist that would accept Medicaid patients.
After he died, the governor/senator somebody had his staff get the official list of Medicaid doctors. In the whole state of Maryland, there were less than 50 names on the list, and of the entire list, exactly one office would accept a new Medicaid patient.
quote:The analysts also found that seven dentists in Prince George's County were providing more than half the care to the county's 45,000 to 50,000 child Medicaid beneficiaries. Of those seven dentists, three in a single practice provided more than one-third of the services to beneficiaries of United Healthcare. Other dentists listed in the company's network provided few or no Medicaid services to children in the county, according to the analysis.
posted
CT: there probably is a shortage. However, I suspect the shortage is not as bad as in the UK, notably because we see neither an incredible rise in the price of dentistry or a huge number of people waiting in lines to see dentists (the latter is the primary manifestation in the UK, but the former is more likely how it would manifest here).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I hate to say it, but my first response to the Washington Post article was, "It's United Health Care". I have heard so many negative things about UHC, even under their "better" plans, that I shudder to think what the low-income plans might be like.
Many (if not all) of my own doctors refuse to have anything to do with UHC, because of their consistent denial of medically necessary claims, and I would imagine the same situation exists for dentists as well.
My bf who works for the State of Illinois, had a pretty difficult time finding a dental provider who would accept IL state dental insurance (the same insurance that every state employee has), because apparently it is also pretty complicated and crappy process to get reimbursed.
It appears that the dental demand is such that the dentists can afford to be pickier and eliminate hassle from their lives, because they can still make a living providing services to people with "good" insurance.
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This is what happens when you don't floss. Your dentist gives you a bad grade. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
(the toothy grin just seems a ppropriate here...)
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