Too Many Cambridge Dentists is Hazardous to your Dental Health!

Isn’t it great all the choices you have in choosing a Cambridge dentist? Well, brace yourself for a shock:

Having too many choices of a Cambridge dentist is actually a sign of poor dental care in Cambridge!!! This is not an opinion it is a fact. Skeptical? Read on:

 1) THE PROBLEM of Having too many Cambridge Dentist Choices:

Over the last 20 years Cambridge has become like any other city in North America: Cambridge is now an example of Corporate America. Some signs are obvious: American corporate chains of retailers and restaurants have taken over Cambridge. Some are not so obvious: Too Many Dentists and Corporate Dental Clinics!

“Too many dentists” and Corporate Dental Clinics have been the norm in the USA for more than 20 years. It has now reached SCARY proportions. Today an American dental consumer seeking great dental care needs to spend considerable amount of time and effort to find a dentist they can trust. For example, an investigative reporter with Reader’s Digest visited 50 different dentists around the USA to understand the problem better, the results were shocking:

• the reporter consulted with carefully selected dentists that were worthy of his trust: the amount of work deemed necessary was determined to be between $500-$1,500
• for the 50 dentists that the reporter visited, quotes ranged greatly in the amount of work deemed necessary: $1,197 to $29,850!!!
• 75% of dentists recommended SEVERELY more treatment than what is taught in dental school to be appropriate!!!

US dentists, Dr. Marvin Schissel and Dr. John Does, have written a book about the problems with the business of dentistry in the US entitled “The Whole Tooth: What You Must Know to:

Find a Good Dentist - Keep Healthy Teeth- Avoid the Incompetents, Quacks, and Frauds”.

For goodness sake even children are not safe from Corporate America employing dentists:

• Kool Smiles Performed “Unnecessary” Procedures on Children
• Dental Chain Violated New York Law, Settlement Says: chain of 500 practices in 30 states
• AND many other such cases

For every Dental Corporation that the law caught up to, there are many others that will not get caught.

Corporate America knows no bounds. Corporate America does what it does best: MAKE MONEY! Hence, the issue of unnecessary treatment in the US is not isolated to dentists. Unnecessary health care in the US medical system is mind-blowing:

• unnecessary medical interventions
• treatment of self-limited conditions (conditions that will go away on their own)
• extensive treatment for conditions that could be treated with less extensive treatment

YES, Corporate America ONLY cares about making money. They will even KNOWINGLY and INTENTIONALLY get you addicted and kill you for the might dollar; case and point the tobacco industry!

The USA spends more money per person on healthcare than any other country in the world! Unnecessary treatment is the most important contributor to the high cost: $1 out of every 3 dollars, a full $750 billion, did nothing to make anyone healthier! There have been many books written about this HUGE problem:

• How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America by Dr. Otis Webb Brawley
• Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by Dr. Gilbert Welch
• Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease by Alan Cassels
• Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by Dr. John Abramson
• Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee

In Canada there are laws against private medical healthcare. THANK GOODNESS! We as a society rightfully believe that private, for profit, healthcare would not be healthy for patients. Likewise, there are laws in Canada that require a dentist to be the owner of a dental office because we as a society believe that a non-dentist owning a dental office would not be healthy for patients. However, business people and lawyers have devised ways to get around the law and Corporate Cambridge Dentists are already here! In fact, Corporate Dentistry is not a problem isolated to Cambridge dentists, it is an issue throughout Canada.

SO WHAT, Who cares? How does this relate to me?

Corporate dentistry in combination with too many dentists creates the perfect storm for unnecessary dental work:

2) THE LESSONS LEARNED, from the US, about too many Cambridge Dentist Choices:

THE INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF CAMBRIDGE DENTISTS has increased quicker than the population of Cambridge. THE STUDIES IN USA HAVE CONCLUSIVELY CONCLUDED THAT AN OVERSUPPLY OF DOCTORS RESULTS IN UNNECCESSARY PROCEDURES.          

(This effect has been named Supply-Sensitive Care, also called Supplier-Induced Demand)

PLUS

The problem with CORPORATE AMERICA is that the driving force is SELLING YOU MORE, MORE, MORE, MORE… no matter what impact it has on your health. However, when it comes to your health there is an optimal amount of healthcare that any one person should get. Corporate America and health is a bad combination; for example Corporate America taking over the food industry has resulted in death by over-consumption: in the true spirit of MORE, MORE, MORE

Being a great doctor and being a great business person are fundamentally opposite and incompatible. A great doctor’s ultimate objective is to eliminate the need for our services: LESS, LESS, LESS! A great business person’s ultimate objective is for the customer to always need the product or service sold: MORE, MORE, MORE…

AND YES, The problem of Unnecessary Procedures already exists in Canada. In 2012, A CBC researcher visited 20 dentists in Canada and consulted with University of Toronto dental professors, the investigation found:

• dentists vary on the amount of recommended treatment which causes costs to vary greatly
• cost estimates from the 20 dentists consulted ranged from $144 to $11,931
• the correct amount of treatment would actually cost about $1,900
• 40% of dentists recommended significantly above and beyond what should be treated

The good news is that the problem in Canada is not yet as bad as it is in the US! The bad news is that the influence of too many dentists and Corporate America has accelerated tremendously since the above research in 2012.

BEING SMART ABOUT CHOOSING A DENTIST NEAR ME THAT YOU CAN TRUST IS BECOMING MORE AND MORE IMPORTANT with every year that passes, as we are heading towards a US style dentist marketplace.

Too Many Cambridge Dentists and Corporate Dental Clinics are Hazards to Your Health!

In the best interest of your health and well-being,

Dr. Joanne Baldos and Dr. Adam Szymczak