How to Recognize Dental Scams

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Unscrupulous professionals can misdiagnose, prescribe unnecessary procedures and offer non-existent services. It is worth knowing how to protect yourself from this by contacting your dentist.

There are many ways of extorting money from patients, or, as the victims themselves say, “divorce for money”: extremely high price of treatment using ordinary (sometimes frankly cheap and low-quality) materials, imposing unnecessary services that do not affect the effectiveness of the work, and the most expensive treatments. Here - "shares", when they promise a low price, but the price tag is attributed in small print: "Price from …". In practice, getting a service at such a low cost turns out to be unrealistic. In the most difficult cases, the client may find in the invoice services that were not provided at all.

Let's take a closer look at all these methods and how to protect yourself from them.

How dental swindlers cheat patients

1. Conduct low-quality diagnostics

The problem that sometimes worries patients even more than unnecessary expenses is poor-quality diagnostics. Often it is closely related to attempts to get more money out of your wallet. Here are the statements of the doctor that you urgently need either complex and expensive procedures, or the treatment of all the remaining teeth, and their unjustified removal in order to install implants, and the treatment of healthy teeth. In the worst case, an unscrupulous doctor can even remove a healthy tooth.

Here you need to be on your guard right away. Firstly, a good specialist always clearly argues the diagnosis and the purpose of certain procedures. To do this, he uses an intraoral camera, which clearly demonstrates problems in the oral cavity, X-rays, and computed tomography data.

Secondly, such a doctor often offers several alternative treatment plans with different costs, especially if you immediately indicate that expensive services are not available to you.

If the doctor, after these words, lost interest in you or began to blackmail your health, then you should not be treated with him.

And finally, thirdly: it is clear that in the course of treatment, more complex problems may come to light, for example, in a tooth with caries, the doctor will find an inflammation of the roots. But even in this case, a good dentist will always give a clear justification why additional procedures are needed.

2. Indicate non-existent services

This is a marketing trick: supposedly, a patient, having already come to an appointment and finding that the clinic does not provide the service he needs, will not waste time looking for a new doctor, but will agree to what is.

Of course, any treatment must have indications, and sometimes patients cannot adequately assess the need for a particular procedure. But often they know exactly what they need. Let's look at the example of dental treatment under sedation. If the client has a panic fear of dentists, which prevents him from curing his teeth, then it is natural to look for a clinic where sedation is used so as not to start the disease to such an extent that there is nothing to treat.

In this case, it will not be superfluous to find out if the clinic has a license for treatment under sedation. This is a license for anesthesiology, and the patient can check its availability on the clinic's website or immediately ask when making an appointment if there is one. You can do the same in a number of other cases: check which implants or braces doctors put in the chosen clinic, what methods they use, and whether there are certificates and licenses for all of this.

3. They offer cheap dental implants

Dental implantation should be mentioned separately. This is the most modern method of restoring a smile, but such an operation requires adherence to a certain protocol, the doctor's experience and qualifications, the use of a number of materials in addition to the implant (for example, for bone grafting, if the patient has bone loss). But many clients do not know about this, and therefore happily go to the clinic, where the price is 5-8 thousand rubles for such a procedure.

An implant is a medical device that must have a certificate and a certificate from the Ministry of Health confirming its safety.

There are top-level companies that produce expensive implants that have a lifetime or very long warranty (30 years, for example). And there are Chinese or Korean implants that can be compared with a car in the budget segment: it, of course, also drives, but lags behind the Mercedes in terms of characteristics. Such implants are cheaper than premium materials, and some clinics, using this, indicate the price for the implant only as a separate product. And already at the reception, the patient finds out that he will also have to pay for diagnostics, the work of a surgeon and many other things.

Here the expectation is that a client who has already come to an appointment will not look for another clinic, refuse an appointment, waste time again, and so on. This is a marketing ploy of clinics where there are few patients - they are trying to increase their number.

4. They promise to lighten teeth by 30 tones

Clinic dishonesty can be manifested not only in bills for expensive treatment or incorrect diagnoses. It is not uncommon for patients to be deceived when seeking aesthetic services, and most often this happens when a client comes for teeth whitening.

The most common way to get money out of a gullible patient is to promise teeth whitening for 20-30, or even 35 tones on the Vita scale.

There is a certain palette of shades of human teeth, compiled as a result of numerous studies of people of different races and ages (teeth darken over the years, because the enamel becomes thinner and pigments localized in dentin shine through it brighter). In this way, all possible natural tooth shades were structured. This is the palette that the doctor uses in different cases - when choosing the tone of the filling or whitening. The palettes are applied to the patient's teeth and thus determine their color.

All shades of tooth enamel are divided into 4 groups according to the shade of the pigment: A (yellowish pink), B (lemon), C (grayish yellowish), D (pure grayish). For example, A1 is the lightest tone, A5 is the darkest, and so on for all groups. When whitening teeth, an aesthetic version of the palette is used, where the shades are not arranged in groups, but from the lightest to the darkest. You can whiten your teeth according to this scale by a maximum of 10–12 shades. For example, if B5 is lightened to B1, it is only 4 tones, but even if you count on the lightness scale, where B1 is in the first place, it is still 12 tones, not 20 or more.

How to avoid being cheated at a dental clinic

1. Apply to proven clinics

You need to follow the banal advice - focus on the reviews of relatives, friends and colleagues. So you will most likely find yourself in a proven clinic and in the hands of a good specialist.

2. Compare prices for services in different clinics

You should compare prices in different clinics or use aggregator sites that offer such a comparison to find out what the average price for the service you require is.

3. Check licenses and certificates

Before contacting the clinic, you need to study its website: in premium segment clinics, the high price of treatment is due to the use of top-class materials and innovative techniques, the presence of highly qualified specialists and often unique experience developing their own methods of treatment. On the websites of premium clinics, you can find certificates and diplomas of manufacturers, certificates of advanced training for doctors.

4. Insist that the doctor give reasons for all prescriptions and diagnoses

The doctor must confirm any appointments with diagnostic data, explain his actions in an accessible and understandable way and always take into account your financial capabilities.