The Conversation
The Trouble With Dentistry
In May, Ferris Jabr wrote about a dentist named John Roger Lund, who allegedly defrauded many of his patients by giving them unnecessary treatments. Lund was an outlier, but even the most common dental procedures, Jabr wrote, are not always as safe, effective, or durable as we are meant to believe.
Thank you for publishing “The Trouble With Dentistry.” Overtreatment is a serious problem in our profession. While some patients wish to have perfect, bright-white smiles and a mouth that looks like it has never had any problems, most people want to be able to eat without pain and to have reasonably good aesthetics. It’s pretty easy to provide this without major, expensive dentistry—but the dentist won’t make much money. And that’s a problem. By the time a dentist gets out of school and sets up or buys an existing practice, he or she can easily be close to $1 million in debt. In the United States, poor populations are largely underserved in medicine as well as in dentistry. If our society were to offer some form of tuition reduction for serving those populations, both conditions could be helped.
David Dalley, D.D.S.
The American Dental Association and dentists across the country are dedicated to the health and safety of the patients they serve. As a dentist for 32 years, I was disappointed by the author’s reinforcement of inaccurate, negative stereotypes about dentists, and the use of one example of alleged professional misconduct to make blanket statements about the entire dental profession.
The ADA is dedicated to evidence-based dentistry, which integrates the dentist’s clinical expertise, the patient’s needs and preferences, and the most current, clinically relevant evidence. All three are part of the decision-making process for patient care. To that end, the ADA successfully advocated for evidence-based dentistry to become a required component of dental-school curricula and established the Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry to develop resources that help dentists integrate relevant scientific evidence into patient care. We have the data to show that dentists all across the country are accessing this content.
The author’s implication that dentists are motivated by profit to pay down high educational debt is not borne out by the facts. For instance, dentists have for decades advocated for fluoridation of community water supplies to prevent tooth decay. Why
