You are entitled to your opinion. Your opinion is that we want to save money so we pull your tooth. Hopefully you’ve had enough sensible responses to realise that isn’t the case now and no one can possibly diagnose you over the internet.
you also say you despise us and find us repulsive and feel we are money driven. again you are entitled to your opinion. But I feel the need to defend my profession at this point.
We are a highly trained profession. We study for a minimum of five years undergraduate. More recent graduates have had longer courses due to covid. We then have to complete foundation training. Our courses are year long, 9-5 with short holidays, so no opportunity to get part time jobs to help support ourselves. We come out of uni with HUGE debts.
From the outset we have to pay for our professional fees, our indemnity, our insurances, our accountants, our professional subscriptions such as BDA membership, our uniforms, our Loupes and other specialist equipment and only some are provided by the practices we work in.
We generally all do an element of NHS work, but this is poorly funded and a lot of the procedures we do do not cover our expenses. Lab bills in particular are expensive. The lab bill for a cobalt chromium denture is more than the remuneration on the NHS as one example.
We do private work in order to stay afloat a lot of the time. In order to do both NHS, private work and in some cases specialise in a particular area, to do this to an acceptable standard we must invest in further training courses, further degrees, professional development. All at a cost. Training time means we need to take time off and are not remunerated for the time away from
surgery.
Then there are the extra expenses for folk like myself who are also business owners. Employers national insurance has risen significantly, as have wages ( quite rightly), energy bills are double what they were five years ago.
we all have business loans and interest rates are rising, the cost of materials has doubled since I bought my practice seven years ago.
we need to keep ourself compliant, so we pay for regular electricians, fire prevention, legionella risk assessments, cross infection control, maintenance, inspection of autoclaves, x ray equipment, dental chairs, hand pieces. We pay for our expensive computer software, our IT support, our fire alarms, our employers liability, our telephone service, our water supplies ( which are huge), our dental labs, staff training, rent, rates and contents/building insurance.
then we want to stay current so we invest in digital technology such as scanners to give the best results to our patients.
on top of that we have to manage patients and their expectations. We are the profession with the highest suicide rate. We live in fear of patient complaints. We practice defensive dentistry because we worry about attempting complicated procedures. We have very little secondary support as the government are not investing in the training of oral surgeons, prosthodontists and orthodontists. Patients that we refer are waiting upwards of two years to be seen.
Patients sometimes don’t show up for appointments. Last month alone in our practice with had 70 missed appointments. Which leads to waiting lists and long waits to be seen.
I drive a second hand Toyota which gets me from A to B. The only dentists I know with flashy cars are the ones doing very specialist procedures such as implants. And to become an implantologist take many years of training and sacrifice to get there. They are highly skilled and work really hard.
so of course you can have your opinions, but it is also really important to know the full picture before you judge us so harshly