End Of Teeth Days: Can Private Dental Health Practitioners Provide Objective Care?

First up, a few definitions, so that we can all be clear about what we are talking about here. ‘End of teeth days’ refers to that time in our lives when we are losing our natural teeth. Recently, a patient at our dental clinic shared with me his experience of dealing with this period in relation to his dental care by professionals in the dentistry business. When dealing with “end of teeth days” it’s not surprising that people wonder whether private dental health practitioners can provide objective care. What do we mean by ‘objective care’? Other words for ‘objective’ might be impartial, unbiased, and equitable. What we are trying to get at here is an exposition of each party’s subjective interests and intentions.

Dentists & Patients: Common Ground vs The Unshared Alternatives

The patient wants the best outcome in terms of their oral health at the most affordable price. The dental clinic also wants the best outcome for their patient but knows more about the available options on a technical level. The role of the dental professional should be to lay out those options and their costs for the benefit of the person in the treatment chair. There are barriers to this seemingly straight forward process. Often, the patient can be presenting in pain suffering nerve damage from a broken tooth. This means that the client is not in the best shape to hear and decide on the available courses of action. End of teeth days are likely to be accompanied by a psychologically damaging reaction to losing these deeply embedded and long associated intimate parts of our oral body. Hells bells, losing your teeth is not much fun folks.

Presenting The Options To Patients Losing Their Natural Teeth

Amid this mini-melodrama our dentist is taking X-rays to properly assess the tooth damage and what remedial procedures might be available in each particular instance. There are generally two ways to go in these circumstances, which are root canal therapy or extraction. Yes, following these initial procedures further pathways open up. Crowns to replace broken parts of the tooth if this is a viable option after assessing the damage and root canal therapy. Implants if the tooth is extracted and the area is healthy enough for this procedure. Alternatively, a temporary denture fitting may suffice for some, rather than an expensive permanent implant. Dentists are faced with these working realities all the time as part of their professional responsibilities.

Double Trouble Dental Dilemmas

A sexagenarian patient shared with me the fact that in the last 12 months he twice went through the experiencing of going to the dentist with a cracked molar and each time opted for root canal therapy which proved ultimately futile and was forced to return to that dental clinic and have said tooth removed. This doubled his expense each time and also cost him a great deal of pain and prolonged recovery times. Thus, we are talking about thousands of dollars and lost days from work too boot. There is no clear blame being apportioned to the dentists involved, as they made a call in conjunction with the patient. However, it is the patient who pays the ferry man each time in cash and in the prolonged trauma involved in these double trouble dental dilemmas. You have to ask the question. When dealing with end of teeth days, can private dental health practitioners provide objective care?

We have seen how, for the patient, these decisions are not easy to make, as they have strong attachments to their failing natural teeth. Failing teeth are not easy to forgive. The dentist has to make a call, using her or his technical expertise, to advise the patient on the best course of action. The muddied waters come in via the fact that the dental practitioner profits from whatever happens whether the remedial work is durable or not. Indeed, the dentist doubles his or her revenue if this occurs. Like in the casino, the house always wins. There is no suggestion here that unscrupulous behaviour is at play in most of these cases, rather it is the nature of the business itself. Especially, when all dental care is run as private health business in Australia. Yes, the customer can walk away and use their free market economy right to seek oral care elsewhere but in our sexagenarian patient’s experience the same thing happened at two different establishments. It seems to be a common theme, in end of teeth days, that crumbling crowns are testament to expensive false hopes being run up the flag pole. Now, we could put all of this down to mere bitter reflections over the basic injustices of getting old but I am not so sure. I think that we should take into consideration the feedback from all of our patients and learn from it.

The Business Of Selling Hope

Some cynical individuals have said that a great deal of the healing business has always traded on false hope since time immemorial. That medicine has promised unrealised cures and relief from chronic pain over millennia. Losing one’s teeth has plagued humankind for a very long time. The addition of refined sugar to the diet of human beings has been a sweet curse, which has only made things worse. Interestingly, the trade that enriched European colonisation involved 3 things above all others: slavery, tobacco, and sugar. These were interlinked, as slaves were required on the plantations to harvest sugar and tobacco. These things cost the lives of millions of benighted peoples who were enslaved by Europeans. Tobacco went on to kill millions and millions of people from its diseases. Sugar has damaged the health of billions via obesity and the tooth decay and gum disease ravaging us still. Unregulated capitalism in the food business pushes unhealthy stuff upon ignorant and indifferent consumers globally.

“A dynamic relation exists between sugars and oral health. Diet affects the integrity of the teeth; quantity, pH, and composition of the saliva; and plaque pH. Sugars and other fermentable carbohydrates, after being hydrolised by salivary amylase, provide substrate for the actions of oral bacteria, which in turn lower plaque and salivary pH. The resultant action is the beginning of tooth demineralisation. Consumed sugars are naturally occurring or are added. Many factors in addition to sugars affect the caries process, including the form of food or fluid, the duration of exposure, nutrient composition, sequence of eating, salivary flow, presence of buffers, and oral hygiene. Studies have confirmed the direct relation between intake of dietary sugars and dental caries across the life span.“
– From the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, School of Health Related Professions, New Jersey Dental School, Newark (RT-D), and the Academic Centre for Dentistry, Amsterdam (CvL).

Health As A Private Business

The business of health when run as a private entrepreneurial concern will always be susceptible to questions about its impartiality. Is the profit motive overshadowing the public duty of the health professional? These things are not easy to put to bed one way or another. Modern dentistry is an expensive business to host and a good business sense is vital if dental clinics are going to thrive. Dealing with end of teeth days: Can private dental health practitioners provide objective care? The answer to this query is always going to be cloaked in shades of opaqueness. Customers do not have a real choice, however, in Australia. They cannot seek the diagnosis from a public health facility when it comes to their dental requirements, not without waiting for an appointment that is reserved for the poorest among us and is badly serviced through underfunding anyway by governments. We must all put our trust in the scruples of business men and women wearing white lab coats. Amid the high pitched whine of the electric drill hopes teeter on the edge.

“Dentistry in Australia has almost a magnetic pull on dentists and future aspirants due to the successful careers that the country offers to dentists. To work as a dentist in Australia, you need to be licensed by the Dental Board of Australia, the leading authority overseeing dental regulations and practices in the country.

Currently, the average annual dentist salary Australia offers lies between 190,000 AUD and 250,000 AUD. The dentist salary in Australia per hour is about 120 AUD to 125 AUD. “

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