Dentists are too nice.
Some people out there find this difficult to believe, especially considering the amount of pain that dentists can and do inflict.
That’s because the public has a strange perception and expectation of the dental profession.
But, seriously, I see so many dentists being too nice to their patients.
By this, what I mean is I see too many dentists allowing patients to have an easy out and allowing them to defer necessary treatment.
Necessary treatment that if it were done now would be better for the patient than not having that treatment done now.
Here is why diagnosed dental treatment needs to be done now:
Conditions get worse.
Dental conditions do not heal themselves.
They get worse.
Cavities get bigger.
Decay approaches pulps.
Periodontal bone loss does not reverse.
Teeth do not straighten themselves.
Super-eruption does not reverse itself.
The cost of having Dental work done does not get cheaper, especially when the condition being treated worsens with time.Unlike VCRs and large screen TVs, the prices of dental treatment have risen with time.
Leaving treatment to a later date to be fixed means that the treatment will be more extensive and probably more painful when done later.It’s going to hurt more for the patient.
Some treatments are easier for the dentist to perform when they are performed earlier rather than later.
In fact most treatments…
So why do dentists delay treatment?
The number 1 reason that dentists allow patients to “escape” from having diagnosed treatment completed is because the dentist has not been taught how to SELL the treatment to the patient.
And because dentists are not taught how to feel COMFORTABLE in discussing costs and fees and money with patients, these dentists allow the patient an ESCAPE PATH.
Dentists who do not understand the elements of a sales process [and that’s what it is], feel a rejection when the patient does not go ahead with treatment.
And because most dentists have not learned how to improve their ability to present necessary treatment in a logical sequence, they seek ways of justifying their inadequacies.
In fact, there are some dentists who believe that giving the patient the option of having no treatment is a valid and legitimate option.
Well, let me tell you this:
Patients do not have dental degrees and do not understand dentistry and the consequences of non-treatment.
So, giving the uneducated patient the choice of non-treatment is simply supervised neglect.
In fact, there are consultants who teach dentists how to feel OK about patients not accepting treatment.
Yes, really!
These consultants believe that if you present the option of doing nothing to the patient, and then the [uneducated] patient chooses that option, then the dentist has not been rejected, because the patient has taken one of their recommendations.
Is that crazy or crazy?
Let me tell you this…. Uneducated patients roaming the streets with untreated time-bombs inside their mouths is a recipe for disaster in any community.
All that does is create unhappy patients who want immediate emergency treatment the instant that their untreated work starts unravelling….
And for all of those four reasons I wrote about earlier, when you attempt to accommodate these traumatised and irate patients and try to placate them, you will say to yourself, over and over and over:
“Why didn’t I fix this problem properly the first time I saw it?”
There is a reason.
And that reason is simply:
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
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