Self sabotage
Not far from my dental office I used to have a specialist oral surgeon. Let’s call them Dr Alpha.
I never really enjoyed surgery so I made the decision that I didn’t want to place dental implants. Instead I referred my patients who needed implants to Dr Alpha.
Whenever I’d send someone to Dr Alpha for an implant they’d invariably come back a couple of months later with it in place ready for the restoration.
One day I got a call from a new oral surgeon. Let’s call them Dr Beta. Dr Beta was just getting started and was looking for referrals. In order to give them a hand I sent them three implant patients.
A very strange thing happened.
All three implant patients returned from Dr Beta having decided not to proceed with treatment. I was so amazed by this that I rang the patients to find out the reasons for their decisions.
It turned out that Dr Beta was giving their patients a long and scary list of possible complications. Dr Beta even warned of the possibility of death from having an implant placed.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a trend among many dentists (especially young, inexperienced ones) to give patients a huge list of possible complications, even if the odds are miniscule. They sometimes give dire warnings about trivial, easily managed complications.
It looks to me like a form of self sabotage where dentists are so terrified of failure that they try and dissuade patients from normal and reasonable treatment. They’d rather extract a saveable tooth than try to save it and fail. It made me wonder how many saveable teeth are lost every year due to extravagant warnings by the dentist.
Of course you need to give warnings for some procedures but they need to be balanced and sensible.
If you find yourself warning patients about 19 things prior to starting a root filling ask yourself: “Am I doing this for a sensible reason or am I doing this because of my lack of competence or because of my personal fear of failure?”
Disclaimer: Despite all of the above, you must always do whatever your dental insurer says.
