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Comment by VectorLock | Hacker News Reader

What kind of treatments make that 28% "unnecessary?" Regular cleanings too frequently?

It depends, here they say mostly fillings. But there is only so much implants you can sell to a person, and acceptance is lower.

Research that showed the 28% figure: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036573

This is anecdotal, but I remember reading an article about a dentist who was convicted of doing expensive and completely unnecessary surgeries on many of his patients, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient in some cases. I can't find the article, unfortunately.

I believe Atlantic had such an article recently. Good starting read is "How dentists rip us off" from Readers Digest.

However, it's a bell curve. There are extremely moral and extremely immoral people. Some of them are dentists.

> There are extremely moral and extremely immoral people. Some of them are dentists.

Absolutely true. However, it seems that other areas of medecine have better systems in place to prevent abuse, and dentristry would do well to follow suit.

Yes, dentistry is in many ways different from the rest of medicine. It's kind of separated from it. However, that is not the source of the problem. It's the fact that average person uses dental care more often than any other medical care, and dental treatments are in vast majority medical operations rather than drugs.

Let's focus on the second part of that statement. It means that majority of cost of dental care goes to the practitioner, rather than to drug makers. This means they have more reason to cheat. The payoff is higher.

That's enlightening, thank you. I was unaware that the type of medical care (within a specialty) can change the financial incentives of the doctor. As someone who was just told to get my wisdom teeth removed, this makes me want to seek another opinion.

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