Scammy dentistry seems to be as American as apple pie to me. I grew up in Toronto, had braces as a teenager to correct a cross-bite, and was left with a permanent lingual arch wire to prevent shift. Those wires are held in place with bonding material - same shit they use to fill cavities - and wear down over time, requiring re-attachment. So I moved down to SoCal for work, and some time around 2015, the wire needed some work. I went to a local dentist that was recommended by a friend, only to have that dentist use so much bonding material that she fused two teeth together. Incensed, I went back and demanded to have it fixed so that I could floss. She blithely claimed my teeth wouldn't shift in my 30s and simply removed it instead of fixing her mistake. Fast forward a handful of years, and I have awful TMJ problems and require another round of ortho because that cross-bite returned. I've also had the gratuitous cavity scam pulled on me by a dentist in San Jose.

Dentists and dentistry in the US seems to me to be a scam. You've got a plethora of schools of varying quality, pumping out dentists with extreme student debt, all of various quality. By contrast, it seems to me that dentistry schooling back home worked much like other medical training and licensure - HIGHLY regulated and only admitting the absolute cream-of-the-crop applicants, resulting in much more uniform, regulated, and higher quality of patient care.

My approach to dentists in the US is now akin to a car dealership: go in wondering how you're going to get fucked over and be prepared to say no to everything.