https://asset.cdocs.com/uploads/forum/attachments/258722/Rea...
It's a fascinating read that basically confirms all of these anecdotes.
Also, I imagine some dentists might decide for their patients benefit (as long as there's no pain reported) to let a couple develop to a level is there's a few in various stages of development, so they can do them all at once with a single procedure.
I don't know how likely or accurate those are, but those are some of the obvious ways that came to mind that dentists might be seeing the same thing and suggesting different actions that don't boil down to them wanting to fleece a customer.
I don’t tell the PM every single thing wrong in our code base. I bring up the things that need to be addressed.
I would like to have a professional judgement closer to how it's done in statics, instead of developers, since you fuck up lives directly with one, and usually not with the other one.
I can understand that the external "poke at it" method requires some judgment, but an xray shouldn't have that much variance.
In the United States, it is routine to get your mouth X-Ray’ed every 6 months when you go in for a cleaning. Dental plans include these checkups at no extra charge.
So it sounds like it's the individual dentists judgment, and their organizing body says that they base it on the occurrence of dental problems in the population the clinics they oversee, with some adjustments based on patient age and risk factors.
So according to Danish authorities, you should be safe getting x-ray'ed every 6 months. They just don't recommend it, since it's a waste.
Dentists and plumbers have what excuse?
The older the building, the higher the chances stuff will go seriously, sometimes catastrophically with no chance of recovery, wrong. Say for the plumber, according to the plans or the knowledge of the building owner, there should be no more lead pipes left in the building. Lo and behold, you open the wall, and find a lead pipe still under pressure, and next to it a tap to somewhere else that doesn't show up on any plan.
Endboss is if you find asbestos. That turns a jobsite worth a week of work instantly into a hazmat site plus immediate concerns for OSHA aspects.
Or for electricians, the plan was to rip out the entire electrical work in an apartment, and you suddenly find out that half the rooms of the neighbor next to you suddenly don't have lights any more because for some unknown reason half of his apartment actually runs via your client's apartment and no one ever noticed. (In this case it turns out that decades ago, this was one giant apartment that was split as part of a divorce proceeding and then sold off separately)
Tell me you missed the point without telling me you've missed the point.
Plumbers can give widely different estimates for the SAME job, with the same knowledge (initial or after finding out about all the asbestors, strange piping, and other issues).
Building a wall of known size takes X bricks, Y windows, etc. Contractor 1 might have more markup or estimate different hours to complete the job vs contractor 2 but the parameters of the job are relatively fixed.
The dentist is seeing the same mouth (wall) and telling you there is vastly different numbers of cavities (bricks/windows). And not off by a small margin, but orders of magnitude.
Sure. I mean, dentists, unlike every other human, are not interested in making money, and would not abuse their position to give incorrect information that is in their benefit. /s
Maybe for profit healthcare is a bad idea?
Surely all developed countries have it wrong.
Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.
Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.
European healthcare is run very differently across the continent. 'Insurance' can mean a [state] social insurance institute that the doctor must bill. Some countries would employ the doctor directly as part of a nationalised health system. Some places it might be the municipality or city that would then get some subsidy from central government. Some it is a mix of all of this. 'Free' healthcare might actually mean a few hundred Euros, or literally nothing.
Later I requested the clinic to share the x-ray with me and consulted with another pediatric dentist from another EU country. His assessment was completely different, and recommended very minimal intervention.
Source: Also a European, spouse is a doctor
This is the poster child of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
In my personal experience, Canada and Australia don’t suffer from this.
Part of the reason is that fashions change... that dentist was trained at a time when minor cavities were always treated as soon as they were noticed, but the more recent recommendation is to monitor and treat only if it gets worse.
munger was right. power of incentives, eh?