How can you have this widely different amount of cavities based on judgement? How are they not snake oil salesmen, if judgement makes the diagnosis different by magnitudes?
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.