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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

A cavity is just a hole or groove of various depth. It's probably less that one dentist sees a cavity and the other sees nothing and more that one dentist sees a cavity worth addressing the the other sees the beginning of a cavity that they figure will need to be addressed eventually, but there's not a major reason to do it now rather than next year or the year after that.

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.

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My dentist shows me the xray they take once every 5 years. Then they walk me through what a cavity would look like. Then they show me that i have none.

I can understand that the external "poke at it" method requires some judgment, but an xray shouldn't have that much variance.

What you are missing by waiting 5 years for an X-ray is that the rate of growth affects when the cavity needs to be filled.

That's why I also go get a "poke around and look" checkup every year. The X-ray is to spot deeper things, but you can't do that every year without the x-rays becoming a risk factor themselves.

Is that true?

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.

That's what I was led to believe by my dentist when I asked. I just checked danish national guidance, and they say the dose of x-rays is so low the increased risk is incalculable. Instead they say the dentist should only ever use an x-ray if they find it medically necessary out of a principle of minimization.

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.

One dentist has a much bigger mortgage payment than the other.

That seems quite like lying to me for some imagined benefits of their patients.

No professional judgment is important.

I don’t tell the PM every single thing wrong in our code base. I bring up the things that need to be addressed.

Yet you are probably in the 90% of developers who cannot estimate properly.

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.

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