Do you want to be a rich dentist or a good dentist?

摘要

American healthcare often polarises opinon, particularly in the UK and Europe. Is it polarising dentists at home as well? The latest trend in US dentistry, and one I violently oppose, seems to be overdiagnosis and overtreatment. When I first got licensed in the US, only dentists could own dental practices. If a dentist owned more than one practice, he had to spend equal time working at each. I remember watching a TV commercial about Dr Beecham, 'the credit dentist'. He owned ten practices, which meant that he probably spent only two or three hours at each practice per week - no doubt checking the books (this was in the days before the internet and the fax machine, back when calculators were the new hot thing), as he never performed any actual dentistry himself. As the years passed, the equal time at each practice rule was dropped and then, in some states, the rule about only dentists owning practices dropped.