For a layperson, you are unbelievably, stubbornly confident in your incorrectness. You cannot possibly know the depths of your ignorance. I am an expert, and I will continue fixing the problems caused by bad international dentistry for a healthy fee. You don’t need to believe it for it to be true, and your denial does nothing to change my daily reality in practice. Good luck.
With all due respect, you don’t know what you don’t know. In case you missed it, I am a US dentist. I spend every working day dispelling laypeople’s misconceptions about dental work. What work they have, what work they need, benefits and drawbacks, etc. Your post hits on some of the many very common misconceptions.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to check the efficacy of medical procedures.
You can get x-rays, MRIs and all sorts of after-care examinations performed by your choice of trusted doctors and dentists if you are unsure of the quality of care you received.
Not all work can be evaluated, even with x-rays, as restorative materials often hide the most important details. MRI is irrelevant for dental. X-rays are just a tool, not the final word, and they can’t reveal certain things. Bacterial ingress and leakage is, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Most docs (in both medicine and dental) are exceptionally reluctant to disparage another’s work. It is considered unprofessional and unethical to bad-mouth another professional. That’s just how we’re trained.
A strong indicator will be how you feel after the procedure, which is why I include patient surveys in all of my posts about medical care abroad. Very importantly, other than the higher-rated equipment, expertise and report accuracy, patient satisfaction regarding care quality in Thailand is rated higher than in the US, for example.
This could not be further from the truth. Discomfort and success are completely different things. Some extremely high quality, ultimately-successful treatments will make you feel like shit afterwards. Often, post op symptoms are more closely a matter of chance than they are of quality. Patient satisfaction and surveys are complete worthless bullshit, as evidenced by hospitals’ Press Ganey scores, etc. See Goodhart’s law. Docs hate chasing patient satisfaction because it is so poorly correlated with actual quality care. Telling the patient “no, this will have a poor outcome” gets you bad reviews, while doing a slipshod job that is unlikely to last but looks superficially good gets you patient satisfaction. I see it CONSTANTLY. Smooth-talking, kind-seeming, gentle dentists whose skills and ethics are complete trash. Patients can’t tell the difference. This is why so many people love Nurse Practitioners, who are poorly trained and often happy to act as a rubber stamp for what the patient is asking for, even if it is not in their best interests. People love “yes men”.
Remember, Yelp and Google reviews are both astroturfed by business owners, and used as a weapon by disgruntled people and competitors alike. There’s a local dentist office that’s still under construction and it already has 30+ 5-star reviews in Google. Hasn’t seen a single patient yet. I would not be too trusting of reviews in general.
You have taken your subjective experience and tried to use that to say the work is objectively good. That’s not how any of this works.
Now could that work actually be good? It could be. This is not to say that all foreign dentistry is bad, but SO MUCH OF IT IS. I know because I see it. The fact of the matter is, patients generally don’t know the difference between good and bad work. I see patients all the time who said some absolute basement-tier-garbage work was done by their previous dentist, who they adored.
Incorrect. This applies to most medical care destinations outside of the US; follow-up care is essential abroad and is usually presented in a contract and verbally confirmed with you before any diagnosis even takes place, let alone a procedure. You have access to all the documents and files your hospital abroad does and are also free to share those or ask your hospital to share the documents with other doctors and clinics of your choice.
Ask any orthopedic surgeon what they think of foreign procedure mills offloading post-op knee-replacement care to an unfamiliar doc in the country the patient is visiting from. This is a huge issue docs discuss in private - patients flying to wherever for cheap, substandard treatment and leaving them to manage the complications. It’s a big issue in places like FL and NY, but also broadly everywhere.
Many treatments, you get essentially one chance to get it right, and fixing it is either impossible or 10x as much difficulty. Getting it right the first time is priceless. You can fuck up a tooth in an instant. Destroyed. Cannot be fixed. Some errors are invisible and don’t hurt right away. Many infections are painless or hard to diagnose from typical x-rays. Many compromised teeth spend a few years feeling normal before they fall apart. I know this because I see it every day. I’m the one who gets to fix others’ mistakes - if they can even be fixed.
As a practicing professional who spent the majority of my training seeing a high % of international dentistry, it’s hard to watch.
Dental work is my most common healthcare experience abroad. I cannot recommend Thailand enough, especially for dental work, nothing but 5 out of 5 dentistry for me so far.
What it all boils down to is: how can you know the work done was good? You can’t. You can know it looks good superficially. You can know the dentist was nice, or that their office was clean, and that the bill was low. You can’t know if the work is actually good. You don’t know if they are intentionally overlooking long-term health for doing what the patient/customer wants right now. You don’t know if the materials or techniques would be considered substandard in the US. Yes, other countries often have a different “standard of care”. I have seen ABYSMAL work from Asia and the Middle East. I have seen appalling work from Mexico, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Yes I also see bad work done by local US dentists - primarily those who advertise themselves as being some kind of affordable, emergency, or discount office – but consistently the worst dental treatment I see is foreign. How do I know? I’m the one who has to fix it, if it can be fixed.
Dental tourism scares the hell out of me as a dentist in the US, but I understand why it appeals to people when quality care here is expensive. I have seen bad work from every country in the world, including the US, but the trend is you largely get what you pay for. The offices that accept every insurance under the sun are doing work at discounted fees, and usually cutting corners to do more of it. Medicaid? Pays less than the cost of providing the service unless serious corners are cut. Those are the US-side problems, but the dentists working for poverty wages in India are doing much worse things, on average.
Why is it often worse? With dental tourism you get no follow-up care. You also have no recourse if they fuck up your mouth. Good luck suing a dentist in Mexico or Thailand for malpractice. Turns out, the more financial incentive you have to practice high-quality care, the more you have to lose from fucking up and losing your license.
EDIT: This is “Work Reform”, not “Fuck Everyone Who Has More Skills And Makes More Money Than Me”, although you wouldn’t know it from the types of responses sometimes. Quite frankly dentists are workers, whether employees or practice owners. They only earn what the work of their hands allows. They are not exploiting other workers to do the billable labor, because legally they cannot allow non-dentists to do the vast majority of billable work (there are small exceptions that account for a tiny % at most practices). They are not capitalists. The downvoters just hate the message and would rather shoot the messenger than listen to someone who knows from the inside.
All this boils down to is that there is nothing more expensive than first-world human labor. Without a doubt, nursing homes are increasingly run by sleazy profiteers, but the reason you can’t easily do better (i.e. find a high-quality nursing home) is because it’s simply expensive to employ enough people, who have sufficient skill and work ethic, to give the elderly care.
Yes, PE in healthcare is destroying the country in every imaginable way. The answer in this case is more complicated than get the for profit companies out of nursing homes, which is necessary but not sufficient to solve the problem. The scariest thought is that there may be no good solution.
Keep pushing to advertise it and I’ll have more work, thanks.