It takes several years of learning for one to be called a professional. It requires several years of commitment, training, intense testing, and mental health support for dentists to acquire a license and have the authority to exercise their skills.
Patients visit health centers to access health care services with the hope they will get help. However, an unfortunate happens, and the results are the opposite of expectations.
There exist ‘professionals’ in dentistry that are tarnishing the image of the industry. They practice their profession in unethical ways. This article will be discussing the dark side of dentistry for more insights.
Factors Explaining the Dark Side of Dentistry
Different Body Parts Pain
Some outcomes are, of course, a result of repetitive routine. Like any other professional, cosmetic dentistry involves different parts of your body that leave these parts feeling tired in one way or the other. Long-held and continuous posture when attending to patients can cause pain, tightness, and other related problems.
If you have been in the industry for a while, you understand what it means. It has been happening, and if you are yet to experience this, maybe it will. Dentists mostly experience pain in the neck, shoulder, and lower back than other professionals in other occupational groups.
Body aches may appear early in dental careers, with more than 70% of dental practitioners experiencing pain in the first years of their career. These are problems that can lead to a severe physical disability. Dentists are advised to seek neurological rehabilitation service and examine the contributing factors in the early stages of employment.
On Job Challenges
Dentistry has ethics and codes of conduct, but people are breaking every code by day with the happenings in the profession. It is happening in dental offices. Among these include insurance fraud, abuse of the staff verbally, patient over-treatment, and undertreating lack of mental health support for dentists and any other sort of treatment in between.
You might have heard of new dental staff mistreatment, especially with the new practitioners in the service. Some have their prep checked, and others are told only to do drug consulting. There are others hired but never receive remuneration even after busy days, weeks, and months of severe and no break engagements.
What follows is quitting the job to go and look for another, hoping things may change. Surprisingly, one lands in the world full of advertisements for associates looking for individuals willing to work day and nights and weekends without any leave.
It gets even worse when you realize that some of the associates looking for your service will only need you for a few days a week. The poor mental health support for dentists leaves you in a dilemma when you’ve many bills to be paid, and the job is reimbursing you for limited days. Up to now, there is no other option other than accepting the offer on the table and looking for another job that probably will boost your ability to meet your bills.
Treatment-Related Problems
When you think of the treatment done mainly by dentists, implants, and teeth whitening, tops that list. Teeth whitening often causes a sensitivity that can be uncomfortable and chronic to some extent.
Patients don’t know that tooth implants are said to cause inflammatory conditions known as Peri-implantitis. Peri-implantitis is the cause of bleeding around the implant and loss of bone. This condition is severe for patients with more than orthodontic services and continues even after treatment.
Medical School Tales
The dark side of dentistry hinders dentists from making money. Medical schools are flooding the entire profession with shallow thinking. Dentists are being pampered with information that they only need to be good, and the patient will keep lining up for their services.
Medical schools are still teaching what they used to teach in the last twenty years or so. They are telling dentists to remain focused, and things will change. They are telling dentists not to market their dentistry or even hold conversations about how to do dentistry. Whoever is telling you not to market your profession as a dentist probably doesn’t know about dentists’ mental health support.
When you market your dentistry, you educate the patient and feel confident, and the price can’t be an issue. Patients understand the benefits and negatives of not taking action and opt for rehabilitation services. They are also excluded from external pressure since they have information from a dentist who prioritizes the patient’s wellness over their interest- making money.
Digital Challenges
Dentistry as a professional has unpredictable challenges that make it difficult to maintain mental health support for dentists and ethical postures with the clients. There have been several graduates coming to the market with limited employment opportunities. With the older dental practitioners delaying retiring from the job, the newly graduated dentists automatically result in excess professionals in the job market.
The newly graduated dentists are fresh from school, and most of them have used loans to facilitate their education. They are now supposed to initiate the process of repaying the loans awarded for school fees. A few of them happen to secure employment but still, need mental health support for dentists.
They are subjected to lower pay that is way below the overhead cost. These problems are even escalated by the absence of the indemnity of the insurance that disappeared from the dental marketplace.
Dental health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations are replacing it. These two are associated with lower costs and lower remunerations. They are the factors that are encouraging unethical and unlawful insurance practices in the industry.
With government health insurance, the rate and incidences of abuse have even increased. Health centers are sending exaggerated bills to the relevant insurance bodies for compensation for the clinical services. It is the result of these actions that honorable insurance providers are forced out of the market, like Medicaid, and getting replaced by other dubious entities.
Some of these Medicaid providers are considered too big to fail, and their expulsion from the health insurance service provider can result in poor access to health care. According to the audit report, there has been gross overtreatment of dental patients, especially children, by an unlicensed child dentist. There have been outlier billing coming from large groups like the dental service organizations.
Current Dental Service Organizations
One advantage comes with dental service organizations. They may provide immediate job opportunities for immediate graduates in dentistry. It is explicitly clear they are at least solving the problem of flooding graduates in the job market, but at some point, they cause problems related to mental health support for dentists.
A doctor is trained and equipped with the skills to serve the interests of the patients. In comparison, dental service organizations have the sole responsibility of making a profit for the stakeholders. When they happen to cross, the one to suffer is the patient and may even get cheated.
Dental service organizations are known to operate in different business models and environments, and when problems occur, they intrude on doctor-patient relationships without the patient’s consent. Some of them are unlicensed bodies directing patient care. It is against the professional ethics and laws charging for the same and fraud to the consumer.
Discount Dental Plan
A discount dental plan is a plan invented to help fund dental care for patients without dental insurance. It involves payment of a yearly fee to an individual, family, or employer discount plan. The patient can access dental care at a discounted fee. Patients benefit from the lowered dental costs through the annual fee. It doesn’t often happen with manipulation of the process to disadvantage the patient.
The insurance companies are reluctant to pay even when they are obliged to pay. Through the various tactics put in place, they manage to either delay or deny payment for dental care until the insurance attorney intervenes. Apart from that, they go ahead with manipulating the scheduled fee. They may set payment for a particular service at a lower amount to discourage and scare patients from that specific service.
Also, the discount dental plan may disadvantage dental patients in several other ways. The patient may visit the health center only to be attended to by unlicensed professionals against the law. It happens mainly with patients with limited employment options or those working under contracts. This leads to hiking the fees, which eventually leads to obtaining money from patients.
Although patients tend to bargain, they end up being overcharged because there are no oversight bodies or auditing expenditures. Dental discount plans are not under any oversight, and they are not even allowed in some countries. Administrators don’t audit the spending as it is with the insurance industry.
What Are the Solutions to the Dark Side of Dentistry
Come Up With an All-Round Good Team
For you and your team to create an incomparable pool of dentistry services, you ought to be efficient and effective. Strive to form a team that knows how to do it precisely and is even motivated to make a patient who walks in feel valued, worthy and welcome.
A happy patient will come next time or refer a potential patient. It is the only way to remain predictable. Learn how to offer world-class dentistry, market it, and promote it. By the end of the day, you will help many people with mental health while creating a prosperous life for them.
Bankruptcy Service
Every other year there are several graduates in the fields of dentistry. Many of them get into the job market with the sole idea of selling their skills to start servicing their debts accumulated while schooling. Get them into doing unethical deeds once they get into offering service to obtain money for settling the debt as soonest possible.
These, among others, compromise their professionals. Therefore, reducing the bankruptcy service of a substantially reduced number of dentists getting into the job market every year will go a long way in improving ethical treatment and other dental practices.
Mentorship
Graduates from medical school need mental health support for dentists after graduating in positive environments regardless of their professionalism. There should be clinics where the interest of the patient is valued.
It is the only way to give them a better beginning of the profession in dentistry. Their role models and mentors should be people of goodwill, not private practitioners with an evil mind of exploiting consumer and medical fraud.
Strict And Punitive Regulatory Bodies
Authorities and regulatory bodies ought to be strict and punish violators in dentistry. It is the only way to keep their attention. They should also maintain strict sanctions for dentists repeating offenses. There should be severe punishment as mere warming from the boards only encourages violators with patients being abused.
Imprisonment
Some dentists go beyond abusing patients and colleagues to involve themselves in business models harmful to the public. Such people need not only legal actions taken against them but also criminal actions. They are punished in ways that don’t make an impact on them.
Fines and other penalties are paid by their investors, which don’t affect them in any way. Proposals for the imprisonment of such should pace well with their evil actions. It is only through such a punishment mechanism that dentistry images would remain mental health support for dentists.
Trust between Insurance and the Health Sector
The unnecessary competition, collision, and mistrust that has been experienced between the insurance industry and the health facilities should stop. When we have a professional dentist and a local dentist respecting and upholding dentistry ethics, it will be the beginning of the trust-building game. That’s when the insurance industry will accept any information and data from health facilities, eliminating mistrust and facilitating smooth operations between the two bodies.
Dental as a professional is slowly losing its culture. A culture that knew nothing about any discipline happening in the dental industry to date. Many dental professionals and in their world need mental health support for dentists. It has gone to the extent of preferring neutral ground and anticipating new changes in the industry.
But sitting and watching will not bring to reality the dreams about reforms in dentistry. With the self-regulated operations running on, the laws of demand and supply in dentistry may continue devaluing the profession if no actions are put in place.
