It comes around every few years; the media choose a profession to vilify and accuse.

In fairness, the bankers have had a pretty long stint of bad press, and well deserved many would say. Estate agents and lawyers have taken their turn.

More recently even doctors, who for years have been placed on the most high of pedestals have suffered a little mud slinging. Dentists have always been a pretty easy target probably because of the rather outdated image of us all driving around in sports cars, whilst living the high life on the back of extortionate fees and dubious clinical standards.

Every few months an article will surface about a dentist who has brought us all into disrepute. Someone who has usually put money before professional standards and sometimes this is quite rightly deserved. One of my own university colleagues is at the moment languishing at her majesty’s pleasure for defrauding the NHS out of thousands of pounds, hardly something that anyone in our profession would ever attempt to defend.

Over the years there have been countless TV programmes and articles aimed at making the general public question the trust they have in their dentist like the infamous ‘Driffield driller’ who ruined people’s mouths in pursuit of the quick buck.

But in the same way that Harold Shipman was not a classic example of a friendly local GP, the overwhelmingly huge majority of us dentists are decent, hard working professionals not out to con anyone out of cash, or perform treatment that doesn’t need doing in order to fund a Caribbean holiday.

And so it was with a sense of dismay and a heavy sigh that I read the press this week ‘Are you being ripped off by your dentist?’ The story stemmed from an article written in Which? Magazine accusing dentists of not being clear about costs. The research was based on visits to 25 practices and a survey of 1000 people, 80% of whom said they trusted their dentist’s advice but 40% couldn’t understand the charging system. First of all, this is 25 practices out of the 10,000 practices, a questionable sample size I would humbly suggest?

Don’t get me wrong, I would agree it’s always good to critically question the way any profession is run, I’m just not 100% sure that drawing too many conclusions on how us dentists must be all in it to try and pull the wool over our patient’s eyes based is helpful. I would agree that the cost of dentistry is sometimes confusing, it’s difficult enough to explain the processes without even starting on all the different charging permutations.

Sometimes I feel more like a second car salesman than a health care professional. But dentistry is not exact. It’s rarely possible to be able to accurately predict cost before seeing our patients just as it would be virtually impossible to find out how much it would be to fix a car without having seen it.

Tomorrow it will be someone else’s turn to take the rap. Dodgy plumbers, utility companies bamboozling us with their price plans. And then, in no time at all, we’ll be back to dentists. What a joy.

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