Boom Times for Dentists, but Not for Teeth | NYT | 10.11.07
With dentists’ fees rising far faster than inflation and more than 100 million people lacking dental insurance, the percentage of Americans with untreated cavities began rising this decade, reversing a half-century trend of improvement in dental health.
“Most dentists consider themselves to be in the business of dentistry rather than the practice of dentistry,” said Dr. David A. Nash, a professor of pediatric dentistry at the University of Kentucky. “I’m a cynic about my profession, but the data are there. It’s embarrassing.”
Dentists, of course, are no more obligated to serve the poor than are lawyers or accountants. But the issue from a public health standpoint, the critics say, is that even as so many patients go untreated, business is booming for most dentists. They are making more money while working shorter hours, on average, even as the nation’s number of dentists, per person, has declined.
Dentists’ incomes have grown faster than that of the typical American and the incomes of medical doctors. Formerly poor relations to physicians, American dentists in general practice made an average salary of $185,000 in 2004, the most recent data available. That figure is similar to what non-specialist doctors make, but dentists work far fewer hours. Dental surgeons and orthodontists average more than $300,000 annually.
I’m always amazed at how many dentists and oral surgeons seeing (or taking a call on) dental pain due to a dental abscess send them to the Emergency Department for the antibiotic and pain medicine prescriptions. We are not dentist — see the patient and treat the patient — the patient needs a dentist not a delay. Sorry, we’re already taking all those disenfranchised from medicine, we can’t do those disenfranchised from dentistry as well. Ranks right up there with “I just had my chiropractor do a manipulation and now I really hurt.”