Pulling Out Teeth
I keep wondering why are dentists so set against pulling out teeth. If there’s any bit of it still good, they’ll torture you till they patch it up as well as they can for a while longer, despite sometimes knowing that you’ll need to have it pulled out not that long afterwards anyway.
I’d be inclined to say it’s for the money. After all, once a tooth is pulled out there’s nothing left for them to do for it, except eventually put an implant in it’s place and then it’s really over, while if they keep struggling to save a little bit of it you’ll still need to come rather frequently to have more work done. But sometimes I wonder if it’s not a fear of failure as well. If they don’t think that if they pull it out now when it was theoretically possible to leave it in for some months or a couple of years longer, they’re failing in their job, not realizing that a doctor fails by not doing what their patient wants them to do.
Ok, pulling a tooth out can hurt a lot for a while but, bar complications, you’ll be pretty much all right a week or so later and that tooth won’t bother you again. As long as we’re just talking about a tooth or two, and not any easily visible ones, I don’t see any problem with that, especially since they can be replaced if you wish.
There could actually be more problems caused by their insistence to fix them, since, for a tooth gone really bad, that means needing to go several times, over the span of a few weeks, and usually being scared out of your wits. That is far more likely to make people stop going, allowing the problems to get even worse, and actually make them less likely to go when they notice a new problem, making them lose more teeth in the end.
Shouldn’t it be the patient’s choice, and shouldn’t that choice be presented to them when the dentist notices that the problem is quite serious and will be a lot of trouble to solve? Or especially when they know they can’t really solve it, but just delay the inevitable a bit longer…
