What do we do when a dental practitioner breaks the trust of patients? Should we discuss that within the profession? What happens when those cases are picked up by the media and talked about in the public sphere? Should we engage in the discussion or try and shut it down.
There has been just such a challenging scenario playing out in Western Australia, that involves up to 130 patients who have been stranded mid-treatment and reported to have lost up to $2.3 million after the dentist was reported to have taken his own life. It has now emerged that some of these patients had accessed their superannuation to pay for treatment and have not only lost their money but have also been hit with unexpected tax bills.
At least one prosthodontist had weighed in, saying in one of the articles:
“You’re seeing it more and more, all of these patients getting ridiculous amounts of dentistry done that’s going wrong, and they’re being left stranded.”
The mental health angle seems to have made people in the profession reluctant to talk about the case.
I recently had a dentist (that I didn’t know) contact me to ask what we could do about the negative articles being written about dentists, concerned that the reporting was putting the whole profession in a bad light.
My immediate response was to write ‘Encourage dentists to behave better?’
Probably not exactly what this person wanted to hear. But if you strip everything back to basics - it’s hard to write negative stories about the dental profession if there are no negative stories to report on. Aren’t we supposed to be all about prevention rather than cure?
In this episode of the Dental as Anything podcast I talk about the vexed issue of the early release of superannuation, over-servicing, the role of the media in reporting stories of interest, and how the dental profession should respond.
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