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Comment by xyclos | Hacker News Reader

When I was 12, I was scheduled by my regular dentist to have two cavities filled. It was the first time I had anything negative in a dental checkup. We were very poor, so my dad was pissed that it was going to be almost $400 to get them filled. He found a different dentist that was supposed to be a bit cheaper, and I went to that one instead. He was shocked to hear that I had been scheduled for two fillings. Since I was a new patient, he did x-rays, which showed zero decay. The dentist that lied about me having cavities is still in practice today more than 20 years later, and has 4.5 stars on Google.

I fear there's not really a good way to vet Dentists effectively since most people probably never find out that they've been scammed for years. I'd love to learn some new strategies though.

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> I fear there's not really a good way to vet Dentists effectively since most people probably never find out that they've been scammed for years. I'd love to learn some new strategies though.

It's something the government should be doing; running sting operations against dentists with compliants against them. Unfortunately, dentists and prosecutors are in the same social circles.

I like the idea of that proposal, but I'm not sure how it would work in practice.

The problem is that the crooked dentist will argue that the "bait" patient has in fact have cavities. And then if the prosecutor finds somehow convincing evidence that the patient does not actually have cavities the crooked dentist can change tactic and say it was a honest mistake on their part.

With other crimes where "sting operations" work the situation is much more clear cut. The target of the drug sting is either selling drugs or not selling drugs. If you find drugs you can easily prosecute them. With the dental scam even if you manage to catch them red handed once, it is still a long and complicated process to prove it was a scam and not a mistake.

Or alternatively we can legislate to make making mistakes with dental diagnosis illegal the same way having large batches of drugs is illegal. That will make the prosecution easier, but will have all kind of other negative consequences.

It could be done. You do a first pass of a significant number of dentists, with people with confirmed healthy teeth, and then do a second pass on every dentist who recommends fillings. Caught scamming twice? License suspension. Repeat offender? Jail time. The odds of such a program putting an innocent dentist in jail gotta be near-nil.

There's no shortage of people who would damn-near volunteer for the work, given how many of us have had multiple run-ins with crooked dentists.

Even if it cost, say, $10k to catch each scumbag dentist, the ROI to society would be tremendous. Catch enough dentists in the space of a few months, apply appropriate consequences, and the whole culture will change.

That said, in reality the dentists would 'hire lobbyists' to kill anything like this.

Hmmmm. I like this.

Could it be done as a non-profit perhaps? I mean we clearly can’t do the licence suspension and the jail time that way but we could maybe shame the scammers?

Hahaha I love it. Extinction Rebellion but for dentists? ... How about "Extraction Action"?

The main issue I foresee is that there's just so much to be outraged about in the world now. People are using shameful behavior to distract from worse shames - it's been weaponized!

So, making a significant impact in a crowded 'shame market', across a tightly controlled media landscape, generally requires a highly skilled dedicated team.

I was wondering about this problem since this thread; specifically, wouldn't it be rather easy to use big data techniques to catch dentists who are way outside norms?

And after looking into it, it seems that insurance companies, Medicaid etc have been doing exactly this, and catching some pretty big fish. It's new for me to give insurance companies much credit for doing anything good, and I feel weird now. Real enemy of my enemy stuff.

> dentists and prosecutors are in the same social circles

What? Are there dentist/prosecutor cocktail parties us software grunts are missing out on?

I wonder if there is room for a service that just performs X-rays and passes them through some kind of AI model as a kind of a "dental fizz-buzz." Surely they wouldn't have any perverse incentives in that case.

Oh man. I would dearly love to see scumbag dentists lose their ability to easily scam vulnerable people, often desperate and in pain.

That said - I'm sure they have tight regulations on who is allowed to X-ray teeth, and diverse ways to keep their own in line should they threaten the apple cart.

Ever heard of nano silver fluoride? ... Exactly. (Unless you saw the HN story on it here recently [0].)

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41474080

You’d think they were breaking a law or something, recommending unnecessary medical procedures.

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