S
sincitysoul
Member
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2011
- Messages
- 51
- Location
- Middle of Illinois, USA
I have my first visit with a dental clinic tomorrow and I was wondering if any of y'all had experience with making the first visit into more of a consultation and what that might entail vs getting treatment right away.
Of note: I have used this dental clinic before (3+ years ago before my physical health went to crap), but they've expanded a bit since then and I will be seeing an entirely new provider that I've not met before. This clinic is ran by our local teaching hospital and staffed by dentists going through their dental residency program. I was told that they generally only have 3-4 dentists working the clinic at any point in time, and considering our town likely have several hundreds (if not thousands) of patients getting their treatment through this clinic, they stay pretty busy.
My teeth are bad, there's no way around that. I think I only have two teeth out of 19 remaining teeth that aren't broken, cracked, or decayed beyond repair and that's purely just because those two teeth are part of a bridge (One anchor tooth on each side of a gap where a tooth was pulled 18 years ago). The best course of action at this point is to extract the remaining 19 teeth and eventually get dentures - The wait list for dentures tends to be AT LEAST 1.5 years long, so when it gets to that point, I will likely be getting those from another facility and paying out of pocket (I've been eyeballing our local Affordable Dentures). The problem is that I (A) have a lot of medical problems, (B) am an extremely slow healer, and (C) have a dental phobia.
I was thinking of walking in to this first appointment and making it clear that while I'm okay getting x-rays/panoramic x-ray if they want, that would be it as far as treatment and would much rather use this first appointment to touch base and figure out what treatment might look like moving forward since I can really only tolerate getting 1 or 2 teeth pulled every 3-4 weeks VS getting several extracted at once due to both (A) and (B) mentioned above ((I had a bottom molar extracted 2 weeks ago and my system is just now settling back into normal))
Have any of you done something similar?
Of note: I have used this dental clinic before (3+ years ago before my physical health went to crap), but they've expanded a bit since then and I will be seeing an entirely new provider that I've not met before. This clinic is ran by our local teaching hospital and staffed by dentists going through their dental residency program. I was told that they generally only have 3-4 dentists working the clinic at any point in time, and considering our town likely have several hundreds (if not thousands) of patients getting their treatment through this clinic, they stay pretty busy.
My teeth are bad, there's no way around that. I think I only have two teeth out of 19 remaining teeth that aren't broken, cracked, or decayed beyond repair and that's purely just because those two teeth are part of a bridge (One anchor tooth on each side of a gap where a tooth was pulled 18 years ago). The best course of action at this point is to extract the remaining 19 teeth and eventually get dentures - The wait list for dentures tends to be AT LEAST 1.5 years long, so when it gets to that point, I will likely be getting those from another facility and paying out of pocket (I've been eyeballing our local Affordable Dentures). The problem is that I (A) have a lot of medical problems, (B) am an extremely slow healer, and (C) have a dental phobia.
I was thinking of walking in to this first appointment and making it clear that while I'm okay getting x-rays/panoramic x-ray if they want, that would be it as far as treatment and would much rather use this first appointment to touch base and figure out what treatment might look like moving forward since I can really only tolerate getting 1 or 2 teeth pulled every 3-4 weeks VS getting several extracted at once due to both (A) and (B) mentioned above ((I had a bottom molar extracted 2 weeks ago and my system is just now settling back into normal))
Have any of you done something similar?
