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Suspicious of dentists

M

marymarysue

Junior member
Joined
Jan 8, 2023
Messages
5
Location
NY
Hi, this is my first time posting here. I first went to a dentist that had no regard of my pain or fears, and even left cavities in my mouth after he claimed there were none. (I only found out because the hygenist told my mother and I.) It got to the point that after my root canals at that dentist, my mother refused to take me there anymore.

I wanted to tell the context behind why i'm suspicious of my current dentist. She's nice, and they specialize in treating patients with anxiety, and I have seen her 3 times in the past 6 months over my worries. I have a wisdom tooth that has an odd hole in it, and 2 premolars with some brown around their fillings. Each time I have gone there, she said that theyre not cavities and to not worry, but i'm still suspicious that she is letting them get bad, so I will have to get a root canal. I also wanted to get a sealent on my wisdom tooth so I wouldn't have to get an implant, because my family does not have the money for that at all, but she refuses to put it on because she says ill have to get it extracted eventually, although it's fully grown and supposedly without any cavities + decay.

I put a photo of my wisdom tooth and the left side of my mouth. I know the wisdom tooth hole looks normalish here, but its deeper than it looks.
 

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I'm confused (pretty normal occurrence for me these days). What is it you're actually asking?
 
@Gordon I have these little brown spots on my wisdom tooth and the premolar in the photo, I was wondering if they look like cavities or decay. Sorry for the confusion.
 

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Thanks, sorry for being a bit thick.

No, those look like staining from here. (Only way to be certain is to physically check with a dental explorer but I'd be surprised if they were decay.)
 
Okay, thank you for your reply. I wanted another opinion cause I've had a dentist tell me something wasn't a cavity, just for my new one to say "How did they not catch these?"
 
Diagnosing decay is a very subjective thing, if you ask 3 different dentists you'll probably get 4 different answers!
Part of my job was to correlate decay rates across a population, in order to plan future care, training needs etc.
Not very easy when you're dealing with dozens of different dentists. The only way to do it with some semblance of consistency was to "calibrate" a small group of dentists who had about a week's training so we could get some repeatability in the results.
 
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