Dr. Christensen does the profession a real disservice in September JADA’s "Is the Wide Range in Crown Fees Justifiable?" when he distills the practice of dentistry into a commodity-based model that has a certain fee attached to it (
JADA 2006;137[9]:1297–9
).
Many blame the insurance industry for our current position but I, for one, feel that each and every dentist is somewhat to blame. How does it make us feel when a phone shopper calls our office to get a price on a crown? What’s next? "Can I get my tires rotated while I wait?"
Dental fees should be calculated based on many of the factors stated by Dr. Christensen, but the most important factor is the dentist’s care, skill and judgment during the examination, diagnosis, prognosis and, finally, treatment of the patient. At some point we, as a profession, need to get away from being tooth fixers and back to being the physicians of the masticatory system. Then these questions will not come up. When was the last time a patient called our thoracic surgery colleagues and asked, "How much for a coronary bypass graft?" We train our patients how to treat us, and as long as this type of fee-for-commodity mentality persists, then we have to be happy with what we get.
