Dr. Alan Paradis: Well I would say certainly that one of the strengths of seeing a prosthodontist to deliver your dental care is that we are trained to give a proper diagnosis of what the patients conditions are and determining the treatment needs based on the individual patient needs and I’m going to emphasize that one of the fascinating things about the professional prosthodontics is that no given day is the same for us, no given patient is the same, it’s always interesting because every single individual has special needs and if the doctor doesn’t spend the time and have the education to determine what those needs are, the patient is going to get a treatment that many times in these corporate models is optimized for the profit of the doctor or corporation and not optimized for the patient’s needs and this is kind of the extreme what you brought up about corporate dentistry providing one form of treatment for everybody that enters their practice is really the extreme extension of this. In other words, the doctor’s ethical responsibility is to address the individual needs of the patient, removed from what the needs of the doctor are. There used to be a system where if the doctor was able to look at a patient as an individual and treat their needs. There was adequate compensation to that doctor where that system work to the benefit of both. Right now we have evolved to the point where there’s a strong pressure for dental practices to provide treatment of patients based on the need of the practice, which is in many case the investors. So we feel the specialty level dental care where there’s an individual relationship between the patient and the doctor, where the patient can request their treatment based on their needs and the doctor has the skills and the education to provide the proper treatment that that’s where the patient gets the benefit.
Dr. David McFadden: And even to add a little bit more to that, contrasting prosthodontics, our specialty of reconstructive dentistry with the average general dental office. Many consumers will go into a general dental office thinking that all their options exist in that office when in fact they go. It’s like going into a plumbing supply store and trying to get electrical supplies. It’s not available there, unfortunately in dentistry the consumer doesn’t know that so many times what happens is that the treatment gets dumb down to the level of what the doctor is capable of and because most patients still believe the doctors knows best and are going to do what’s best for their patients. They’ll follow the lead of the doctor and many times that’s where it goes wrong. Think of it this way that thing that you may need isn’t for sale in that office even though you may be led to believe that it is
