Aspen Dental, you suck

The BBQ Pit
1

I had a badly infected tooth yesterday, it went from a mild ‘hmm, that’s a weird ache’ to throbbing pain and swollen face overnight. I’m new in this area and don’t have a regular dentist yet, plus I’m just shy of being truly phobic about dentists. Lots of Not Good experiences as a kid, blah blah blah.

Anyway, I was looking online to see who was close and open early, and Aspen showed you could call as early as 6:30 am, so I did. I made it clear that yes, I was a new patient but that this was an emergency visit, I need to be seen today and the sooner the better. The only office that had a slot was a 50 min drive away, but I jumped on it. Got there at 8:30 for a 9 am appt, and was pleased to be called back almost immediately. They did the whole round of X rays, which made sense, but then did a periodontal check too and offered to do a scan for oral cancer. I declined.

The doctor came in and took a look at my admittedly awful mouth, and started talking about pulling multiple teeth and getting plates and bridges, and what the long term plan would be. I vaguely said yes, I do need a plan, thinking that she was going to leave to wash up then come back and deal with the one tooth that had my face so swollen I could hardly see out of one eye.

Nope.

I got taken back out to the front to talk to their finance guy or something, to work out a treatment plan. At that point I just said ‘yes, I do need a plan but right now I want this agonizing tooth dealt with, today, and nothing else’ They’d been making it sound like I should come back in a few days to deal with it!

The guy backspaced out of all the stuff that had apparently been pre-entered, and he showed me back to the lounge to wait.

And I waited, and waited, and waited.

Almost four hours after I arrived they finally brought me back and took care of the tooth in 10 minutes. The one hygienist let slip that they’d forgotten about me.

Did some reading during that long wait - and came across this:

It’s 10 years old but I recognized a LOT of the tactics - Pulling multiple teeth, dentures and repeated fittings, oral cancer screening, the whole Lets Work Up A Plan And Costs nonsense.

Fuckers. At least this only cost me $81.

2

I hope you are feeling better. Dental pain is awful.

3

Yep, thanks! Once the tooth was taken care of and the novocain wore off, I was and am fine.

4

Working from home since pandemic I sometimes turn on the noon news; yanno, to catch up on the shootings & fires. There are basically three commercials (although the parties change)

  • Were you injured in a car accident? Dial 1-800-SHYSTER
  • Let us turn your bathtub/shower into a walk-in shower, in a day. Of course you can never bathe away your aches & pains again because you no longer have a tub.
  • A corporate dentist (not Aspen) who talks about price, When I had an implant done at my dentist it was expensive but certain things were free - return for stitch removal, & a 3(?) month follow up appt. I’m guessing, & your link kind of confirms that everything at the TV dentist is a la carte. Oh, you need your stitches to come out? That’ll be $___ for another office visit.

Now that your crisis is over, take the time to find a real dentist

5

They also apparently instantly sold my email to random places. My inbox just now was full of Thanks for signing up! emails from things I would never consider needing more info on, like a sports page, Kingsford charcoal, and Katie Couric’s newsletter.

Fuckers…

6

I went to Aspen Dental once.

Kept getting Robo called a week ahead everyday to remind me of my appointment. Finally answered and pressed ‘7 to stop the automated call’, and immediately got a call from the front desk. Bitch, stop calling me, I am an adult and can remember a date set. I am sure it made sense in their Dentist Ted-Talk convention that began with a symposium on cost cutting measures, “Are you aware that every year in the Dental World 1 Billion dollars are lost to missed appointments. What if I could tell you there is a way to increase sales with no overhead?” I don’t want to be spammed by a service I am already paying for.

Fuckers took WAY too many x-rays of my teeth for just a cleaning.

“Oh, this is standard we need these on file.”

7

Aspen Dental are crooks, nothing more.

8

I hadn’t been to the dentist in ages. I saw the Aspen Dental ads and went for a cleaning. When the hygienist flossed me, they made a huge deal that my gums bled, and tried to sell me on a $3,000 gum disease treatment. They almost had me convinced, but then I heard them giving the same speech, and selling the same treatment to the guy in the next chair.

I went to a local dentist two weeks later for a second opinion. He laughed when I told him what Aspen recommended and said: “try to floss more often.”

The Massachusetts Attorney General ended up suing Aspen and getting a million dollar settlement for these types of practices.

9

Had a similar thing, crooks. Fortunately we found a good local dentist , who was very accommodating when I said I hated flossing, and he said I only needed to floss the teeth I wanted to keep.

10

I feel your pain - fortunately for me, only figuratively, not literally.

There is a firm here in Hawai’i that as far as I can tell is similarly money-grubbing. They’ve got offices in multiple locations, and when I went to the one closest to me (pre-Covid), the spacious waiting room was overflowing with patients; it was standing room only with patients spilling out into the courtyard, despite the fact that they had a lot of chairs. I waited over 90 minutes past the scheduled time for my appointment to be seen and was late for a business meeting as a result.

Given that there are shortages of many types of health care professionals in the State of Hawai’i, I don’t automatically fault them for that; they could just be doing their best to meet the needs of an underserved community.

But what I found really repulsive was their many posters advertising a chance to win free plane tickets if you referred more patients to them. First, the last thing they need is more patients, since they obviously can’t provide timely service or adequate waiting room space to the ones they already have.

Second, the last reason anyone should recommend a health professional to a friend is because they stand to receive some kind of pay-off. Recommendations should be made on the basis of the quality of care received.

Somewhat similar to the OP’s experience, I was given an elaborate treatment plan that involved many thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket expenses for all kinds of filling replacements and other supposedly required services. Included in the many services I “needed” was the one I really DID need, which was dealing with a damaged tooth that needed a new crown. It was a little hard to suss out the actual cost, since it involved going through each line item (they had developed a schedule of visits for multiple purposes over the course of a year or so) and determining which ones were related to the damaged tooth and which were for other things they recommended. But dealing with the necessary issue came to around $3,000 out of pocket.

Once the urgent need for a consultation was over, I took the time to find a different dentist, via recommendations from real people, who took care of the problem under $1,000, and didn’t try to upsell me on a zillion other treatments.

Jerks. I left a detailed, articulate and negative review on Yelp.

11

A few years ago I had a back molar pulled. My dentist remarked that I had a lot of gum and bone loss and I shouldn’t be surprised if I lost some more teeth. This sent me into a panic and I went to the internet to research dentures because I thought that may be imminent. That lead me to an online denture support group (now gone) where I hung out off and on for a couple years. The number one question (or one of the more frequent ones at least) " Are Affordable Dentures (another denture franchise) any good." The consensus on that board was that there were good ones where people had a pleasant experience and horrible ones where people had the opposite experience. Not sure if Aspen and Affordable operate under the same franchise guidelines but with Affordable there seemed to be a spectrum of how satisfied customers were depending on the individual clinic.
The good news for me is that my teeth have remained stable and I haven’t lost any more.

12

My dentist (the only one that will take my insurance) was formerly a part of “Affordable Dentures”–though they’ve since changed their name. They also tried to sell me immediately on dentures, saying that there was little “tooth” left, and couldn’t understand why I would want to delay that as long as possible.

They also didn’t seem to understand why I was freaked out about the then upcoming omicron surge, despite not enforcing their own policy that patients in the waiting room had to wear masks. At some points, I (and my ride) were the only ones with a mask on at all.

My plans now are just to wait until I’m having pain and getting the bad teeth pulled as needed, and using other tactics. Though, given how much I’d have to pay out of pocket, I’m also wondering if I should try a different dentist who won’t take my insurance. If they’re more than $500 cheaper, then it would be less than I’d pay.

I also found it fishy they only gave me two extreme options, one that would cost $15000, and one that would cost $3000, and not even offering the idea that I came up with to just remove as needed.

13

Mr. Wrekker uses Affordable Dentures.
He has 2 partials.
Evertime he goes in they do the big push for him to get full dentures.
He always tells them “No” in no uncertain terms.
He’s in his mid 70s so he figures he can make it til he kicks the bucket.
They are in the same shopping center as Aspen Dental so I believe they are in association with each other.