Yeah, now that I reread the thread, it did come up a couple of times. Not sure why I skipped those posts last night. . . I remembered the stuff about financial concerns to an appropriate degree.
And I can certainly see why you might not choose to look for a new dentist for yourself (given your history) even while annoyed with the dentist for her contributions to this crisis.
I’m really not alone!
I’ve been trying to get Bella in for a broken tooth since March. First the insurance sent us to a dentist who wasn’t even pediatric. That dentist sent us to a pediatric dentist after pretending to try to clean her teeth. The pediatric dentist gave her a liquid to drink to calm her down; I forget the drug…but she refused, then became hysterical because too many people were crowding in on her. The pediatric dentist referred us to a specialist for “special needs kids”. We’ll be seeing him at the end of November. What started out as a simple filling and cap has now turned into an extraction. I just hope having a tooth pulled at three won’t make her future teeth come in all wonky.
If my insurance KNOWS I have a child with special needs, why did they send me to a regular adult dentist (note I say she’s THREE?) instead of straight to the dentist who actually handles children like her on a daily basis?
Poor baby! (and poor you!!!). I feel your frustration!! Yoiks. At least my Dweezil is old enough to be reasoned with… sometimes.
The main concern with a baby tooth pulled that early is that the child may need to have a space maintainer put in to keep the neighboring teeth from migrating and there not being room for the adult tooth. A friend’s son had such a thing (basically a band around the tooth behind it, and an open wire loop to hold the space open). Moon Unit also had to have that done on one of her teeth - the dentist ignored the hygienist’s report of seeing decay, the tooth decayed and abscessed, and had to be pulled. Needless to say, we don’t see that dentist any more (and in fact the hygienist is the one who steered us to the current dentist).
Moon Unit had 2-3 other baby teeth pulled later on - hers were evidently composed of a mixture of swiss cheese and cheap sidewalk chalk - but didn’t need the spacers, as X-rays showed the adult teeth relatively well formed and not too far from erupting anyway.