Parental Prorities: Fail

[anakhouri]

My son had a dentist appointment. This other mom in the waiting room started talking to me and was going on and on about how she never let her son (who looked to be 8 or 9) go anywhere alone and he would never join the Boy Scouts etc because there are PEDOPHILES EVERYWHERE who want to kidnap your children and make them into sex slaves.

Then the dentist came out and chastised her harshly; it seems some months back he told her that her son had a cavity and it needed to be filled but she never made the appointment to have it done, so now the cavity had become an abscess and he needed surgery or a root canal or something way worse than a filling.

I was just thinking, way to save your son from the hordes of rampaging pedophiles while completely neglecting his dental health, lady.

Time to reassess your priorities.

[TheHuckster]

Horrible and paranoid mother, but the dentist seriously scolded her in front of everyone else in the waiting room? That's a bit unprofessional if you ask me.

[anakhouri]

The setup is a little odd; there is a little reception area when you go in, the waiting area to the right of the reception, and a little post-exam type room to the left of it. The areas are all open so even though they were in the post-exam area, across the room from where I was in the waiting area, you could still hear it. I think he was pretty angry but yeah, he probably should have taken her back into the exam room if he thought it might get heated. It sounded like he was talking, then she was talking and then he raised his voice (which is what I heard), so maybe she was making excuses? I can't say for sure.

He's really a great pediatric dentist, honest.

I felt super bad for the kid. A root canal, and a mother who cripples his social life and his independence.

[TheHuckster]

Sadly I know one or two people who seriously seem to think dentists are quacks who prescribe unnecessary procedures just for the money. One of the people I knew had an impacted wisdom tooth that was discovered years before she finally got surgery for it. Her mother thought the dentist was full of crap, saying because she couldn't feel anything right now, it couldn't be that bad. By the time she finally got work done it was affecting her jaw bone and causing immense pain that prevented her from sleeping and chewing.

Like my dentist says, when it comes to oral health you have to catch it before it becomes a problem you can actually feel, because by that time immense damage has done and you're left with not only a more invasive procedure that you may need implants to fix, but far more expensive surgery than if they operate on it before it comes to that.

[anakhouri]

It can be worse than that; I read a news story about a man (the nephew someone famous) who had a toothache but no insurance so didn't have it looked at. It turned out to be an abscess and shortly the infection moved to his brain and killed him.