Real Trickery? I'll Pass on That, Too.

New to the area and needing a dentist, I was initially glad to see a flyer from a local dentist within the community newspaper that arrives on our driveway each week. The ad looked somewhat appealing, but its self-proclaimed "old school" approach seemed a little odd to me. Still, I read, and liked what I read once I remembered that many people are afraid of trips to the dentist. Or I did, until I read the following, all-bold paragraph:

No funny stuff. No fake trickery. Just old-fashioned, exceptional service in a very comfortable, warm environment.

Funny stuff? Perhaps I am more fortunate than average or am better about going over my options than most people are, but is dental fraud really common enough to make that a selling point? And the prospect of real trickery does little to comfort me, once that possibility has been brought to my attention. (The unfortunate wording may be down to this dentist being of foreign extraction, although I have no idea.)

All is not lost for this dentist: I haven't looked in earnest yet, so my newfangled techniques of exercising old-fashioned common sense may get me into his chair yet: I'll use the Internet and the few local contacts I have to seek out reviews and other information before I go anywhere.

-- CAV

P.S.: This post I wrote some months ago as a reserve post to use in case I can't blog on a given morning. I rotate these out on days (like today) I find some new, evergreen topic to cover. Since composing this, I read several reviews of this dentist, one calling him "crown-happy" and another describing a ridiculous amount of cavities "found" for someone who, like myself, rarely has them. (That patient went elsewhere.) So the Internet probably saved me there. Also somewhat interesting, it turns out that the ad is less original than it looks. A search of the bolded passage above, which I just did, reveals an ad, placed in Salem, Oregon that looks very much like the one I received. I have never even been to Oregon.