Are dentists scamming us? We investigate

I'm Noah. This is Devin in today's episode. A question that nags at me every time I sit in one of their chairs. Our dentists scamming us. We dig into the dental industry surprisingly dark history.

A lot of the replacement teeth were from corpses.

We hear from someone who uncovered a dentist drilling healthy teeth for profit.

How did I let this happen to me? Twenty eight rout canals.

I must be stupid, and I talk with a startup founder who's trying to blow up the entire industry.

Going to the dentist is one of the biggest scams of our modern time.

I know there's no no touch thing, no touch, Thank touch, thank touch, thank touch, thank.

All right, So in the studio today, we're joined by a friend of the pod, a licensed therapist and a writer of the Reality Test newsletter, Lily Caplin.

Hi, guys, going, I'm so happy to be back.

You may remember Lily from the Do I Need Therapy? Episode? So we're glad to have you back for a discussion. Has nothing to do with therapy. I love that, but really, actually, specifically if we wanted you on this episode because at many and me as baby shower. A few weeks ago, at the after afters UH, we were all gathered around the table and I was complaining about dentists in Sea, saying, Hey, I think they're trying to scam me. I think dentist

So I think that my take on dentistry is a bit of a defense, a bit of a yo yo from where I used to sit. So I've struggled with a bit more than a bit of what one might call dentophobia throughout my life. So I've been super, super super avoidant of dentists, which has caused some problems for my teeth, and I had to get like a whole bunch of work done on my mouth, which was pretty painful and terrible, and I had to really overcome my

Ago, Yeah, no, talk us through. What What are your dentist interactions been like over the years.

Over the past few years? None, Okay, I'm going, I'm booked. I'm booked to go soon. Long wait list, yes, which which that was news to me because in the past I've been able to hop right over there.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I didn't have any trauma with I never minded going, but I never It was just more of an inconvenient thing to do. But I did feel like my teeth were cleaner after.

Yeah. So basically you're going for questions not regularly as we're.

Yeah, we're hearing it's more laziness than, you know, than like a mistrust distrust.

Okay, So the reason we're doing this episode is because of my experience with the dentists. For most of my life up to up into high school, I had pretty limited interactions with this. Never had cavities besides when I was like a kid, so I was just going for cleanings until my senior year of high school. Well, we're transport ourselves to the bowling alley in New Jersey where it's the final frame. It's me and my friends. We're going head to head and I am tied for last place.

Is that where you do it between your legs?

Yes?

Yes, you put two hands on the ball, you sort of get your legs nice and wide, and you sort of pull it the ball between your legs and then push it out. So I did that and I slipped fell on my face because my hands were up. Remember when you rainy bowl your your hands are going sure, so they're above my head and chipped three or four of my teeth like on a on a diagonal. And I know it sounds horrific. It did not hurt at all. I knew immediately that my teeth came out because I

So lost you lost more than your four teeth?

Yeah, Little did I know the trajectory of that would put me on because replacing teeth is very, very expensive, So even with insurance at the time, I ended up having to spend like three or four grand out of pocket for it. And the thing that people don't think about when you get dental work is that it's not a one and done. If you get teeth replaced, you have to get those teef replaced if you get it

They don't have like a bundle deal.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, I was like, you know, they're already all the tools are out already.

Better if it's only gonna be slightly more expensive, you know, like why not do it?

But then they're all on the same timeline.

Exactly, So I told them, Now then you know, they're trying to convince me you can do a payment. I was like, I don't care if it's paying it right now or over a year. I don't want to pay seminar eight grand on teeth just for fun. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Later it's like I'm still paying, so no, thank you. So they, you know, they seem to get the message.

Well.

I like the premise because, for instance, I went to the dentists and they told me I had to get my tooth out, Like, how am I supposed to know whether that's true?

Yes, So AJ used to write this column for this magazine called Mental Flaws.

And the column was called the Bad Old Days, because the premise was that the good old days were not good. They were terrible. They were dangerous, they were racist, sexist, smelly, they were just horrible, painful.

In every month he would cover a new topic. In one of his most memorial months was when he covered dentistry.

You know, I don't like going to the dentist, but I certainly don't like reading about the history of dentistry because it is just horrible.

So let's say it's a seventeenth century you're having an issue with one of your teeth. AJ said, you would typically go to a barber surgeon.

Which was a combination of a barber and a surgeon, and dentistry was often lumped in with surgery because you're taking stuff out of the body that was basically surgery.

And an important thing to note is that during his time period, doctors did not perform surgery, So the church viewed surgery is being unclean because you were touching bodily fluids. So barber surgeons were seen as being more similar to something like a blacksmith. So back to our roleplay. If you have a toothake naved rip your tooth out basically with no anaesetic at all.

Or maybe they'd give you some whiskey.

Or something even weirder.

For some reason, in the seventeenth eighteenth century, medical practitioners were obsessed with enemas. There's not a huge overlap between your teeth and your butt, but they just were like, let's shoot things off the butt and see if that helps the teeth.

So barber surgeons were basically your best case scenario back then, because there were also some straight up grifters.

There was this crazy genre of traveling dentists and they were called toothpolers, and they were sort of like quack medicine, and they would put on a show.

So they'd come to your town with music, they'd draw a huge crowd and then they'd pull out your teeth.

And they would first bring up a shill, someone who was on their team and who had a fake tooth that they would pull out. But then people would volunteer and pay whatever it was fifty cents and go, and then they would pull out the.

Teeth, and these drifters would signal for the band to play louder to drown out patient screams.

And it was a spectacle, you know, people, he really came to watch it. People watched it. It was like people loved executions. People back then, I mean sometimes now are sadistic, voyeuristic, horrible people.

And there are some crazy stories about how these traveling dentists try to one up one another.

One of the famous examples is that they would attach a string to the tooth and then the dentist would get on a horse and kick the horse to go in an opposite direction, and that's how they pulled the tooth out. Now, there is some evidence that was an apocryphal and nyvy didn't happen a lot or even ever, but that was the shot.

And the dentists would use these shows to sell.

The snake oil tooth ointments that were supposed to help.

Aj also told me about the dark history of dentures.

A lot of the replacement teeth were from corpses. So in the nineteenth century there was something called Waterloo teeth, and it was from the dead soldiers on the Waterloo Battlefield and other battles. Scavengers would go and they would take out the teeth and then dentists would put them in.

Growing up, you may have heard about George Washington having false teeth.

The rumor is that it was wood, but that's not true. Truth is much more disturbing that it was a combination of things. It was partly animal ivory from elephants and hippopotamus, but partly from enslaved people human teeth.

Aj says the transition from the quack based dentistry of the past to the science back dentistry of today didn't happen overnight, but there were incremental steps.

There were a few landmarks that really helped. One was the invention of nitrous oxide, which was very helpful because before you were just getting your teeth pulled with no anesthesia, maybe a little whiskey.

And the germ theory was also another huge step forward.

Back before the germ theory, these dentists would go in with their dirty hands and they would cause more infections than if they just left it b So it was a gradual thing, learning about germs, learning about pain management.

And also the idea of prevention became a lot more popularized.

The idea of brushing your teeth and even flossing.

AJA also took a look at how culturally we viewed dentists over the years.

If you google historical dentist illustrations you'll see, you know, they look like these distic monsters pulling teeth out, And I think that that reputation has continued. Like in pop culture, there's Marathon Man, who is this sadistic Nazi dentist.

A life, freshly cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive.

So I'll just go into a healthy tooth until I reached the pose.

There's Steve Martin who was in the Little Shop of Horrors and like that song, He's got an entire song about how much he loves inflicting pain on other people.

Peteple will pay you.

To be in humane.

There's a line in when Harry met Sally when Meg Ryan says that her boyfriend's name is Sheldon, and Billy Crystal's like, well, he's not going to be a good lover.

No, No, you did not have great sets with Sheldon. I did too, No, you did. Sheldon can do your income taxes if you need a root canal, Sheldon shumans, But humping and pumping is not sheldon strong suit.

So the poor dentists get beat up on a lot. Yeah, and some of them I'm sure deserve it, because some I'm sure are still quacks and doing things they shouldn't, but I do believe a lot of them are out to make us healthier and make our teeth less painful.

So that is the history of dentistry. Fast forward to today. Like I said, I am someone who has spent a lot of time going to the dentists over the last couple of years. And one of my biggest issues with the dentists is that it is so damn expensive. Right, So, a new study found that nearly one in three young adults have skipped it dentist in the past year because of cost. And one of the most frustrating things for me about dental care is that it is so expensive

I'm Sarah Stufan. I'm a general dentist in Iowa.

So doctor Sarah is also a dental insurance expert and a spokesperson for the American Dental Association otherwise known as the ADA. She says, I am not alone in being confused by how little dental insurance actually covers.

When we talk about patient satisfaction, and we talk about frustration and cost of care. This hits the nail on the head of what I hear from my patients is that they have some sort of dental benefit and they have expectations of what it's going to do for them, and then it turns out it's not not meeting those expectations. What we've seen with dental insurance over the past twenty years is that, you know, dental insurance has an annual maximum, and those maximums haven't changed.

So to break this down, most dental plans have what's called an annual maximum, which is the maximum amount the insurance company will pay towards any care for the year. Over the last twenty years, that number hasn't really changed. And that's despite rising healthcare costs and inflation. So the value of your dental insurance, say twenty years ago, is

And that's frustrating because the idea and the expectation behind dental insurance is similar to most people base their experiences off of medical.

But it turns out tental insurance is nothing like medical insurance.

Dental insurance I think of more like a coupon. So right, and there's normally, you know, in the bottom of that cupon there was a bunch of uh, there's a bunch of asterisks like limitations and waiting periods and all these things. So when you get to the checkout, you find out that coupon isn't as great as you thought it was going to be.

I mean, all this work that I spoke about, my insurance covered like zero of it, Like it was thousands and thousands of dollars, which I mean, just hearing that just honestly made me feel tired.

No, it just sucks.

It makes me really angry. Yeah, it's like it's such a it's a it's a promise like insurance insurance. The word insurance is a promise that you will be insured against something bad happening. But if something actually bad happens, like your dental insurance covers like what one two cleanings a year, it doesn't ensure you if something bad happens that happens, you're paying for it.

Doctor Sarah says the ada's ideal dental plan has no annual maximum because.

If you have some sort of problem that's beyond you know, say that one crown or that one crown or root canal, is it right for a patient to say, Okay, I'm going to wait on that until next year.

Yeah.

When we're talking about health, this is this is health. Somehow we've disconnected the mouth from the rest of the body, but healthy mouth is part of a healthy body.

So the ADA is working on insurance reforms at both the state and federal level.

And one of the big things when you talk about value for care is called dental loss ratio, which is basically the amount of your premium dollars that actually get spent towards care versus administration of the plan and things like that, and that already exists on the full side.

Under the Affordable Care Act, medical insurance companies have to spend between eighty and eighty five percent of premium dollars on your actual care. Where there's no federal regulation on dental insurance. So I was actually able to find one insurance company in West Virginia who had a dentist loss ratio as low as thirty six percent.

So some plans are putting a very low percentage of what you're paying for a premium actually into your care.

So where's most of that money, like you're saying, is going well towards administrative cost and just profit.

Right, we think it's important that patients their actual their premium dollars are going towards care rights. And that's the expectation for our patients, is that it's going towards care.

It is like, this is exactly what people fear, is what's happening. Yeah, yeah, and it's right right under our eyes.

Yeah, I mean, I can't say I'm surprised. Yeah, it is an expectation that I would like to have, but it's not an expectation that I've had for any kind of insurance on it.

All, Right, So that's the insurance portion of this, And insurance is going to be a reoccurring thing that comes up in this conversation, so just keep that in the back of your mind. But let's talk about care. Right. So I've been going to the dentist for over thirty years now. I'm still not quite sure what they're doing in my mouth, So I called up doctor Sharlyn Pizzulo.

I am a general dentist and a clinical associate professor at NYU Dental School.

So the recommendation is that you go to the dentist twice a year for checkups and cleanings, and at one of those checkups they're usually going to do some X rays.

So then when we look at those, we look at a couple of things. I'm looking at kind of like if I see any infection in the roots of your teeth.

Which might indicate you need a root canal.

I'm looking at old fellings that you've had or crowned or things like that, to see how they're looking that there's nothing compromising them.

They're checking bone levels to make sure that your teeth have a good foundation, and they're also checking for cavities.

We could see the different layers of your teeth, so there's enamel, there's dentin. If I see those shadows going past that first layer, that enamel layer, then definitely I'm recommending that we do a filling.

Doctor Shearlyn says, this is where things can get tricky.

Sometimes you might get recommended to get more fillings and you're used and you're like what is happening here? Depending on that dentist practice or beliefs, they might do fillings on enamel lesions is what they're called, like enamel cavities, like these little shadows that only are in the first layer because they argue like, oh, we should just get rid of it now so it doesn't get any bigger.

But research shows that these early stage cavities can actually be reversed if you take proper care of your teeth and use things like fluoride.

So I'm a pretty conservative dentist in that way where I don't like to drill a person's tooth unless it's really really necessary.

So is there no standard in terms of like, hey, let's get all the dentists together and say we are not going to fill someone's cavities unless they do X. It seems like there's a lot of like personal discretion. There is.

There is a standard, and that we teach in dental school, because I teach in a dental school where we teach our students is fundamentally that if it is again like I said, if the cavity has progressed past that first layer, that enamel layer of your tooth, once it's gotten to the dentin, which is the second layer of your tooth.

She says she could understand an argument for drilling this early if a patient just refuses to take care of their teeth.

Some patients will.

Tell me like, I'm not going to do it, dog like straight up, like I don't care. I got a lot going on. I only brush once a day. If that so, then I'd be like, all right, maybe then we should do this.

Right, But she says even in those cases, it's a discussion and she's not just drilling just because. But not all dentists follow that logic.

I actually recall before I was a dentist, I was like you know, in college or something, and I went and I had never had cavities my whole life. I was really good about it. I always knew I wanted to be a dentist since I was like fourteen, So I was that girl. So I went to a new dentist and they told me I had like four cavities, and I literally cried in the chair. I was like, no, this can't be, Like, I know, how has this happened? And now that I look at my X rays, I

Wow.

I was kind of shocked. Doctor Sherylyn was just outright like, yeah, there are some dentists who were just failing cavities for fun, essentially, not for fun, but because they want the insurance money. So I did I ask bec or Sarah about this. You know, she's like, you're a round table. Now she's a spokesperson for the ADA. This is a pretty big accuation. I didn't just want to take one word for it. So here's what she had to say.

I think in any profession, there's probably going to be a few bad apples, right. I personally feel that dentists generally are wanting to do what's best for their patients.

So I started looking around because I wanted to see just how often dentists are ripping off their patients. Unsurprisingly, I couldn't find any hard data, but I did come across some antidotes like this journalists in nineteen ninety seven for Readers Digests, he sent his X rays to fifty different dentists. The journalists had already known that he needed maybe two crowns that would cost him up to fifteen hundred dollars, but the estimates that he got were all

Most doctors will end up working for a large healthcare organization or a hospital with quite a bit of oversight, But the vast majority of dentists in the US open up their own practices, so they mostly answer to themselves. There are ethical guidelines and codes that they're supposed to follow, but there isn't somebody looking over their shoulder day to day.

I emailed in DMS Faris multiple times to interview him for this episode, but he didn't get back to me. But I was able to chat with someone at the heart of Ferris' reporting.

The journalist, you know, Ferris Jabberer. I don't know how you say his last name, but I don't subscribe to anything to his opinion of dentistry or dentist in general.

That is doctor Brandon Ziedler, who is a dentist in California. And no, he is not the fat guy in his story. Let's rewind a bit to the twenty ten killed Osama bin Laden.

At the time, I was much younger, you know. I was working maybe three days a week and I was looking to work five.

So doctor Brandon was looking to take over another practice, the mayor.

You can't just put up a Sinus's dentist and expect people to walk through the door. You kind of have to take over someone that was retiring.

So a broker he had worked with before put him in touch with doctor Luhn, who was looking for someone to buy his practice so that he could retire.

And it was about a mile and a half away, and I figured this would compliment my practice perfectly.

Things were looking great, like Lynn's practice was bringing in a good amount of money. It was nearby. Doctor brand didn't only a day or two to make a decision because the market in the Bay is very competitive, so he tried to do his due diligence by looking through Lune's patients records.

It's pretty difficult if there's several hundred charts and you have an hour or so to go through the charts, you're just randomly selected.

Doctor Brandon ultimately decided to pull the trigger and he bought the practice.

I just had confidence that this could be a good fit for me, so I purchased a practice and in February of twenty twelve, I took over and I just, you know, decided that I'd start meeting the patients, getting to know them like I did my first practice.

But within that first month he started to figure it that some thing was off.

I don't remember the numbers exactly, but if it had been eighty thousand dollars a production a month, it was around like fifteen thousand.

So in other words, doctor Brannon was doing a lot less work on these patients than doctor Loan was.

I was thinking, maybe I'm doing something wrong, Like where am I going wrong here. Well, then the second month was similar, the third month was similar.

And as he started seeing more and more of LUN's former patients, he started noticing something was off.

I would look in their mouths and you know, scan really really well, and I couldn't find anything wrong with their mouth. And then they would stand up and be like, are you sure that you looked closely enough? I don't think you're looking closely enough. So then I'm now starting to second guess myself again. And then they'd go it up and go to the front office staff member that I had that also worked for the previous dentists was like, I don't know that this dentist is, you know, looking

Doctor Brannon also started to notice a disturbing pattern.

I was looking at the patients, you know, I was starting to see a very high number of root canals, a very high number of crowns, and so that was another red flag for me. Started to put two and two together and I and that's when I'm you know, it was probably maybe six or seven months in. I was like, this is not me. I'm not doing anything wrong. You know this there was something that was not done above board here on these.

Patients, and he decided he needed to take a closer look. So over the next year, he looked at all of doctor Loehne's former patients, going through every single procedure that he had performed over the previous five years.

Then I started to create a big spreadsheet because I knew that spreadsheet was important as far as percentages of treatment to see how far this dentist was from the norm.

For example, Lund loved to give root canals. Fifty of his patients had fifteen or more root canals, with one patient getting twenty four. Typical person is only getting one to two root canals in their lifetime. Looking through the numbers that you you have in terms of you know, usually if there's a crown, I think you said, there's usually thirty percent seven percent chance that you're going to

Every day I get a patient coming in my office, you know, could be a new patient, right, and I don't know a lot of times I don't agree with that the other dentists did, but that's a difference of opinion, yeah, right, and me and one of my patients could move or leave, right, Yeah, And that dentis may not agree with what I did, but being in the ninety percentile range when it should be in the three to seven percentile range is way outside norm.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Lun was also charging patients insurance for work he never actually did. After seeing just how widespread this overtreatment was, Brennan felt like he had to do something about it.

And then I started talking to them one by one. Some were already well aware, some had suspicions, and.

So doctor Brandon, along with several of LUN's former patients, ended up suing him. There were some settlements. Lon's insurance had some big payouts. Loun never admitted to any wrongdoing, but he was arrested in twenty fifteen and charged with dozens of felonies for insurance fraud, and he eventually ended up surrendering his dental license in twenty twenty three.

A lot of them were like, I'm so stupid. How could I be so dumb? I can't either, and I would say to them, this is not about intelligence. This is betrayal of trust. Like that's what it boils down to. It has nothing patient be like I've had all these How did I let this happen to me? Twenty eight rou canals I must be stupid and says betrayal of trust. You go to someone for all these years, dry doctor, this person betrayed your trust. Yeah, and that's hard for

But despite what doctor Brannon went through, he says he thinks this type of overtreatment is extremely rare.

I think in any profession, no matter what you go into, you know, law enforcement or medicine or you know, lawyer's attorneys, whatever, I feel like ten percent I think cross the line. I think no matter what profession are going to, you're going to run into people that do the wrong thing, that don't do the right thing. And I felt like that article in particular kind of led the reader perhaps to believe that there's a much higher percentage, say, in

Do you feel like there needs to be something done more on just the you know, a more nationwide level in terms of dentists and holding them accountable.

Yeah, that's you know, people always ask I don't I don't. I think the profession would be completely different if it was big brother was watching, right. I think I think that would be hard to be a dentist. I think less people would want to be a dentist. I mean, there's a certain amount of ethics and integrity we're supposed to have. There's a similar to a Hippocratic oath that we take as a dentist. I don't you know, I

So my first thought after reading this story is how do you not become that person who has all this unnecessary work done. This is my recommendation, This is doctor Sarah Ada.

If your gut tells you that something's up, go get another opinion. In general, dentistry is not emergent. There are definitely some emergent situations where you need to make a decision that day, but most of the time you can take home the information and you can sleep on it.

And this advice was also shared by doctor Charylyn. But as you'll hear, I don't like this advice.

If it feels like it's weird, I would take a step back as a patient, be like, let me think about this before we move forward, and you can get a second opinion.

Yeah, I was going to say, how do you so I get a little bit frustrated with this feedback of like get a second opinions. How usually when this is happening. You're going for your check up, right, your dentist is saying, hey, you need to get this thing done. I can do it now, right, And you know, part of what I goes through my mind is like, Okay, to get a second opinion, I need to go search and find another dentist.

You don't have to necessarily take x rays again. You could take your records from the office you went to, so like that would save you because those records are yours, like you paid for them. So you'd ask them like, hey, could you give me my records and they have to give it to you, so you could take those too a different office or I mean, now, I know I work at a dental school, but dentald school is a really good option if you have a local dental school

Have you ever been in a situation when you felt like, oh, I want to get a second opinion on this thing, but like it seems like it's too much trouble.

Yeah, I probably just wouldn't deal with it. I'd either just stop going and yeah, let my teeth throt, or I would just pay. Yeah, but the school I guess also they wouldn't have the profit motive incentive is another benefit, yeah for their side.

But yeah, I just don't feel like I would ever have the bandwidth.

For that exactly.

Yeah.

It's like if I had nothing else to do but work on my teeth, yep, sure, mm hmm.

It also kind of feels like it's just such a bomber man, because like you've got, you've you when you think about all these different parts of your body that you need to maintain, including your brain and emotions. As a therapist, which and I am like drawing some comparisons to to like my professional world after that, but it just feels like, Okay, I've made it to the dentist my twice a year visit, like which is terribly annoying

Yeah, and then who knows how long that's going to take too. Like I said, I'm waiting months for my checkup. There's something wrong there. And then they're like, okay, go to another person. It's like, now this whole thing might take three months. If I have real pain, It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna be like, all right, just take it out or whatever, Just do it now.

The onus on the individual just in it, you know, just for everything. It's just so heavy, it feels so burdensome.

So I'm gonna take one more brick and when we get back. I'm gonna tell you guys about a startup of plans to blow up the dental world as we know it. Okay, we are back. I'm Noah Devin Lily.

So.

A few days ago I took a trip down to Soho to meet the founder of a new dental startup. I'm good. Are you all right? Can I have you start up by just introducing yourself.

Hey, my name is Tyler Burnett. I'm co founder of CEO here at Wally Health.

Tyler was inspired to start Wally after having his own run in with a dentists after moving to the US from Canada.

And being told I needed eight fillings when I didn't need them right, and so I wasn't showing any diagnostics. I wasn't educated on what was going on with my oral health. During that appointment, I was told by dentists that I had eight cavities and they needed to be filled immediately and it was going to cost me a lot of money.

He didn't end up getting the fillings, but he did come up with the idea for the startup named Wally.

We're building the future of dental care. So what we're doing is solving a major healthcare crisis.

So about forty percent of working age adults in the US go to the dentists each year.

We want to see that over eighty percent.

Tyler thinks Wally can change that by making oral care more affordable and approachable.

Our product is simple. It's two hundred and forty nine dollars per year, so it's membership based and we provide unlimited dental cleanings, diagnostics, exams with dentists at any of our locations here in New York and New Jersey at the moment.

Tyler, who is married to a dentist, by the way, is extremely critical of the industry and says it does not invest in prevention or the patient experience. He says, Wally, though, has different incentives.

We're honestly incentivized to prevent and be proactive in our care, which no other dentist in the country is.

By the way, No, we're very proud.

We don't have drills, and while you're not going to get drilled.

So while it doesn't actually do any major dental work in house, they offer things like aligners in cavity of reversal treatments for an extra fee. But if you need like real work, they'll refer you out to someone else.

Going to the dentist is one of the biggest scams of our modern time here in the United States. It's, pound for pound, the most expensive healthcare experience we have as patients, as consumers. And what I mean by that is we spend more proportionately when we go to a dentist. That rate is higher than any other healthcare experience where you're going to a doctor, you're getting a prescription field,

Right.

They're the experts, and so you know, they own thirty percent of all dental locations. They're going to own forty percent by the end of this year. So it's not getting better anytime soon. But they come in and they play those rules really well. One thing they do is they find all of the treatments that an insurance plan will cover. So that's why you see a lot of extra treatments being sold and I mean a diagnosed and sold because the insurance will cover all of these little

So, while he doesn't actually accept insurance.

We didn't want to play those rules. Look, we knew to be true to to our our mission around preventive and productive care, we had to build the way we wanted to build, and we didn't want our thinking to be corrupted in any way.

I don't know anything about this startup, but he's saying, you know, if we accepted insurance, like we there, we would have no agency over becoming corrupted morally like that it would just happen to you.

Yeah, like can how about like that?

Agency also just like lies with you as the provider. Yeah, just like maybe don't get corrupted, you have control.

Over So I thought it would be weird for me to talk about this service without trying it out for myself. So I was actually able to get a Black Friday deal, so I only paid one hundred and fifty dollars. It's usually two hundred and fifty dollars for the year. And I made my first appointment to go to Wally's Williamsburg location in Brooklyn. So this was even before I spoke to Tyler, so I had no idea I was doing a story on Wally or who I was at all. Because I wanted to truly be on their cover and

Welcome. While I know it's the first time here, and I'm going to be your dental.

Assistant for the day, Sauce.

It is the first time I'm going to start up the problems of diagnostic exams. So I'll start up with a scan of your teeth followed by the correctly.

I think you'll see the.

High episodes that you're saving.

Okay, all right now. I would say every single person I talked to was really informative in a way that I was not used to. At the dentists, they really talked me through step by step what they were doing while he uses this Swiss technology called GBT, which doesn't involve any scraping, so it was really pain free and past the eye test, it looked just as effective as my normal cleanings. And then at the end of my appointment,

That way you can just keep everything cleaned out underneath it.

Okay, and I was on my way. So for my first appointment, I felt like I had a pretty good experience at Wally, but I wanted to see what were the major complaints that people had as well. So one of the biggest issues people have is that this idea of unlimited cleanings. So the earliest I was able to book my next cleaning was two months after my first appointment, so you know, not truly unlimited.

Sometimes you know, growth outpaces what we thought it was going to be, and that's you know, quote unquote a good problem to have as a business, but we're always building to be ensuring there aren't limits on unlimited.

Some patients also felt, similar to a lot of the dentists that we've been talking about, that Wally was trying to upsell them on deep cleans and other add ons that don't come up the members.

So even though we go through such rigorous modern diagnostics where we educate and talk through them, there is always going to be a group of people that are not going to react well to that information.

And he said, at the end of the day, if you don't want to do the treatment, like you don't have to. You know, they're not pressuring you, they're just letting you know. So Wally only operates a few locations in New York and New Jersey right now, so it's not really going to upend the entire system. Tyler says they have big plans to expand to fifty locations by

I mean, honestly, don't I don't have a problem with it. I think it's it's honestly pretty smart that they came up with a way to provide this type of accessibility. There's like kind of two groups of patients that would

So doctor Sarah likes the idea of a membership but didn't love that patients may be seeing a variety of dent to set Wally.

The more I get to know a patient, the more I understand one of their past experiences and two what's changing, I can notice those changes a lot better, and I get to know what they like as far as care goes and as far as you know, let's say they're anxious, like what works really well for them? Each dental visit gets a little bit better. Are when when we know how we can best care for them.

We've heard a lot of claims about who how many dentists are.

Or not scammy, and there's no hard numbers to that.

Yeah, I mean, how could there be? Yeah, But like I feel like probably I imagine I want to imagine that most dentists are just like people who want to do a good job at their job and are trying to like make an honest living. And I think there is probably like a subset of dentists that are trying to make the most money possible, but by scamming their customers. Just like there are my like family doctor when I was a kid, got like arrested for pedaling opioids. That's crazy.

Your your health.

Yeah, and so just the fact that it's separate, that the insurance is separate is what's so terrible. Just like I feel like the real enemy is our like the healthcare system, and not so much the individual dentists who are I want to believe, for the most part, just trying to like do their jobs.

I agree with you, I think the big issue is access, right, I think I don't think the issue with dentistry is all the dentists are trying to scam us and say we have cavities that we don't have. I do think there's a subgroup that is not conservative of enough in terms of dental care, and they're doing too much work when that don't need to be done. But I don't think that's the majority of dentists. Yeah, let's put it

I agree with you, Like, obviously the experience really needs to improve, and dentists need to be more thoughtful and caring of the patient experience exactly.

You know, we should send some some dentists to some of your schooling. You know, we'll send up the little school of dentistry where you'll teach them some personal skills. You know.

My god, if okay, if any dentist wants to do some like one on one coaching with a therapist on some bedside manner of skills, maybe I actually don't know if I can do that ethically. Dentist need therapy.

Yeah, you know, if you've been hurt by the misconception by anti dentist sentiment in popular culture, I welcome you, yoss heals.

It took a minute, but I had a lot of fun putting together this episode. If y'all are a fan of no such thing, please please please share this episode your favorite episode with your friends. We love making a show, and the only way we can continue to do it is if y'all keep sharing it and talking about it and get more people to listen to it. Our special guest for this episode was Lily Kaplan sitting in for Manny.

No such thing