Did dentists in the past butcher teeth for financial reward?

To expand a bit further, this is also why many practices don't take on new NHS patients. It's not financially viable to have a new patient turn up having not seen a dentist for 20 years needing maybe 10 hours of treatment for a maximum payment of around £280 from the Government. There is no extra funding for these patients. If a practice has put effort into building a well maintained healthy set of patients you can maybe make the system work with elective private cosmetic treatments on the side. New patients with massive treatment need aren't workable under this system.

It's a really st system, which is why so many dentists now refuse to work with it and are handing back their NHS contracts and going private. Which is probably the intention of the Govt, they get to privatise the sector by stealth but can essentially blame dentists.

Some more tidbits:

As a fee paying NHS patient the amount you pay for treatment increases year on year as set by the Government.

For eg in 2006 for a band 3 treatment (eg a crown or Denture) you paid £190, today you pay £282. Dentists have seen pretty much none of that increase, almost all of it has been swallowed by the Govt. NHS income to the practice has pretty much not risen at all since 2006, maybe less than 10%.

These days we have a new situation where for the first time, for many practices (but not all as the amount the Govt pays each practice varies), the amount you pay at the counter is actually more than the NHS contract pays for that treatment. In these situations the practice has to pay the extra to the Government! So you might pay £282 for a crown and £40 of that goes into Government coffers

The NHS dental system is absolutely horrible to work in. If you have a well maintained, stable list of patients, you can suck it up and make it work, safe in the knowledge you'll get paid every month so long as you're in the hamster wheel. But if you have high needs patients, like in the practice I run, it's soul destroyingly painful. A well know dentist in Cheshire recently converted his practice from being mixed NHS/private to fully private. He just couldn't take it anymore. His NHS contract value was £1million a year. He could have easily sold the practice with the contract for £2mil. Instead, he gave it back. Just think for a second how bad it must be to literally give £2mil away just like that and carry on seeing patients. It's BAD.

There are a few practices that are absolutely killing it on the NHS. The info I gave above was based on the 'average' nhs practice.

Why are some killing it? Because the exact amount each practice gets paid by the Govt varies but most hover close to the average. BUT some get paid way way more eg close to 3 times more per course than the average. Why are some outliers? Because a lot of them had owners who were very close to the PCT commissioners and managed to play the system back in 2006 in a way that guaranteed them very very high rates for ever after.

Dentists have a very interesting history. You won't find the dark part of their history on such websites as Wikipedia. Their methods of curing teeth in the past were terrible and somehow barely efficient. I was always afraid of visiting a dentist, so it is why I delayed every visit to the dentist every time. Once I had to go to an Implant Dentistry in Eastlake Ohio. I was very afraid, but luckily the dentist was a professional and did a professional job, and I didn't feel anything during the process of getting the tooth implant.

Huge dental conspiracy, or, simply a change in training, equipment, and ethos?

Bad apples aside, one of those options seems far more likely to me.

50 years is a very long time in clinical environments.

I dunno my mum remembers being given her first fillings aged 8. She was sent to the dentist on her own (ie no parental supervision) so noone to sense-check what they were doing. Do many children really need fillings at that age?

We had a dentist in my family, and uncle, the only posh person we had.

He was a supporter of flouride. It didn't come into our taps until 1970, by which time I'd moved to a flouride-rich village with my full set of fillings.

Due to my job, I often only cleaned my teeth once a day. Since then I've had two fillings, and most of my originals replaced.

I've got four kids, oldest 50. None visit a dentist regularly, all go private, I only know of one with a filling. Of my eight grandchildren, none have fillings.

I was told that flouride would render dentistry all but redundant by my uncle, which has happened, but for different reasons.

That's a point I hadn't considered. In my youth, sweets were rationed. Even when they 'came off', they weren't exactly cheap. Also, I got fizzy drinks at Xmas. I didn't particularly like them.

I haven’t been to a dentist in 8 years. Right now I am totally pain free and no teeth issues at all, never had a filling in my life. But truth be told I’m a bit apprehensive about going as I’m more worried about what they’ll find when they look a bit deeper!