How to Choose a Best Dentist?
By Dr Sanjog Chandak BDS, MDS
(Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon, Dental Implant Specialist)
How to choose a good Dentist in Nagpur
It’s really tricky to choose a good dentist. Sometimes your family friends neighbors can recommend a good dentist from their experience.But what if you are moving to a new place like Nagpur where you could see many dentists in a small area sounds little confusing right? Lets help you in choosing the Best Dentist in Nagpur.
The first thought which comes to many of us when choosing a Dentist is to go to a local dentist near by (a small dispensary type) or to a bigger corporate setup. The choice of choosing a Dentist as per our advice is to be done predominantly based on the procedure to be done or required for your dental problem.If it is a small procedure like going for a tooth pain consultation any nearby clinic is advised whereas if you are going for any high end procedures like jaw surgeries,invisible braces,dental implants the choice of choosing a dentist is either a specialist dentist or a corporate hospital with big panel of specialty dentists.
In India ,our health system is not supporting dental health insurance ,which blocks many middle and poor people to get high end procedures as they desire. Also lack of knowledge about oral health cause lots of problem in teeth which in turn will affect the patients in choosing a good dentist because of pricing and other reasons.In dentistry there are 6 clinical specialities to choose, ranging from oral medicine (to find out oral diseases), oral maxillofacial surgery (to do dental Implants, to remove impacted tooth, jaw corrections),pedodontics (child tooth care), endodontics (for rct), orthodontics (correcting the malpositioned tooth), prosthodontics (fix teeth, dentures).
So choosing a hospital with multiple specialists is always best because they are more professionally and technically trained in handling particular type of problems,which is best to undergo.
Geographic location Choosing a dentist for treatment procedure which involves multiple visit is required to be done, close to your home or office where you can go and do. Most of the dental procedures requires 2 or more visits. From my experience most of the patients forget to complete their treatment in midway as their chief complaint of pain gets relived fast after their first dental intervention or second and for the subsequent visits invariably most of the patients miss them and if asked why? patient will say, ”I don’t have pain, so i thought treatment was over”, so this kind of issues causes more troubles for the treating dentist so choosing a Dentist near to me makes it easy to get backfor future correspond.
After you have made your choice of particular dentist, please ask your neighbours, friends in your residential area about that dentist andhis reputation. if you don’t get any feedback, you can check with patient management sites like practo, whatclinic.com, justdial, sulekha.com. Generally these platforms have reviews and feedback systems for the services of the dentist with which you can choose confidently. Any hospital with good reviews and recommendations is always a good try as these are the reviews from treatment experienced people.To help others inchoosing a Dentist
It is always good to go to social pages like facebook, practo,whatclinic to see the reviews so the quality of dentist and the clinic can be assessed. These reviews can be beneficial for other people searching for dentist. after you choose the clinic.
The following criteria can be noted like:
Whether dentist graduate or post graduate, dentist specialty clinic working hours (check whether the doctor works both morning and evening)
check the office to make sure its clean, neat and orderly see how courteous are staff members
observe the dentist and staff wearing gloves and other protective gear during treatment, sterilization protocol see
what arrangements are made for handling emergencies outside of office hours
see whether all the informations about all fees and payments are planned before treatment is scheduled
see whether all your appointments are scheduled by sms and reminder for checkups are given conveniently
see whether your records are maintained digitally for future reference
see how much they take care of your needs
check their ability to clarify all the doubts with the help of visual aids like videos, photos of previous cases
I think the above mentioned points will help you to choose the best dentist in any area.