This is all professionals.

Actual expertise, competence and integrity is typically extremely expensive and hard to come by. Luckily, most cases are fairly routine that the majority of the time for the average person it doesn't really matter in the end. It's not like most can afford the best anyway.

Just take any profession that your retail consumer might get access to and the same spread applies.

Most doctors don't have as strong a profit motive as a dentist.

Most people see a PCP that doesn't really have the means to recommend you for thousands of dollars of treatments that he'll oversee. Instead he refers you to a specialist, but you still have your PCP to rely on to say "Hey, this specialist says I need surgery for this, is that reasonable or should I get a second opinion".

But when you go to the dentist and he says you have 15 cavities and need two root canals immediately and he can get you an appointment as soon as tomorrow to get started, a lot of people will just do it without seeking a second opinion since there's a lot of friction to finding a new dentist and undergoing a second exam.

When I needed a root canal, I self-referred myself to an endodontist both as a second opinion and for his expertise at doing the procedure. My dentist's dental tech seemed surprised I wanted to go somewhere else for the root canal, she said "Well, most people like Dr Xxxxx do it, he's very good at root canals".

Get a second opinion before letting a doctor or dentist do anything invasive. I have a bunch of fillings from a dentist who pulled the twelve cavities thing on me. I was young and flush with cash, and hadn't been for a while. But it was only after we'd done most of the filling that I recalled my first dentist diagnosing me with fissures and offered to seal them.

I should have gone for a second opinion before letting her drill. Now I have a mouth full of composites but we find 0 cavities every time I go in for a checkup.

She also fucked up one of the fillings and that did get a cavity under it, during Covid. Cost me a tooth.

Dentists have far more incentive to provide unnecessary treatments than doctors do, especially if they own their own practice. When 100% of the profits go into your own pocket and you’re playing a game of imperfect information against a layman as a trained professional, the incentives are highly misaligned against the patient in a way that doesn’t really happen with doctors that aren’t solo practitioners.

Yeah when people say "no one has any idea what they're doing" it's not a cute joke, it's very very true.

I once went to 3 orthopedic specialists and got 3 different suggestions (1 was surgery!) and I did none of them and the problem resolved itself in a few months.

How far down the line are dentists and other doctors to be replaced by AI robots too?