> ‘So I don’t have twelve cavities?’

> ‘Well some of them probably will turn into cavities some day. But not now. And some may just go away.’

I had this exact experience, though the number of 'cavities' was 1 or 2.

I was traveling a lot at the time so I had to see another dentist in a new city to get the fillings. I forgot to call to have records transferred but I assumed the new dentist would spot these obvious 'cavities'

They could not find anything wrong with my teeth, even after I paid for another set of X-rays and they spent a long time looking over everything.

I thought my experience was unique, but when I tell it to people there's a high chance they have the same story.

This was a learning experience for younger me, who had come to believe that all medical treatment decisions should be a choice between patient and doctor and insurance companies should give the doctors whatever they wanted. Later on I knew someone who was given an unnecessary surgery by a surgeon who became known for pushing surgery on everyone who made an appointment. After that I had a friend go down an expensive path of getting diagnosed with sleep apnea by a local doctor who become known for pushing sleep studies and CPAP machines. We discovered that she had opened her own sleep lab business and was using her practice to send everyone to it for any reason. Now I have dozens of stories like this.

So my stance on medical care has changed somewhat. I've acknowledged that every public healthcare system in the world has some gates on expensive treatments for these reasons. The closer the system gets to decoupling doctor pay from the number of treatments they do, the less pressure there is to push the unnecessary treatments.