In today’s focus on dentistry, let’s talk about trends in the dental profession, and how the dentist in Roanoke that you know and enjoy today might not be there five years from now.

Hi I’m Dr. Paul Henny and let’s talk for a minute about changes that are occurring within dentistry and the dental profession. Most people outside of dentistry really don’t know what’s currently happening within the dental profession and there are some ground swells that are going on that are going to affect everybody’s experience with dentistry going forward.

Back in the 1960s, thinking back, if you can remember, almost every hospital in the country was a non-profit hospital, usually associated with a religion. Today, all those hospitals are gone. All of those hospitals have been pushed out of the market or they’ve been bought up by a handful of big corporations that run all the hospitals in the country today.

This same type of force went through pharmacy about 20 years ago, the individual pharmacist is a rare bird indeed today. Most pharmacies are owned by a handful of big pharmaceutical corporations. The same trend is hitting dentists in Roanoke right now. We’re on sort of the front edge of this wave right now. Dentists in Roanoke, Salem and Vinton are no longer able to afford to set up individual practices. They’re coming out of dental school with an immense amount of debt, and their only real option is to sign on to a big corporation that owns multiple practices.

This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem; but as we’re learning as this new corporate practice model evolves we’re learning that these corporations have agendas that are above and beyond your personal health. In fact, there’s a lawsuit recently in the state of New York where the state of New York sued a dental company because the executives of that company were telling the employees, the dentists and staff, to manipulate sales.

In other words, patients are now coming into an environment where they are not considered just people who need dental care, they are people that are sort of being preyed upon. They’re people who are being manipulated so the company can get as much money from them as they can.

This is a major concern for the profession of dentistry and for me personally. So I think people need to be more organized and educated about how they choose a Roanoke dentist. When they go into these corporate type of environments, they need to be more careful about what’s going on and observe and ask a lot of questions.

As far as me personally, our objective here is to maintain independence and to maintain a personal relationship with each of our clients, so that we can remain outside of this growing problem in dentistry.

Thanks for spending time with me, I’m Dr. Paul Henny.”

You can contact this Roanoke Dentist by calling to schedule a free, no obligation pre-consultation or simply email his office.