On 30 Jun 2003 14:51:07 -0700, 6oo2dy802@sneakemail.com (Paulrus)
belched the alphabet and kept on going with:

>Hi all -
>
>I am hoping someone can help settle an argument my wife and I are
>having.
>My wife is from Japan & we were discussing dentists in Japan.  My
>understanding was that Japanese dentists have you come back many many
>times for a proceedure that American dentists would normally do in 1
>visit.  My wife is going in to have her wisdom teeth pulled (here in
>the USA) and she was very surprised that they'd do all 4 at once.  She
>claimed that it isn't the "proper" way to do it and that Japanese
>dentists would do it the right way - by taking out one tooth per
>appointment - thus the proceedure would take 4 visits.
>
>What I would really love to hear is the facts from a Nihon-jin rather
>than a gaijin.  My wife will most likely not listen to anything a
>gaijin says about Japanese dentistry because "only a real Japanese
>person truly understands how things work in Japan".  So, even though
>I've read about the problems and have a good understanding, she will
>not listen to anything I say - I'm biased towards the USA and our
>system of dentistry.
>
>So can someone help me settle this?  Explain why they take so long in
>Japan and if possible, I would like to know if Japanese dentists think
>that spreading proceedures over several appointments is the "best" way
>to do things, or do they do it because that's how the system works (or
>something else maybe?.

As Jon indicated, it's all about money.

They amount they receive as a basic fee for the office visit is more
lucrative than the add-on amounts they get for dental tasks performed.
Well, maybe or maybe not in actual yen terms, but by spreading it over
four visits, they not only get the pay for the four extractions, they
collect an extra three times on the basic office visit fee. Dentists
are not only doctors, they're businessmen.

This is sort of similar to how Japanese doctors used to be famous for
loading people up with pharmaceuticals. Formerly, the normal practice
was to get the prescribed medicines directly from the clinic/hospital
you visited. The insurance folks prescribe how much doctors are
reimbursed for office visits and specific procedures performed, and
the doctors were sort of limited in their ability to pad the billing
on stuff like that. But one area where they maintained complete
discretion was in how much/many drugs to prescribe for patients. So to
make bucks, they would just load you up with a king-sized bag of pills
and sell them to you themselves (thereby reaping the markup on them as
well, you see). A few years ago there was a change of some sort, not
sure exactly what it was, which resulted in more and more people
taking their prescriptions out of the clinic/hospital and filling them
at the third-party pharmacy of their choice. Naturally, "independent"
pharmacies started to spring up around hospitals. I have a sneaking
suspicion that lots of them are owned by the doctors who have an
interest in the nearby hospitals.

Sometimes, I almost think that the Japanese invented the profit
motive.





--

Michael Cash



"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless
thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

                                Prof. Ernest T. Bass
                                Mount Pilot College


http://www.sunfield.ne.jp/~mike/