Up to a few years ago dentists and orthodontists were prohibited from any form of advertising and the rules were very strictly enforced to protect the public from unrealistic claims. Newspaper and radio advertising was banned. Websites were not allowed. Any form of sponsorship was considered taboo. A similar model is still used by the medical council to restrict advertisting among doctors.
Several years ago the dental council of Ireland opened dentistry to advertising in order to promote more competition among dentists and thereby reduce fees for patients. Nowadays normal commercial standards apply to dentists and more or less anything goes when it comes to advertising.
The introduction of advertising coincided with the economic downturn and the curtailment of both the medical card and the PRSI dental schemes for general dentists so advertising offered an opportunity for dentists to increase their market share and to promote new treatments. Dental advertising is now very common in the press, on radio and it is even starting to appear on our TV screens. Many of us have websites, facebook pages, twitter accounts and we continue to explore new ways of getting our message out there.
So did it work and were the changes beneficial to the public ? There is certainly a lot more competition among dentists now and fees probably have been reduced because of this. There is however a very real danger that the standard of treatment being offered will suffer in the long term and that patients will suffer at the hands of practitioners who concentrate on their media image at the expense of their clinical skills.
Why now would a newly qualified dentist spend the next 5 to 10 years specialising and honing their skills in orthodontics, crowns, bridges or implants when they could instead create the illusion that they have these special skills ? And would it be possible to persuade the patient that a poor result was a good result in order to maintain that illusion into the future ?
Lots to think about !
