Conflict of Dental Opinion - who's right? - Dental Health Message Board

clarkster · 03-06-2009, 06:28 AM

A dentist told me, on examination of an x-ray, that I had recurrent decay and needed my white filling replaced.

As this filling was fairly recent, I decided to get another opinion. The second dentist, again after taking an x-ray, said that there was no decay. Instead, he said, the shadow was caused by the fact that the white filling had replaced a previous mercury filling.

Naturally the first dentist was annoyed and removed me from her list! I'm not too bothered about that, but what do people think about the likelihood of the second dentist's opinion? How hard is it to diagnose decay?

Thanks in advance.

Stribe · 03-06-2009, 07:21 AM

Without seeing you clinically, I could not tell you for sure who is correct. However, I can say that older dentists do not like composites at all because they grew up in a time where the composites were not good at all (they have gotten much better in the last 10 years). I see many cases where a tooth is stained from amalgam, but the stained structure is just as hard and bacteria free as the rest of the tooth. Your second dentist's opinion could be valid.

Diagnosis is the last and hardest thing taught in dental school. Its very difficult to pick up at times because a lot of it just has to come from experience. Because of this, many instructors have different opinions. You could get 4 well-trained up-to-date dentists to look in the same mouth and come up with 5 different valid options. This is all dependant on their experiences with similar cases and their overall risk management styles.

The way to handle all this as a patient is just find a dentist you feel you can trust and who will answer any question you have to your satisfaction. A dentist who will spend the time to educate their patients are worth finding because in the long run a well-educated patient will need less dental work.