Why has patient trust eroded in dentistry and other healthcare fields over the past few decades?
Decades of high-profile professional scandals have lowered the baseline trust patients bring into any healthcare setting. The news cycle delivers regular stories of fraud, unnecessary procedures, over-prescription, harmful product exposure, manufacturer kickback arrangements, and outright criminal behavior across medical and dental practices. Patients have absorbed enough of this to arrive at every new professional encounter with a layer of guardedness that did not exist a generation ago. Their own prior bad dental experiences, or those of family members and friends, add to it. The burden of proof has shifted to the practice. The practice must now demonstrate trustworthiness rather than assume it. Trust gets built through visible professionalism: clean and organized operations, displayed credentials, accumulated reviews, painless administrative interactions, and a structured ethical selling process that signals patient interest over revenue extraction. A practice operating the way practices did in 1990 reads as suspect to modern patients. The bar has moved. Meet the new bar deliberately.
If the answers you are finding here resonate with you, my team and I work with a small group of clients each year. The next step is a complimentary Discovery Consultation and Practice Review with Dr. McAnally.
