BehindTheMedspeak: Is your dentist skimming?

A couple weeks ago, reading Michael M. Grynbaum's New York Times story about the meteoric rise in the price of gold, I happened on the following:

"And in Rockefeller Center, Robert B. Raiber, a dentist, was warning patients that the price of installing a gold crown was about to go up.

"'Patients will see a 10 or 20 percent increase on what it may cost to do a gold inlay or a crown,' said Dr. Raiber, who sits on the board of the New York State Dental Association.

"In Manhattan, Dr. Raiber said, gold crowns already cost up to $2,000. The amount of gold in a complete crown — three pennyweights, or less than a fifth of an ounce — would now fetch $149.81 on the open market, up from $103 a year ago.

"The high prices are forcing some patients to consider other options, like crowns made of porcelain or acrylic.

"'Gold is the best restorative material known to dentistry, bar none,' Dr. Raiber said. But, he added, 'the combination of a recession and the increase in cost for dental work may cause people to hold back.'"
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What interested me wasn't so much the price of the gold as the fact that dentists assume that when they remove a crown — as happened to me recently because of nearby decay that couldn't be fixed absent destruction of the in situ crown — the debris is theirs.

Unlike car engines and their ilk, which can be removed and then replaced without damaging the the components, a crown must be destroyed in order to remove it.

At least, that's the case in my dentist's office.

But even if a gold crown is destroyed in the process of removing it, hey, the gold's not destroyed: it has as much value in crushed fragments as it did in place.

So shouldn't dentists automatically offer you your gold back or compensate you for what they'll be receiving from the lab after they ship it back to be melted down?

I'll take a $150 rebate on my bill for the replacement crown, thank you very much — and so should you if you're faced with this situation in your dentist's office.

They figure you'll be too intimidated to say anything but I'm here to tell you that they'll be embarrassed they didn't offer to make you whole should you bring it up.

No charge for this advice, as always worth precisely what you paid for it.