BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT: In our practice we occasionally find it necessary to invest beyond standard appointment time in the Management of certain patients. This may be due to medical, emotional, or behavioral issues. We are more than willing to provide this service; however there is a charge of an additional behavior management fee on kid time. This fee is related to the cost of committing the time and staff to achieve the optimum outcome for more sensitive patients.
The procedure took 5 minutes. That's hardly covered under that quote.
OP, in my opinion pediatric dentists are bananas to a large extent. Finding a good one is like finding a needle in a haystack, and they are going to be the ones with the LONG waiting lists.
DS had tooth problems from early on; possibly because of facial trauma at 6 months old or maybe because of his dad's family's tooth problems (or a combo), and it took us a YEAR to find a decent, sane dentist. All the while two of his teeth were rotting away.
First one wasn't a pediatric dentist but talked a good game; we had 3 mini-visits to her (awesome idea, if she weren't over an hour away) to get him used to her, the office, and the instruments. But at the end she wasn't sure of dosing for doing the work, and wouldn't do it.
The second guy, a pediatric dentist, had a GORGEOUS office, I mean deluxe. Went in, and he had DS diagnosed with bottle mouth without ever looking into his mouth. It was amazing, how he did that, despite the fact that DS had never had a bottle or juice. What he WAS doing was looking at DH and me, and making nasty assumptions that because WE were heavy, we were obviously feeding him absolute junk. He then judged me for leaving the room when it came time for the exam, and scoffed when I explained that we learned (in this 3 mini visits) that my ONE year old acted very babylike (what a surprise) when he was with me, but got all "I'm a big brave boy" when he was with DH. I was trying to make the guy's work easier and I got judged for it. He then diagnosed a whole bunch of things and said we'd need to coordinate with medical insurance to have a bucketload of work done, under General, in the *office*. Yeah, NO. General will be done in the hospital, and by the way, you're talking about taking out FOUR teeth from the front of his mouth and you're saying he won't have speech problems because of it? Oh ha ha ha. No wonder your office is so gorgeous from what you're charging.
Got a referral to another pediatric dentist from mothering.com's forums (and also from a yahoogroup, veryyoungkidsteeth), and his office was wonderful. Went in for a quick visit. Went back to have a big filling done (where the other guy was just going to take out those teeth) and he used NO medication because it wasn't needed. His behaviour management was playing Finding Nemo in the TVs in the ceiling.
Went back to have the two teeth removed; used a blip of lidocaine and had both out inside of 5 minutes. Their office is awesome. They aren't perfect, but it's just administration stuff (they think that HIPAA applies to patients' parents instead of them, and say "no cell phones" so that they can have conversations with parents in the waiting room in front of other parents...no...this was a problem for us because DH would take DS to appts but I'm the healthcare decision-maker and he HAD TO call me sometimes.)
Once you find a good one the other ones just look ridiculous.
