Where'd All the Family Doctors Go?

Cherokee Family Dental

We've now had two interesting "family doctor" experiences: one with an MD and another with a DDS. The story is basically the same for each. Since the DDS experience is ongoing, I'll just give the details for that one.

The setting is Cherokee Family Dental. They offer this annual subscription which entitles you to a discount on their basic dental services. We crunched the numbers and it seemed like it'd make financial sense to sign up the four kids. We took them in for a cleaning. Two of the kids – K and J – were found to have cavities in need of filling. Glossing over some of the boring details here*, they referred us to a pediatric dentist for this work. So, what's the point in this "family" dentist exactly? Of course, they didn't mention any of this upfront when we paid them for the annual subscription like, "by the way, if your kids ever need any actual dental work, we're not going to do it." So, yeah, avoid Cherokee Family Dental.

*They would only work on J if they could sedate her (?!), and K was freaked out by this one young, inexperienced dentist who was waving a giant needle around. K got his chastisement from me (man up; no one likes those needles). Likewise, this dentist needs to not work on kids without considerably more training.