Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

“What? $5 for the soup? Steamboat is supposed to come with soup. How can you charge me for it? It’s not that I can’t afford to pay for the soup. It’s just that this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard.”

This was the argument I overheard at the next table. It was between an angry woman in her late 50s and the poor waiter trying hard to explain company policy. You might think that she was shocked by the bill when the waiter showed it to her. But no. She had not even started yet. The waiter was just informing her upfront that they would be charging $5 for the soup.

I was having steamboat dinner with my friend Tsun Han at Fat Fish Restaurant at the Admiral Country Club on a Saturday night. They serve steamboat which included a generous spread of seafood and sliced meat buffet style. Like one reviewer said, “the prawns were so fresh that they squirm”. The staff was also friendly and attentive. The ambience was pretty good without being packed with noisy crowds. Well, at least it wasn’t noisy until Madam Soupless turned up and complained about the $5 soup even before she started.

Let’s see. The restaurant charges $22.80++ per person which was cheap. Adding $5 to the total bill would mean an additional charge of only a little more than a $1 for 4 people. So would Madam Soupless be happier if she were charged $25 (2 people at her table) with no mention of soup cost?

The restaurant’s policy is just an example of itemised charges promoting “transparency”. If charging Madam Soupless $5 was enough to freak her out, I wonder what would happen if the restaurant gave her a bill which looks like this:

Food $18
Soup $5
Utensils $1
Gas $1

$100 + $7 GST is ridiculous? $107 no GST is good? Look who is being not just ridiculous but also stupid.

The internet allows people we have never met to become our patients. It often starts off with an enquiry. This is followed by a consultation, a discussion, treatment planning and finally the actual treatment is done. This source of patients is not to be under-estimated. It’s how we managed to build up a cosmetic dental practice. That was 6 years ago.

In recent months, however, we received a lot of enquiries from people who seemed like potential patients. This may sound like good news, but it isn’t. In the past when trust was easier to come by, a high percentage of people who contacted us via the internet did show up for consultation and treatment. Nowadays, enquiries are much harder to handle. Folks who seem interested try to settle the treatment plan, exact costs, guarantees and number of visits over a few emails. They don’t seem to realise that dentistry cannot be practised online. A lot of details of exact costs, procedures etc cannot be determined without an examination. Even with that, unforseen circumstances may result in a change of treatment plan. Insisting on precise figures is difficult at best and unreasonable at worst.

An example. How much does it cost to do a filling. $80. patient turns up with deep caries involving the pulp. This would require root canal treatment and it’s going to cost much more than $80.

“Can you guarantee that it’s only going to cost $80? No hidden costs.” comes the question by email.

Of course not! How can the dentist tell how bad your condition is and whether a filling is all you need? Don’t these folks realise that as far as I’m concerned, it’s their tooth that is hidden from me and not my costs which are hidden from them.

“I just want to do a filling. If you can’t guarantee that it’s not going to cost more than $80, then I won’t come.”

????????!!!!!!!!

So what if we quote reasonable charges. Some folks may be suspicious why Dentist A charges less than Dentist B. So these folks ask even more questions in an attempt to determine how reliable a dentist is without even turning up for consultation. Some of these questions are irrelevant and some can be downright weird. The more they ask, the more uncertain they become. Someone ought to tell them that the real answers to their doubts don’t show up very well on email. So usually, it back to cost factors. Cheapest practice wins. Not to say that the cheap practices are no good, but what about this thing called trust?

C, a colleague of mine has just been diagnosed with diabetes. His doctor? None other than our schoolmate in JC. The doctor is not an endocrinologist. He is just a GP, but C and his family has been seeing him since he started his own practice more than a decade ago. C’s entire family has not been seeing any other doctor ever since. No matter where they go or how much they charge or what additional tests, medications and procedures they indicate, their pool of loyal patients who see them several times a year follow them. It’s all about trust.

If there’s such a thing as doctor-for-life, is there such a thing as dentist-for-life? I’m sure there is. Quite a few have followed me all the way from Hougang. How do you choose a dentist-for-life then? Simple. Try out a few dentists for simple, non-invasive treatment like scaling. Pick one you like, show up regularly for scaling and develop a close patient-dentist relationship with him/her. He knows you. He recognises the importance of the relationship and is far less likely to do anything “funny” than someone who is seeing you for the first time. So what if there’s no Medisave in his/her clinic? So what if the clinic would only allow a 70% claim of surgical fees? Do you have to look for a clinic that allows a 100% claim (like mine) and shoot 100 questions at me because you don’t trust me? Please go back to the dentist you trust. Entertaining all these doubts, mistrust and reluctance to pay consultation fees is a waste of time for me.

So what’s new? Wellness Village packed up and left without any warning, Customers who have paid for packages, some just before the spa closed down, are now left in the lurch. When something like this happens, civilised consumers would seek help from CASE.

And here’s the response. Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE) executive director Seah Seng Choon said that he was “not surprised” by the spa’s actions.

“Don’t be fooled by the location. Spas are generally small businesses, unless they have an international chain … Consumers have to be careful when transacting with them,” said Mr Seah.

Huh? Did I get that right? What was Mr Seah (former General Manager of NTUC Denticare) trying to say? That consumers must be careful transacting with small operations like mine? That small establishments are weak, unpredictable or even nonviable in today’s economy? That they should “merge” with or just surrender to NTUC? That dental patients would be safer and better off with the big group practices and establishments employing hundreds of dentists because Mr Seah wouldn’t be surprised if small and humble practices out there fold up and pack up quietly after collecting deposits for crowns and bridges? That the big medical or dental groups going for IPO are somehow more reliable? Big is in, small is out?

OK, so Mr Seah’s comments have drawn some flak and he has bothered to clarify that the numbers show that SMEs are usually the ones that leave customers in the lurch. I don’t think we need to be reminded of that. There are far more SMEs than big companies out there. Of course the failure rate of SMEs will be higher. I think the problem everyone who objects to Mr Seah’s remarks has, is the derisive way in which someone working for one of the largest organisations in Singapore that has put so many pop and mom operations out of business should add insult to injury. And by the way, if a certain ethnic group in the country is more prone to divorce (as shown by statistics), would Mr Seah warn other people from other ethnic groups not to marry them?

Just take a look at the food courts run by the big players. Impressive theme, impressive uniforms, unimpressive food. Chances of finding good hawker food is much higher in small, one or 2-man operated stalls without any designer decor or uniforms. So why is it so difficult for so many of my middle management friends to understand why I don’t belong to group practices with scores of dentists and dozens of branches?

Why are so many seemingly intelligent people so easily impressed by the size of the company providing a service? Is it because we see with our own eyes how the big boys strangulate the little guys as the new generation of consumers place less and less value on personal touch? Will we end up as a nation of employees under one big employer? What happened to the promotion of entrepreneurship? Were those messages only meant for the scholars heading our GLCs?

Gosh, I’d better be packing my bags and heading for Cambodia soon.

Thaksin’s vision?

I was at Toa Payoh Library on a Sunday morning and decided to make use of the couple of hours before my TCM class started to do some studying. At 10am when the library opened, the crowds rushed in. By 11am, all the seats at the study tables were occupied. In spite of being the only uncle at the study tables, I was quick enough to claim a nice seat. All of a sudden, a sense of nostalgia and deja vu gripped me. Vivid memories of student days flooded my mind. All this was too familiar. In spite of being quite out of place, seated amongst all the youngsters, I settled down to the business of studying very quickly.

And I love old libraries like Toa Payoh. It’s big, with a children’s section downstairs and the adult’s section upstairs. The newer libraries like the one at Sengkang and Hougang, are a total waste of time. They are situated inside shopping malls, with the noisy children’s section blending into the adult’s section, the floor area is miserably small and worst of all, there’s an eatery attached, taking up valuable space that could have been used for more shelves and study tables. I’m not sure about the youngsters, but I certainly don’t like this sort of setup.

Toa Payoh is different. They have enough space for a senior citizen’s room and a newspaper room. Though demand is high, a seat at the study tables is definitely not difficult to find if you’re early and quick. Interestingly, the majority of my companions at the study table started their day by reading Chinese books and magazines. One young lady ate her Old Chang Kee snacks under the table. After some leisure reading, they got down to their English textbooks and highlighted lecture notes. No prizes for guessing where these youngsters are from, but if our local kids are going to continue waking up late on Sundays and “studying” in noisy places like Burger King, dressed in their best clothes in order to draw eyeballs from neighbouring tables, I can guess where our next generation of top students are going to come from.

Another insight I gained from this. I’m not going to believe my kid if he tells me he’s going to study with friends at Burger King or that library in the mall. Go to one of the old libraries if you really want to study.