Who do you trust?

I spent a good hour in the chair at the Dentist's office Monday afternoon. As I sat there I thought about polls I've seen measuring the amount of trust people place in medical professionals. It dawned on me that I've never seen a poll about trust in dentists.

This is interesting to me because my experience is that dentists are among the least trustworthy people on the planet. I had two dentists in Austin that tried to get me to agree to extensive, unnecessary work. Our son had a dentist in Austin who billed both me and my insurance company. They then refused to send me my money back until I had called them three times and gotten ugly with them on the phone. Remarkably, the office manager for that dentist told me that they never re-fund money in cases where they double bill unless the patient is both insistent and persistent. Now in Colorado, we've stopped sending our kids to a pediatric dentist and instead are taking them to our dentist because we discovered the pediatric dentist was practicing fraudulent billing.

So, who do you trust? I should say that our dentist here in Colorado is fantastic and everything is above board. But I've found them to be the exception to the rule.