Don't Trust The Car Mechanic!

Because you're being scammed. Unless you have a good understanding of how to repair your car yourself, how the machinery works, how much parts cost and so on, how can you trust the mechanic?

If there's something wrong with my car, I take it to my nephew first. He has repaired cars all of his life and there's not a thing or a car he can't repair himself. At least cars made until around the year 2000 - 2005, after which they became 4-wheeled computers. I've never owned a car younger than that for that reason alone; it cost me nothing but the parts I buy myself at a car-dump to repair the damn thing. It's not a toy for me nor a status-symbol, it's a purely functional thing that gets me where I want to go when I want to go there.

The stories of garages and car mechanics that overcharge their customers are many and widespread; I'm sure you know someone who got screwed over big-time on their bill. This is not true for car mechanics only. All things we aren't an expert on, we rely on the knowledge and problem analysis done by a payed expert.

So I went to the dentist a week ago for my semi-annual check-up. I didn't have any trouble, sensitive teeth or pain for the past six months, so I wasn't worried at all. And my dentist is a nice man too. Lying under the light, him poking around in my mouth hunting for cavities, he always chats about his personal life. This time he had a story about his car; it broke down, stopped running and didn't start again. He had to take it to the garage, the official garage because the warning lights on the dashboard won't go out if some encoded signal isn't sent to the car's computer. And it was sooo expensive, he said...

"Well I'm done,", he perfectly timed the end of his story with finishing the check-up, "unfortunately you have four small cavities that need to be filled before they get bigger. Let's make an appointment for next week, shall we?" Because I didn't have any pain or whatever I asked "are you sure?" and he replied "of course I'm sure." And that was it. I had my cavities filled yesterday, and that cost me 350 euros. I don't want my teeth to rot to the point where I need a root-canal treatment, so I go along with his judgement.

The trouble here is that the dentist for me is like a car mechanic for someone without a person like my nephew in their life. For "fun" I just typed "dentist fraud" into Google's search bar, and the number of hits is frighteningly high. Did the dentist have me come back because it was necessary for my dental health, or was it because he needed some extra cash to make up for his own financial setback caused by his expensive car breaking down? I will never know.

I'm almost sure that if a cure for cancer is found, it will not see the light of day, simply because of the enormous amounts of money made with fighting cancer. Or am I too pessimistic here and should I have more faith in "human nature"? In a world where there's so much profit to be made on sick people, would it make any economical sense to cure illness, or to prevent illness? At what point is it more lucrative to even promote sickness, physical or mental?

Boy, the dentist sure made me think. I hope this made you think as well. I'll keep going to the dentist, I'll keep trusting his judgement and I encourage no one to stop seeing their dentist or doctor, that's not the point. Also keep getting your car repaired; we don't want accidents. To encourage you to keep going to the dentist, I'll leave you with the best dentist-scene ever to come from Hollywood (now imagine a hollow, evil laugh here):

The above is a slightly redacted version of a post I published in 2018 originally.

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