I know this is a really long review but, like many other Yelp reviewers, both my wife and I had really bad experiences at this dentist's, and I wanted to help readers understand what they may be in for if they decide to go here for treatment.
A basic tactic the practice employs seems to be to get a patient in, diagnose a significant (likely expensive) issue, and then offer to treat it that same day. If you accept, you are likely to be stuck there for hours - they had my wife in for almost 7 hours they day they proposed installing two new crowns for her. The knock-on effects for other patients of this tactic are inevitable, and probably explain the issues with scheduling and abrupt cancellations other reviewers report and that we also experienced.
Making this even worse, in my wife's case the initial treatment offered was provided in isolation of other dental issues she needs to address -- she discovered this on moving to another dentist who has told her that one of the crowns Edgewood put in should not have been done before attending to those issues. In my case, a tooth that was not giving me any problems was diagnosed as needing a crown, which the dentist went ahead and put in even after I reported feeling sensitivity and pain in the area during the prep work. Recurring pain in the two months following the procedure eventually led to their recommending a root canal (which meant I had to pay twice for work on the previously unproblematic tooth); that also failed to solve the pain, and, after two follow-up visits, I had to have the tooth extracted. The only good thing I can say is that, having lost all confidence in Edgewood, I at least went somewhere else for this procedure and had a much better experience.
That leads me to another aspect of the practice that seems problematic: its one-stop-shopping approach, a variant of the basic diagnose and treat tactic I described above. Although Edgewood is a general dental practice, they offer more complicated services by bringing in an endodontist and an oral surgeon. To be fair, I had a very good experience with the endodontist, but the fact remains that there's no easy way to research who these visiting practitioners are and how they've been reviewed by patients. It's also unclear what legal rights a patient has when dealing with these visitors - they're independent agents, not part of the practice itself - or what their financial relationship with the practice is.
Finally, like other Yelp reviewers, we encountered miscellaneous additional problematic issues: with the exception of one individual, the front desk staff, which has a rotating cast, are chaotic. Inconsistent price quotes, double billing, and failure to return calls - we had all of these. The dental support staff are similarly all over the place: during the 90 minutes I had to wait for my root canal to begin, two different technicians called me back to take x-rays - I had to tell the second that it had already been done. The first also told me she needed to take my blood pressure, but failed to do so; the second didn't even mention it. And, finally, some of the treatment areas double as storage space, with boxes of supplies sitting next to the dental equipment. All in all, it's a mess.
So why is this practice so bad? I did a little digging online and have a theory: it's licensed to an out-of-state individual who apparently has ownership in a number of dental offices nationally. There's nothing wrong, of course, with a multi-location venture, but, at least in our experience at Edgewood Smiles, and apparently for many other reviewers, the business model appears focused on maximizing revenue generation; it certainly doesn't seem to privilege quality control in patient care.
So what can one do? What I can't do is undo six months of pain and thousands of dollars of expense. I can file a complaint with the Fulton County Better Business Bureau and/or the Georgia Board of Dentistry, but neither of these is likely to do much. Dental malpractice is hard to demonstrate and, with recent legal changes in Georgia, may have become even harder to prove. So the one thing I can do is to write this review - and let you know what happened to us as you decide where you want to receive your dental care. read more