My relationship with dentistry was terminated about 30 years ago when I taught myself how to keep my teeth cavity-free by deploying 5-minute long daily cleaning session. I thought I would never need to see a dental professional again and my confidence has held up until very recently.
Due to self destruction caused by some unexpected change in life, I somehow developed teeth/gum problems and medical help was deemed inevitable after self-recovery attempts failed in vein.
It is a pain in the butt for a foreign guy like me to find a dentist here as there's literally no dental office in the 415/650 zones that is run by someone who originally came from my native country. There are so freaking many Asians, Indians and Middle Easterns in the industry, but sadly enough, minority doctors are more than often biased against other minority patients.
I yelped about a dozen of white male dentists in the city and my pick among the decent candidates was Christopher Nichols. He's a sharp looking guy with concealed masochist smile who you might have seen in one of those Alfred Hitchcock films. Pretty cool.
The fact he had higher education on the other coast sounded like he avoided traffic with Asian students he would face in his home region, SF Bay Area. But I tried to believe he will not discriminate against me based on my cultural/ethnic backgrounds. I prayed for it.
Dr. Nichols is actually a very rude, ignorant, and judgmental person who talks you down and neglects your dignity. But I wasn't offended because those qualities are necessary for a doctor to have in order to practice medicine everyday and to maintain doctor-patient relationship in an authoritative way. Nobody wants a nice, soft spoken guy to help him battle against diseases. We want a bad ass dentist who shuts everyone up and does his job perfectly. Right?
So everything was fine as long as Dr. Nichols takes his profession seriously. However, during my last visits, I found that this guy was a total scum who would not deserve to collect my respect/money again.
I am not going to write a long review due to the space, but basically he lied to me about the cavity which was found by full-mouth X-Ray exam along with several others. He singled out a tooth and said it requires immediate care or I'll need a root canal and he threatened me to skip free teeth cleaning that came with the exam and take care of this particular cavity ASAP.
I had a very phony impression from the way he convinced me. My BS detector was ringing loud and I decided to go to another dentist's office in town to get a second opinion. It turned out that I had a slight cavity in the tooth he warned me of and other teeth had further enlarged holes. And the new doctor told me none of those cavities are about to penetrate thru nerve area or need immediate filling. It was a false diagnosis tactically forged by Dr. Nichols.
So why did Dr. Nichols want me to take care of the smallest cavity first? We don't need to hire Hercule Poirot to draw conclusions. This guy just needed to pocket some cash by fixing the easiest problem while letting all other potentially serious problems grow into worse conditions. He did show me a X-ray photo of the tooth with cavity that's expanding close to the nerve but what new doctor showed me was different. Did Christopher Nichols show me someone else's mouth or what? I went back to Nichols' office next day asking him to show me the X-ray results again and I knew he was going to decline my request for an obvious reason.....which he did exactly as I predicted. Honestly, it took me weeks of hard feeling to eventually accept that I was fucked over by him because I thought he was someone I could trust despite personality issues.
"This immigrant sucker is too stupid to know how many cavities he has, where they are, how to consult his lawyer or contact DCA....etc...."
Those assumptions are, in fact, what his secret smile is made of.
Crooked Christopher, you're fired read more
