This reminds me of a joke: What do you call a person who fails medical school?
A dentist.
At least in Germany, applied dentistry was seen as of even lower rank than surgery, something that did not have to do with professional medicine at all (the vocation of the university-educated medicus). Dentistry was a crude affair practiced by barber-dentists or other non-surgeons, sometimes in public bathhouses (places often associacted with prostitution and their bathmasters ignoble company, legally barred from forming or entering guilds), sometimes in broad public on the marketplace. Dentists were traveling people and quacks, those who break teeth (Zahnbrecher), often failing at proper extraction in the first place. All those prejudices took a long time, real progress in the field (anesthesia, pedal-powered mechanical drills and other tools, hygenic measures) and lots of organized lobbying to dispel. I’m sure the reputation of dentistry in other European countries must have been similiar. Some of that prejudice might have carried over to the new world, too ?
The SOUNDS!
I think by far that is one of the biggest issue that people have.
Being so up close and personal doesn’t help either. They have to violate your personal space more than regular doctors typically have to. Like literally the entire time you are there, they have to be up inside you.
Oh yeah, and did I mention the SOUNDS?!
I know several people who are afraid of getting dental work because they are afraid that they’ll get assaulted while being put under.
It’s not so much now, but during the 80s and 90s there was an epidemic of that happening.
Maybe because they’d always be judging you for your teeth?