When choosing a dentist, it's amazing how little time and effort many people will put into the process.
Many people will put far more time into choosing a hair stylist or mechanic than they will someone to work on their teeth.
However given how important and how expensive dental work is, choosing the proper dentist for you and your family should not be taken lightly.
In this article I'll discuss some of the factors I used in choosing a dentist in Ashburn, VA, which is where I live.
First, I needed to make sure I was looking for the right type of dental provider.
Since there are many different types with various areas of specialty, it's important you choose one who can at least handle the dental work you know you have in the short term.
It's also important that you consider the dental needs of your family if you are choosing a dentist for more than just yourself.
Since I was choosing a dentist for myself and my family, which included young children, I wanted to choose a dental office that could handle all of us.
Next, I wanted to make sure they were covered by my insurance.
This can be a complicated affair, but I found the easiest approach was to use my insurance company's website to do my initial searching for an Ashburn dentist.
Since I knew everyone in their listings was covered by my insurance, this took care of this aspect of my search.
However since many insurance websites don't have dental listings, this is a criteria you may have to double check with each dentist on your short list.
Making sure the dentist I chose had the right accreditations was also important.
This includes making sure they have the proper degrees and are affiliated with the proper dental institutions.
The main dental institution for dentist is the American Dental Association (ADA).
Proximity to where you live obviously is important to choosing any service provider.
Now what exactly defines 'proximity' really depends on the area you live in, but in my particular case, there are plenty of dentists in Ashburn, VA so I had plenty to choose from.
If you live in a more rural area you'll need to decide how far you are really willing to drive to visit the dentist.
However given then importance of dental work and the infrequency of the visits, many people are willing to drive a little farther to visit the right dentist.
You can check local area web listings to find dentists in your area.
"Yellow Pages" has virtually been replaced by larger online business directories as well has more accurate local ones.
Many business directories for your town or community will have listings for dentists, and you can also use Google Maps to see how close they are to where you live.
Finally, once I had a list of dentist that met all the specifications described, we turned to checking references.
We have lots of neighbors with kids, and it was easy to ask around to see if any were current patients of the dentists we were considering.
The dentist we ended up choosing was actual a very popular dentist with many of our friends.
Having references probably will give you as much comfort as anything when it comes to choosing a dentist.