Ascher Richd H

Richard Ascher is a thief. He used the methods of a con artist to get me to pay way too much for a simple cleaning. I originally went to him because his price for a cleaning was more reasonable than other dentists in the area, and I was pretty poor. However, the cleaning job he did on my teeth was not very thorough. The second time I went to him was when the con occurred. One of my teeth was a little sensitive, so he insisted that he had to x-​ray it. I was sitting in his chair in the middle of a cleaning, and he refused to continue if I didn’t agree to an x-​ray and to a special scaling procedure that he said he would perform on that tooth. For that x-​ray, he charged me $ 50 (the going rate for x-​rays at the time was $ 20). He then did a «special» scaling of that tooth, which included a shot of Novocain (or maybe it was Lidocaine) — but his special scaling took less than a minute, and he clearly didn’t do anything special to the tooth. (Maybe he scraped a little deeper under the gum or something, but it still took only about 30 seconds.) For that, he charged me $ 125 (in addition to the fee for the cleaning). Altogether I paid him $ 240 for what was just an ordinary cleaning worth about $ 75. Once I got home and itemized his charge for the visit, I realized I had been conned — but I had given him cash (which he insisted on), and it was too late to get my money back.
So you might think, why is this dentist conning his patients? Thirty years ago there was a glut of dentists in the country, and dental fees were low. Over the years I went to a lot of dentists who were looking for ways to pump up their fees (like stretching a cleaning out over two or three visits). This dentist apparently came of age during that time. Instead of stretching out a treatment over many visits, this fellow settled on a technique of demanding extra money for special treatments during a simple procedure.
This is a very old man who shakes constantly. That made me nervous from the get-​go, but his secretary assured me he was perfectly capable. He isn’t. I know what a thorough cleaning feels like, and his cleanings weren’t thorough at all. I’m still angry at myself for falling for the con.