02/09/2026
Hot take: Students should not have to patients to show up. That's the part nobody says out loud.
Twenty leva for the taxi. Materials out of your own pocket. The coffee, the lunch, the "please, just come once, it won't take long." Sometimes plain cash, because the case has to be finished before the exam and there's nobody left to ask.
And when the money runs out, you beg instead. You call your flatmate's aunt. You ask a Bulgarian classmate to post for you in a group you can't write in yourself. You stand near the door at the right moment and hope the next walk-in happens to be the category you're short of.
I understand exactly why it happens. What I'd point out is what either one actually buys you.
Someone who came for the money doesn't want the treatment. They want the money, so they come once. Someone who came as a favour cancels without thinking twice about it. And nearly everything you're short of — endo, prosthetics, anything past three appointments — depends on that person coming back a second and a third time. You can pay for a first visit. You can't pay your way through a case.
There's a worse part. The more students who do it, the more patients come to expect it, and the going rate goes up. The ones who feel that first are the students with the least to spend.
None of this says anything about you as a clinician. Nobody ever gave you a channel, so you built one out of favours and out of your own pocket.
It just shouldn't be the only one there is.
Patients on Unident register themselves and write down what's wrong before any student sees the request. Nobody paid them to be there and nobody is doing anyone a favour. They came looking — which is also why they come back.
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