Dental Clinics, as Far as the Eye Can See!

Everywhere I've gone in the Manila area, there's been one pervasive theme... Dental clinics. I don't know why, but there are dental clinics everywhere. Not like dental clinics back in the US, either. Those are recognizable offices, not dissimilar from private practice doctor offices and the like. No, these are different. These are just regular stores which, you know, happen to be dental clinics.

Every mall, every strip mall, every corner store, they all have dental clinics in or next to them. Even the really poor neighborhoods, the kinds of neighborhoods where the taxi driver locks the doors as we drive through, have random hand-made signs leaning against their corrugated metal buildings indicating that inside can be found a dental clinic.

What... the... fuck?

I can understand the ubiquity of, say, coffee shops. Everybody drinks coffee. (Well, I don't, but I'm a statistical anomaly. For reasonable values of "everybody," everybody drinks coffee.) And it's not hard to mess up coffee. It's pretty straight-forward. There are machines that do it for you, all you need is some minimum wage register jockey to hand it to you. The same goes for, say, gas stations. They're everywhere, and for good reason. You can't mess it up. It's simple. It's, well, ubiquitous.

But dental clinics? Don't you want to go to some sort of specialist for that? Aren't those resources scarce? Coffee shops and gas stations are everywhere because people use them every day. How often do you people go to dental clinics? What procedures are being performed there? What is the market force which justifies the vast assortment of corner-store dental clinics?

Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about... Imagine a local park. Just a standard park. Benches, a path or two, some trees, a kids' playground. You know, a park. In that park there may be a building of some sort. A simple, small, cinder block building. This is where the bathrooms are. Perhaps even a storage closet of some kind for the parks and recreation department to store tools and other implements for maintaining the park. For nicer parks there might even be a small office of some sort in that building.

There is a park near my hotel. It has such a building. That building contains, aside from the bathrooms and the storage closet and maybe a small office, a dental clinic. I'm not kidding. I'm not exaggerating. There is a dental clinic. In the park. By the bathrooms. With the homeless people. (Actually, I don't know if there are homeless people in this area. I just assume the presence of homeless people in a public restroom in a park.)

Why is this a thing?

(Side note: Did you know that one of the primary goals of Obamacare is to have a dental clinic in every public restroom? It's a brand new fact.)