Your patients are smart; you need to be smarter.
Pick up any dental journal on any given month and you will find an article or two on how to build a cosmetic practice, or how to increase the amount of elective dentistry in your practice. You can find articles from many different authors with many different opinions on their particular “top things to get you there.” But one common opinion shared by everyone is the need to be well educated on cosmetic procedures, materials, and your ability to address patients’ needs and desires.
Dental school is a long, tough road. When finally completed, very few people feel ready to start the next step in their education process. Dental school does a great job of providing a foundation of education but does not provide for us the tools necessary to form a comprehensive care practice. It is geared toward getting the students ready to pass the boards. When we graduate dental school, what do we really know about Occlusion, Cosmetic Dentistry, or Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction? With increasing public awareness of dentistry and overall oral health, today’s dentist must be ready to handle each of these disciplines. Consumers today are more geared towards cosmetics and elective dentistry. With shows such as “Extreme Makeover,” veneers have become a household term. Just ask yourself how many of your patients are familiar with Lumineers By Cerinate? How prepared are you for today’s highly educated dental patient? Most dentists today can even claim to have completed a veneer case or two. But isn’t your obligation as a clinician to be trained in these procedures before performing them on your patients?
Your most important investment
The path of continuing education you choose to begin will not only be the best investment you can make, but most likely the single most important decision you can make in your career. With so many courses available today to learn about these related topics, how do you choose? The first step in the process of deciding your CE path is to set goals for yourself as to the quality of care and services you which to provide.
After graduating dental school, I completed a General Practice Residency, like so many dentists today do. Following my residency program, I began a path of continuing education focused on my goal of becoming my areas leading cosmetic dentist; with a little twist. In order to separate myself from everyone else, I had the idea of becoming an expert in the field of Temporomandibular Joint Dysfunction. I was going to be the doctor who builds smiles from the ground up.
The next step in your CE path is to decide which programs in the market are best for your practice and your goals. So where did I start? I was already doing crowns, and since I seated some veneers, I thought I was already doing cosmetic dentistry, so I thought the place to start would be with TMD courses. I did research on people I perceived as experts in TMD and took course after course. You name the lecturer, and I heard him speak. Jack Haden, Harold Gelb, Terrance Spahl, Jeff Okeson, Ralph Garcia, and Brock Rondeau, just to name a few. Throw in the usual people that everyone says you have to see, Gordon Christensen, John Kanka, Ray Bertoloti, David Garber, I had taken over 1,000 hours of CE, and earned my Fellowship in the Academy of General Dentistry, by the time I took my first live patient CE program on veneers with The Hornbrook Group.
Have a plan
As much as I thought I knew about occlusion and cosmetics by this time, I was surely surprised by how much I truly did not know. Taking this course opened my eyes to the vital role that occlusion plays in overall treatment, not just the TMD patient.
I brought my knowledge from the Hornbrook Group course back to my office partner and discussed my vision of getting a uniform practice protocol in place designed to promote cosmetics and proper occlusion. After discussion several CE options, my partner offered his opinion that he wanted to go through a traditional occlusal-based camp. He had come up with the idea of completing the Dawson program, and since the Hornbrook course I just completed was based on Dawson/Pankey; I knew it would be to my benefit. We started and completed the Dawson program together. I was introduced to the Piper Center for TMD from the Dawson courses and decided it was only fitting to go through Piper’s TMD program since I heard nearly every other speaker’s program of TMD on the planet. Finally, feeling ready to perfect my cosmetic skills, I returned to The Hornbrook Group and completed its continuum. With each additional course I took with the Hornbrook Group, I realized their overall program was not simply about cosmetics. The program paralleled and added to what I had previously learned from the Dawson Center and other occlusion courses. I felt it tied all my previous courses together in terms of practicality, and how occlusion and cosmetics fit together.
I know what everyone reading this article is starting to ask, "Is it truly necessary to go through each of these programs in order to build an excellent comprehensive practice focused on cosmetics?" Hardly. After taking nearly 1,800 hours of CE, and developing a 20 year old general practice into a comprehensive cosmetic based practice, I do feel I am a pretty good source on where to turn in order for you to build your own comprehensive cosmetic practice.
If you are haphazardly picking your CE courses to fill your year’s requirement or taking whatever free courses come your way with no direction, goals, or congruency between courses, then I am sure you will continue to wonder why other practices are consistently excelling year after year, while yours remains the same. You may have involved yourself in a CE course or two in the past and become disappointed at home when you found you could not implement the things you were taught because of the practicality. Have you lost your drive or your enthusiasm towards dentistry?
If you think the process is harder than just setting goals and taking courses then start by asking yourself a few questions; Do you understand how joints break down and how the occlusion is adversely effected? Do you routinely screen your patients for occlusal-muscle problems and offer them solutions that can be as simple as an occlusal equilibration, yet can drastically affect their way of life? Would you like to perform more elective dentistry in your office? What are you waiting for?
Consider continuums
If I had to make a change in any one thing I have done in my career following dental school it would have been to enroll myself in a CE continuum sooner than I did. Continuums will allow you to have a positive learning experience throughout each course, with the next course building on the last. This prevents any contradiction or loss in quality you may get from jumping from one program to the next. How many of you reading this article have a friend that has been through The Hornbrook Group, Dawson, Pankey, Kois, Spears, LVI, or Nash? Have you ever wondered why they speak so highly of these programs? It is because the model has been tried and tested time and time again. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel, as Howard Farran says… “You just need to be on the bus.”
How has my CE path benefited my practice? Patients are being educated to a higher degree, and in return are completing their treatment plans. Elective cases have gone from several cases a year to several cases per month. I have built a strong referral base of TMD/myofacial pain patients that lead into my restorative practice because of the complexity of their treatment needs, such as full mouth reconstruction.
Take the first step in choosing the right program for you. Decide on the goals for yourself and your office, as well as your office philosophy. You will find that many of the structured CE programs out there share the same philosophy with one another, and many are interchangeable. It is just a matter of deciding which one will better suite your goals. I would find the program that you think will allow you to achieve your goals and complete that program. The commitment to higher education will reap rewards in your office far exceeding the investment of the courses.
In 2008, I will celebrate my tenth year as a dentist. I truly love my job and could not imagine doing anything else.
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