Dental Info

In general good quality patient dental care should be about helping our patients achieve the best dental care possible. This doesn't necessarily entail getting our patients to spend maximum money. Instead it is about our ability to educate our dental patients about the factors that can undermine their dental health and lead to tooth loss. Most times tooth loss can be prevented through early intervention and patient education about the importance of home care and showing them how to achieve optimum dental health.  Most often  dentists do not get paid for the time spent on educating our patients. Instead there seems to be an increasing emphasis in health care about achieving efficiencies. and insuring our ability to generate a profits in spite of the ever increasing costs of delivering  dentistry in an optimal fashion. In my opinion our government and the insurance companies bear a certain responsibility for these developments. Both the government and the insurance...

When I went to dental school shadowing was not required. My only experience was as a patient. When I started dental school I was surprised how "difficult" dentistry could be. After all, my uncle was my dentist and he always made my care look easy. I had a lot to learn when I started school. I am not sure if I fully understood the difficulties involved with running a practice, seeing patients and making them happy. If I had shadowed I would have had a much better understanding about what is actually involved in being a practicing dentist.  We are currently hosting a recent college graduate who is taking a gap year and I asked her how much shadowing she needs and she reported that most schools require 100 hours of shadowing. I think this is a good thing, since the amount of schooling required to complete a dental degree is both time consuming and expensive.  Not all dentists are comfortable having a prospective dental student shadow them in their office, but many are and ...