What's wrong with cook book dentistry?

 When dental students are studying to become dentists, often their schools focus on teaching a 'core curiculum'. The logic is that dental schools want to make sure their graduates achieve a level of basic skills and can perform procedures to a level of competency. Often there is a conscious decision made to not 'confuse' our students. That being said there are many ways to do dentistry and students of dentistry need to be open to learning new ideas and new ways of doing their dentistry

Unfortunately many dentists fall into a complacency trap , where they develop a routine way of doing procedures and aren't always open to learning different ways of doing things. They probably believe that doing things the same will provide consistent acceptable results. This is what I mean by cookbook dentistry since they probably find it easy to follow their recipe over and over again.

The problem is that dentistry (and all professions) is constantly changing and improving and we dentists need to be open to learing new ways of doing our dentistry. This is why good continuing education is so important. Also once we are exposed to new ideas and techniques , we need to be open to trying them out on our patients.

When I am teaching dentistry I come in contact with many people training to become dentists and in my opinion it is very important that they be open to learning different ideas and ways of doing things. Personally, almost every week I learn something new. This was especially true during the years I spent teaching one day a week at NYUCD. While I was there , I often had the opportunity to observe other faculty helping students with their patients and I learned so much by these observations.

Unfortunately, dentists spend most of their time working alone (with their assistant) and can spend years doing the same procedures, the same way , over and over. While this certainly allows them to become more proficient at doing procedures it can limit their ability to learn from others. 

This is why continuing education is so important and being open to learning new information about dentistry is key to improving our ability to help our patients. Through our continuing education, we can be exposed to the thinking of many excellent clinicians who demonstrate and explain the way that they approach treatment planning and dental procedures. 

from Ask Dr. Spindel - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/2026/03/whats-wrong-with-cook-book-dentistry.html - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/