By Paul A. Henny, DDS 

The word “prescriptive” recently got stuck in my head. It made me think about the important distinction between a relationship that’s primarily focused around “giving directions or injunctions” versus mutually goal-oriented and collaborative. It’s all too easy in the middle of a busy day to reduce our patients’ complex problems down to prescriptive responses so we can move on to the next problem or obligation on our schedule.  

The reality of dentistry was brilliantly stated long ago by Bob Barkley, “Our goal is to design dentistry that will fail at the slowest possible rate.” This humble statement should always sit at the center of our practice philosophy: We aren’t gods; hence we aren’t perfect, and we can’t control the future. The best we can do is learn, practice, and do our best with the best of intentions. The rest will be up to the patient and fate.  

If our patients choose to not assertively take charge of their oral microbiome through appropriate oral hygiene and diet management, then all of our skills and good intentions will be undercut, and the failures sometimes blame-shifted onto us. That thought brings me around to the central reason behind why I’m writing today: We can’t be successful unless we are also good teachers and leaders. We have to want our patients to be successful on a very deep level. 

Last year my daughter Allison graduated at the top of her high school class, and it was easy to think “Wow! Look at what she did!” Yet it wasn’t just her efforts that made it happen, so the thought should be “Wow! Look at what WE did!” as the effort was communal and very philosophically-driven. It’s clear that Allison’s Principal and teachers LOVED her enough to invest a significant part of themselves in her development. You could feel it, see it, and hear it in their words. 

Are we similarly invested in our patients success? Are we doing a whole lot more than just being prescriptive? Are we investing a significant part of ourselves in our patients’ lives because we want to see them succeed? Can they feel it, see it, and hear it?  

By John C. Cranham, DDS 

Pete Dawson and I talked about this often. No matter how many years in practice, dentists never have everything figured out. The things that you are doing now are not going to be right forever.  

My advice to young dentists is to be open to new processes and new materials even if you have a predictable way of doing things now. Learning and adapting makes dentistry incredibly fun. Even in my 60’s I am always learning something new—like the digital 3D world of dentistry. I haven’t been this excited about dentistry ever. 

Starting out as a new dentist wasn’t easy for me. I wanted to be known for something in my community. I wanted to be known as the dentist who solved problems that other dentists couldn’t. The first thing I needed was courage to put myself out there and do whatever I needed to do.  

The second thing I needed was training, mentoring, and experience. I went to The Pankey Institute and Dawson Academy. I took all their courses. I took a veneer class with Bill Dickerson back in the day. I listened to Ross Nash and Larry Rosenbaum. At the turn of the millennium, I was trying to take the traditional occlusal information and blend it with the hottest cosmetic information at the time. (Those concepts were diametrically opposed back then. It was blasphemy to put them together.) I prevailed and became better at solving functional problems and improving aesthetics at the same time. Today, dentists do this all the time. 

I and all my colleagues coming up over the last 30 years have had to be open to change. We’ve had to try new things and work at mastering them. I don’t think I am doing anything today in the same way I was trained in dental school.  

My message in this blog is that it’s important to evolve as a dentist to stay enthusiastic about what you do and to provide the best care you can. It’s common for maturing dentists to let go of certain procedures and focus on what they enjoy most and develop specific expertise in niche services. It’s also common for other maturing dentists to continue enjoying general dentistry half of their time and focusing on complex cases the other half.  

Enjoy the relationships you build and take pride in improving your restorative work as you need to redo it. Patients are wowed by what you can do now and how you do it compared to how you did it years ago. They love learning about the advances in dentistry that benefit them.  

The relational part of practice will always be rewarding. Being able to choose what you do and who you do it with will always be wonderful. Passion for what you do is fueled by learning, so keep setting goals to learn something new and be open to that learning changing you. 

A Reflection: Although most of our early educational classrooms have not often fostered it, an essential participatory experiential exercise can help ground our discoveries and anchor our adult learning, in which we can be “known through” an experience with self and others, more than knowing anything by our own thought. An authentic encounter with a teacher/mentor can foster, in time, our discovery toward a feeling of true knowing, in our heads, our hearts, our hands, and our bodies, as well. This understanding, authentically discovered, can emerge, in unique ways with each individual, and becomes an opportunity for True-Self seeing. It is quite unlike the intellectual “knowing” most of us have been taught to rely on. This experiential kind of “seeing,” can take away much of our anxiety concerning figuring it all out fully for ourselves or requiring ourselves to be “right” about our formulations beforehand. At this point, a teachers’/mentors’ facilitation can become more like a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea.

Life then becomes more like a verb than a noun…We were not put on this earth to describe life, rather we are invited to actively live it,,,! In time, there often can be someone dancing with us (maybe sitting on our shoulder), and we are not afraid of making mistakes. We learn through experience, mistakes, doubt, while allowing a reviewing process to become an intentional part of our experiential learning. It is often best, if we are not told first… Rather, we can be invited to discover it for ourselves! Hmmm…Isn’t that interesting?

“The true wonder of learning is discovering for ourselves!” Carl Rogers, PhD

Through our own experience we can discover while having many encounter’s in which family, patients, team members, friends, and colleagues become our teacher’s / mentor’s. Even when we are doubtful, we can look in the mirror, at our authentic self and say, “Yes” – knowing full well, there is much more to be experienced and it is bound to add layers to our understanding and learning on the job! What ever the “Job” may be or become! Learning becomes a “Two-Way Street” and our teachers and mentors can become participants, team members, patients, spouses, parents, grandparents, adult children, children, and grandchildren, in all age groups. Success then, is a moving target… Not a fixed destination; instead, it can be a becoming!…Isn’t that wonderful…!