Category Archives: Patient Communication

My New Dentist Life: Knowing enough to know what I don’t know

Editor’s note: This is the fourth article in a New Dentist Now blog series, My New Dentist Life, following a new dentist’s first year experience out of dental school. The three-month mark! I am getting better at managing multiple patients at a time, my speed is slowly improving, and my treatment planning skills are tested daily. However, there… Read More »

Dentist or therapist? In our profession, compassion is an inescapable part of our job

For most of us, the reasons behind becoming dentists are fairly common across the board:  we like working with our hands; we like creating beautiful smiles; we wanted to own our own business (for the business owners of the group); and the catch all, we wanted to help people. For those of us who didn’t grown up in… Read More »

Questioning our role in health care in response to COVID-19

It feels strange to say, but I feel very lucky right now. In the face of an unprecedented pandemic ripping apart the fabric of our society, workplaces, and daily lives, my life has resumed largely as if nothing changed. My family is healthy, and my office is perhaps busier and more productive than before COVID-19 took hold, only… Read More »

Hitting the pause, reset buttons during COVID-19

When COVID-19 emerged as a global threat, we learned very quickly that now is not the time to sit back and wait for direction but to use our own resources and internal compasses to guide us in making difficult decisions. We realized we were all learning as we go, so to speak. There was no time to gather… Read More »

The power of care calls during uncertain times

I remember the transition I went through after I purchased my dental practice. That was a time of uncertainty for patients of the practice because, well, they just didn’t know what they were getting. Who was this new guy taking over the office? Through the first few weeks of my transition, my team updated me on the many… Read More »

Implementing new safety measures before reopening our dental practices

When I put finger to keyboard three weeks ago I was sitting in my office after having seen an emergency patient at one of my company’s two Federally Qualified Health Center clinics in central Indiana. Two days later we decided to close that location and only see patients at the larger of the two clinics and cut back… Read More »