At this time of the year, I take the opportunity to thank you, my patients, for giving me the privilege of taking care of you. Our office is nothing without our patients and we sincerely appreciate that you have selected our office to provide your dental treatment.
In the New Year we will do our very best to provide excellent dental care for you, family and friends. We will never do any treatment that is not in your best interest or put our (financial) interest before YOUR best interest.
This is what all dentists and physicians are taught but seem to be ideas that have been discarded or seem old fashioned.
The best way to select people to take care of you...doctor, lawyer, car mechanic, accountant etc are the following two qualities:
1. They love what they do.
2. They hate to fail at what they love to do.
I was consulting with a 20 year old young lady and her Mother and towards the end of the appointment, I asked Mom if she had visited my website? She said that she had not but that she had seen my ads in magazines. I showed her two OF my ads in HERLIFE and started to explain the treatment for each of these professional women.
"Wait! These are actually YOUR patients? I thought that you just used models in your ad'"
Every photo that I use in an advertisement, on my website or for educational purposes to explain and demonstrate treatment to one of my patients looking to have a specific treatment IS A PATIENT THAT I HAVE ACTUALLY TREATED.
I NEVER USE ANOTHER DENTISTS PHOTOS OR BUY PICTURES DEMONSTRATING WHAT TREATMENT CAN BE DONE. ALL PHOTOS ARE LIKE YOU...ONE OF MY PATIENTS.
What I will leave behind when I retire is not something for others to remember me by but rather it will be the quality of the dentistry for the patients of a few young dentists.
I have mentored many young dentists which involves hours of time, the exchange of hundreds of emails and texts and many face to face meetings. Most older dentists are unwilling to spend time educating our young colleagues and certainly will not do it unless they are paid.
One of the young dentists that I mentor is Dr Ashok from Bangalore, India. He found me online on a dental forum about 7 years ago and we have exchanged 1000s of emails and he will make his third visit to our office in a few months. When I first met him, he could not accept the concept of conserving as much tooth structure as possible by placing beautiful and strong direct bonded resin fillings using a rubber dam. He told me what everyone has told me for more than TWO DECADES....That treatment will not 'work! You and I know that bonded resin fillings are fabulous for saving teeth without crowns but Dr. Ashok was not too sure about that.
Over these past 7 or so years Dr. Ashok has worked very hard to emulate my work and after all of this time, he has become a master of resin fillings. He no longer doubts my techniques or materials and now his colleagues in Bangalore tell him the same thing that dentists here told me: That treatment won't work! Because he has become a master, he was recently invited to present a lecture in Bangalore on saving teeth with resins rather than destroying tooth structure with crowns. This is a photo of Dr. Ashok giving a lecture.
He and other young dentists are creating my Legacy...Just as it is meant to be.
I am always amazed when people that I meet ask me if the photos in my magazine ads (HERLIFE, Saratoga Living and Capital Living) are actually my patients and my work.
On the opening page of this website (WWW.Benjaminsmile.com) there is a statement that all photos are of actual patients that I have treated.
I guess folks can be suspicious of the photos because if you go to many dentist's websites, you see the SAME photo of a woman smiling. Yes those photos are purchased from a photographic website that will sell you a picture of anything that you want.
I ONLY show actual work that I have completed in my ads and on my website. Occasionally, I go to other dentist's websites from other states and I find photos of my work on their websites...And that bothers my staff more than it bothers me.
If you are going to other dentists for consultations or treatment, make sure that the photos of dentistry has actually been done by the dentist that you are meeting with.
Disruptors are people or companies that completely change the way that we do things. For instance, a few decades ago, many in my generation would have loved to be able to carry around our (vinyl record) music collection with us. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, we were able to do just that and it changed how we listen to music. A few years later, we realized that we wished that we could carry around our emails and put our computers in our pockets and Steve Jobs and Apple again came to the 'rescue' and introduced the iPhone.
Disruptors never listen to others when they tell them that 'you can't do that or that won't work.'
When I realized that a bonded resin filling placed under a rubber dam would save lots of tooth structure and avoid the need for onlays or crowns, other dentists told me that it would not work. And besides, why would I want to give up almost a $1,000 per tooth by placing a resin bonded filling instead of a crown?
Any one that knows me knows that my motto and my office motto is "Do The Right Thing" and that is what we do. Crowns and onlays are treatment of last resort in patients ~58-70 and then and only then will natural teeth be able to last someone's whole life.
Malcome Glidewell did a great interview in INC. Magazine about disruptors. See below:
When people talk about what it takes to transform a field or a world, they leave out one crucial component, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell told the audience at the World Business Forum on Tuesday. "What's really behind it?" he said. "What are the preconditions that make that kind of change possible?"
Too often, he said, the list of explanations is short. "We talk about the importance of technology and knowledge and resources, having the kind of money to make it happen," he said, "but we don't talk about frame of mind--attitude. The kinds of attitudes that lie behind provocateurs."
Using the powerful story of shipping magnate Malcolm McLean, Gladwell revealed how having the right attitude is critical to effecting great change. As Gladwell explained, McLean was the sort of guy who didn't show many emotions. He grew up in poverty during the Great Depression and dropped out of school at age 16. But when he went to work at a gas station and learned he could earn $5 a week just for shipping in oil from far away, he volunteered to help his boss, and this changed the course of history.
McLean's fuel-trucking gig led him to become something of a leader in the trucking space. He was the first guy to suggest using diesel fuel and the first guy to find the most efficient driving routes. He was also the first guy to spend 20 years thinking of ways to make shipping more efficient.
Here was the problem: Shipping took forever, and so did loading and unloading the cargo. In fact, it cost so much to ship that many multinational companies that could have gotten rich from expansion didn't even bother with it, said Gladwell. On top of that, docks were often controlled by organized crime or run through unions, and there were problems of theft to contend with.
By the mid-1950s, when McLean was already a household name among American truckers, he decided to switch industries. He sold off his trucking business, and after a few false starts came up with the idea of making the back of a trailer retractable so the cargo could easily load on and off a ship. In April 1956, the plan worked, and the free and inexpensive movement of freight from one country to the next was born.
So what made McLean such a rousing success? He certainly wasn't educated, and he knew next to nothing about shipping. McLean had a background in trucking, which was considered a whole separate field in those days. But McLean did have three things going for him, Gladwell said, something Steve Jobs and other visionaries had in spades.
The Beauty of Being Disagreeable
Everyone thought McLean was crazy. He sold off a successful business, and the idea of using containers in shipping wasn't new--people had been experimenting with them for 30 years and failed miserably. Containers were so heavy they drove up costs, plus they were cumbersome to load. Longshoremen hated the very idea of them. It didn't help matters that McLean had "mortgaged himself to the hilt," Gladwell said, or that shipping was a capital-intensive business, which trucking was not.
But McLean, like most underdogs, could not have cared less. He was "completely indifferent to what people said about him," Gladwell said, which is "the first and foundational fact to understand these disrupters. They are what psychologists call disagreeable--they do not require the approval of their peers in order to do what they think is correct."
Reframing the Problem
Everyone also thought McLean wasn't seeing the whole picture. People who worked in trucking, railways, and docks had all kinds of ideas on how to solve the problem. Trouble was, they were the ones who could not see the whole picture. They thought of solutions in terms of how it would make their jobs easier, only reframing individual components. Conversely, McLean wanted to reframe it all. As Gladwell explained, people said he couldn't design containers that were too heavy, so he redesigned the connection between the trucks and the box. People said he needed a crane to lift the containers onto the dock, so he thought of a railway line to help the cranes move up and down the ship.
"Successful disrupters are people who are capable of an active imagination," said Gladwell. "They begin reimagining their world by reframing the problem in a way no one had framed it before."
Removing Constraints
When longshoremen saw what was happening, they went on strike. McLean was fine with that. He figured he could use the time to retrofit his ships and bring in larger containers. However, if he wanted to use heavier containers, he was going to need a stronger crane. So he went to a nearby crane company and asked for one that could carry about 35,000 pounds--also, he would need it in 90 days. The company flat-out told him no.
Undeterred, McLean got to thinking. What if a lumber company's crane maker could help? After all, they used cranes and carried large loads all the time. It seemed like a good idea, so McLean flew to Washington State to find out. "Can you build me a crane?" he asked the crane maker. "Sure," they said. "And can I have it in 90 days?" The crane maker told him he wouldn't even have to wait--they would send one right over that afternoon. "You could see by reframing the problem, that frees him up," said Gladwell. But why insist on getting the crane in 90 days?
Well, that reason is simple. Like a certain entrepreneur who had just seen the graphical user interface at Xerox Parc and wanted to build one of his own, McLean wanted to get it done, now. It had nothing to do with his vision or insight. Not even his brains or resources, said Gladwell.
Like Steve Jobs, McLean believed in his vision. What set him apart was not what was in his head or his pocket--"it was in his heart," said Gladwell.
The fact that I am in my late 60s has not diminished my interest in learning more and becoming a better dentist....All for YOU.
I told you that we have purchased a CEREC system that will allow us to design and fabricate strong ceramic (metal free) crowns and onlays in one appointment and without placing the impression material (the goop) to take impressions.
Last weekend Trisha, Jeanine and I travelled to Scottsdale, AZ to learn more about our new system. In September I had a two day course in Charlotte, NC and more recently we had 20 hours of study in our office. We now have more than 100 hours of education on our new system. The manufacturer told us to just do 20 crowns and 'we would learn.' We refused their suggestions and instead invested tens of thousands of dollars learning the right way to use the CEREC system.
I have never been comfortable 'practicing' on my patients; for me, learning from the experts is the best way to incorporate new techniques and technologies into our practice. This is why I have invested almost FIVE MILLION DOLLARS in my education after dental school.
Why would I do that?
Because you DESERVE to be taken care of by a clinician who KNOWS what he or she is doing.
This discussion popped up on FACEBOOK. Please read my comments at the end of the posting.
What have I said about mercury fillings these last 23 years?
1. I don't know whether mercury causes diseases and I would never tell anyone to remove their mercury fillings in order to stop MS or other neurological diseases. There is NO scientific evidence for that.
2. The government and the dental establishment (aka The American Dental Association) say the mercury must be handled as a toxic substance when you transport it or when you take it out of the mouth. This implies that amalgam fillings (with mercury) are only 'safe' when they are in your mouth. Sounds like someone is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.
3. All metals expand when heated by coffee, tea, hot pizza etc. Teeth are made of glass and expand very slowly when heated. This leads to micro fractures in teeth which ultimately lead to broken teeth.
4. A bonded resin filling placed under a rubber dam makes teeth much stronger than having a mercury filling. This avoids the need for the majority of crowns that are placed. Crowns weaken teeth dramatically.
Do you understand why I don't even like to discuss issues of mercury as a toxic metal? Forget the mercury issue and understand how much stronger your teeth will be when the amalgam is removed and a bonded resin filling placed.
Most dentists will probably never admit that the dental material placed in your mouth can be the cause of many diseases and disorders. Conventional dentistry...
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