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Once the high speed handpiece was invented in the early 1960’s very little in dentistry changed for fully 30 years from the patient’s viewpoint.
Twenty years into my dental career, I was beginning to suffer from the legendary “middle age burnout” which every dentist had heard about from his older colleagues from day one. Right on schedule!
But now we are in the middle of a 5 year period in which the way we do almost everything in the dental office is being re-invented. I can’t wait to get to work every morning! Suddenly I don’t have to give a shot for the majority of patients I see every day. I have been able to learn how to make crowns on a computer in 20 minutes. A task which used to take a full 8 hours! I can save teeth I never could save before. I can often treat a whole day of patients, without unsheathing a needle! I can stop infection in the pockets around a tooth in about 15 seconds! I can shine a “magic light” on a tooth and stop it from hurting. I can usually accomplish the favorite task of every dentist…making it look like I was never there, and neither was the decay! I can often practice “stealth dentistry”. There has never been a more fun time to be a dentist.
To prepare for the end of the world at Y2K, almost everyone got a new computer. And it came with an Internet connection. Which put everyone on the Internet all at once. Dentists have, in very large numbers, just this past year begun talking to each other by way of Internet discussion groups and sharing information and knowledge at an unprecedented rate. The lonely, isolated dentist in his little solo office is now suddenly empowered to share his work every day with the most state of the art dentists in the world. This, even more than the new machines in my office has revolutionized my own little “inner world”. |
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