An Interesting Diagnosis & Cognitive Reframing!
Hey everyone,
I hope you are all well! It's been a very busy week back on clinics, and with exams only a month away, things are getting hectic!
I will be putting a load of my side projects on hold for the next month or so and really prioritising my studying, so this will be the last newsletter I put out until June. I will also be leaving the Discord Community for a little while, but I have some exciting plans to revamp it to a different platform after exam season so stay tuned!
🦷 Dental Diary
This week we had a lot of care-planning clinics and with one particular patient, I found that I was able to utilise a lot of the knowledge I accumulated about occlusion. I am especially talking about those advanced concepts like the anterior envelope of function, and I’ve detailed the story in this week’s Clinical Revelation!
We also had a variety of Professionalism workshops, as that’s something we’ll also be examined on in this year’s final exams, and most of my spare time was spent revising!
🧠 Insight of the Week
The insight of this week is a short one, but a relevant one this exam season, there’s a quote from the bodybuilder Chris Bumstead that I remembered recently:
This pressure is a privilege.
I don’t know if he came up with this, but it’s such a brilliant principle, and links to the idea that I recently learned about in psychology called cognitive reframing, where you change your perception about a problem to help you solve or overcome it.
Cognitive reframing has been studied to be the best form of coping mechanism, so being able to rely on this idea of transforming challenges into gratitude!
💉 Clinical Revelation
A patient came in this week with complaints about a painful, root-treated tooth and also spoke about issues with crowded teeth. She also had a chipped central incisor which she wanted restored.
I assessed the patient but while I was waiting for the tutor I had a great conversation with them about that chipped tooth. I told her that, although she wanted it restored, that would only be a temporary solution because the cause of that fracture isn't a restorative one, it's an orthodontic one.
She had failed orthodontic treatment when she was young and her lower incisors were crowded, one of which was placed and tilted more lingually. This meant that during function, that particular tooth constricted the anterior envelope of function, and was hitting the fractured tooth more than it should have, leading to the chip.
Definitive treatment would be orthodontics, either braces or aligners to correct the position of the tooth, and when the chipped tooth is restored, it would be much less likely to fracture again.
Obviously, we can't provide any orthodontic treatment at dental school so she’d have to get it elsewhere, but I was grateful that I was able to use the extra knowledge I gathered from lectures and podcasts to help this patient, giving them options that other dentists did not tell her about before, and it suddenly felt like all of that extra effort came into good use.
That's all for this week, I hope you guys have a great next week! If you are enjoying this weekly email thing I'm doing or if you have any suggestions, please let me know, my Instagram is always open if you'd like any advice!
Omar Tabaqchali :)