“Pressurising” Your Goals & How to be Creative as a Dentist!
Hey everyone,
I hope you have all had a great week! It has been a bit of a different one for me, having a few days of clinic, then an exam to end the week as well, and I’ll get into all that in this week’s issue!
But first, just a quick announcement that I will be LIVE this Thursday (29th Feb) at 7 PM with Dr Gilan Nehad, AKA Dr. G from The Presenting Complaint Podcast. He is a young dentist currently working in DCT, so we will dive into that topic this week! If you have considered doing DCT after dental school or want to learn more about it, then you don’t want to miss this one, so tune in to ask any questions!
🦷 Dental Diary
Some big wins at the clinic this week, as I saw my case-pres patient and was able to reassess them, rechart their teeth, detect caries, take radiographs, and with the help of my tutor, was able to put together an updated care plan for my patient, which I am excited to make more progress with!
My partner also had a complete/partial denture case going, and he made primary impressions for this week as well, we were successfully able to “build” up the impressions, utlising all the materials in our arsenal to fabricate the best impressions we could. Check out my most recent post on this where I go into a lot of detail about that process, as inspired by Dr Rupert Monkhouse, whom I also saw this week, as he presented a lecture for our committee at the King’s Prosthodontics Society, which was fabulous. He has a way of simplifying removable prosthodontics, and even though I had seen him lecture before, there was still a lot to take away, particularly to do with digital dentistry, and combining that with the traditional analogue impression techniques.
At the end of the week, I also sat another formative exam this week, on our Human Health and Disease module. This is arguably the most difficult module we have and this exam was strange in that it was an MCQ, so a different format from what we get examined on at the end of the year, where we’ll have essay-style questions! Though this wasn’t necessarily good exam practice, it did help me figure out how my learning, understanding, and memorisation of this massive topic has been going, so it may be useful to point me in a certain direction with my revision for the final exams.
🧠 Insight of the Week
A big lesson this week came from a brilliant YouTube video I watched by Thomas Frank, which I will link below and I highly recommend watching if you want to gain clarity on what you want to accomplish!
An interesting concept that Thomas talks about is the idea of pressure; you may have heard of the saying that “diamonds are formed under pressure” and it’s what we students say after we have procrastinated for long enough and now that seemingly distant deadline for that hefty assignment is on the horizon. We say it as a way to motivate ourselves to produce good work because there is the pressure of that deadline. Thomas explains that this concept applies in just the same way to our larger aspirations and goals. Imagine a gas canister filled with air: because of the high pressure inside, it becomes very useful for a variety of things, like pumping a tire, but if we were to make the canister ten times bigger, then that higher volume would lead to a lower pressure, rendering our gas canister useless.
This is what happens when we keep putting new projects, goals, and aspirations onto our plate, we increase the volume of our “gas canister” but our resources (the air) like our time, energy, money, and focus, are limited and that means we can’t give our all for any of the goals we have set out to achieve.
Thomas goes on to explain how we can figure out what we want the most so that we can reduce the volume of our cannister, and apply the maximum pressure onto the few goals that we actually want to work on, so give that a try!
💉 Clinical Revelation
This week’s clinical tip isn’t technically a clinical one, but it’s something that’s potentially more important than any individual quick tip or hack I know of!
In dentistry, particularly in dental school, we often have many different inputs regarding how to do certain treatments; we’ve got our lectures, our tutors, any consultants, Instagram, other dentists in practice who we may have connected with, and so on. It can be difficult to figure out what we should do and why when every opinion seems to be different. But from my experience, they’re just that. Opinions. I was speaking to a friend recently about what we enjoy about this field we’re in, and I brought up the fact that although I am not an artist, most of the hobbies in my life have been very technical ones, but ultimately they had a degree of creative expression embedded within them. The same is true for dentistry.
I realised that as long as we know the basics by studying the properties of our materials, and can apply them with our creative flair, then we will cultivate our unique style of practice.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s take impressions for example. Some dentists love using silicone; others prefer compound for supporting soft tissues; some may use wax for some of the ridges and not others. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which technique you use as they can all produce the same, good results. What matters the most is your understanding of why you use them. That way, when an unfamiliar situation inevitably arises, you can approach it with no issues, as you’re not relying on a cookie-cutter clinical tip to lead to successful treatment; you understand the materials and tools you’re working with and know the purpose of each and can use them to problem-solve in any case that comes your way. So, if a tutor loves using wax in a certain area and advises you to do so, certainly follow their advice, but also ask them why. Surely it will be useful in some cases, but in others, it may be a hindrance in your hands, but you won’t be able to understand when those times may arise if you don’t know the purpose behind using it!
There is no one perfect composite, impression material, or bur. It takes the dentist to be able to manipulate all of these to their advantage and creatively come up with a solution.
Once again, if you can take a minute to fill out this survey for a project I am working on, that would be much appreciated! PLEASE CLICK HERE I am working on an educational product aimed at dental students and young dentists and I want to hear from you guys so I can give you as much value as I possibly could!
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! Talk to you guys next week!
Get Better Today :)