I started dentistry thinking it was a very technical work …everything was about doing perfect details like drawing perfect shoulders, sealing cervical margins with perfectly adapted matrices, doing endodontic treatments with the precision of a sniper.
During my journey, instead, I realized that there was a fundamental skill i was lacking.
Communication.
And during my courses going everywhere in the world I realized that this is a general problem.
In the last years I dedicated myself a lot to this topic and, honestly, this improvement has paid me in several ways.
We have, on average, trouble communicating properly with our patients, with out employees, with our technicians.
We shouldn’t amaze ourselves too much, cause we experience this problem also in our houses.
How often we have troubles communicating with our spouses and we have different opinion on several topics?
Useless to say, in western countries like in Europe the number of divorces skyrocketed in the recent years because of these.
There is a strict analogy I found in dentistry, and this is the relation between a dentist and his technician.
Most of the times this is a really tricky relation.
All the doctors complain about their technicians.
All the technicians, more politely, complain about doctors.
The problem is that both of these two parties are focused on their different needs and problems.
When I started with minimal vertical preparations my technician was complaining about the lack of space. This will be a very frequent complain if you start working with vertical preparations.
You ‘re just making their work tougher and they don’t understand why.
When doctors receive a faulty work, they are much more prone to complain than think about which kind of work has been sent, most of the mistakes coming back from the lab are doctor-generated in my experience.
We work in a harsh environment and we usually over estimate our work,
We easily overestimate also occlusal reduction.
We easily overestimate lack of parallelism between different abutments…and so on.
Our technicians often just go on with the work cumulating mistakes over mistakes.
What i am talking about is a recurring topic I see all over the world.
The solution is just one. Both of two parties have to learn each other’s work.
Of course not in detail but the minimum required to understand the problems each part experiences during the work.
Just understanding lab problems we can really communicate with our technicians and realize good dental work.
Only understanding lab problems we can improve many mistakes we do in our office.
Have you ever put two models in articulator? Have you ever checked with exocad your prep? Have you ever done the preparation of the die? have you ever seen the deformation of the wax after the removal on a preparation with some undercuts?
Is your technician aware of the biological and biomechanics problems our patients have when we give them “more space”?
Are they aware of what happens to their work in the mouth after few years?
Prosthetic is a really team work and it’s not possible to work in this branch of dentistry thinking : this is not my job, this is the technician’s job!
In the same way in a football team, the player has to know exactly where to pass the ball in order to make other players do the goal, we have to know exactly how to pass the “ball” in order to make the goal.
If you wanna really thrive in prosthodontics, this is my advice : stop thinking, this is not my job! when talking about lab part.
Your job is even that!
