Dr David McFadden: Obviously Doctor Paradis and I are here today to convince you to come to our practice for our consultation. All our consultations are complimentary. So we try to remove that hurdle for you coming to see us to get great dental care. But what do you think it is about our specialty and about you and me as individuals that we can tell our patients. What separates us from the pack.
Dr Alan Paradis: Yeah Well one of the things I think is critical about prosthodontics is that it is specialty of dentistry that really emphasizes actual patient dental treatment, fixing teeth properly, fixing mouth properly and replacing missing teeth properly. We are the only specialty that is trained to do those things. Well this specialty actually is part of general dental education and traditionally in dental schools’ dentists spent a great deal of time learning how to make the prosthetic that they are going to install in the patient’s mouths. The problem is we quickly realize when we graduate from dental schools that we have glossed over the details that are really critical to establishing the ability to deliver a good quality dental care. Now some young dentists are talented and can pick up these skills instantly. Others may never develop the skills that it takes to deliver proper dental care. I quickly realize when graduating from dental school as did Dr McFadden that the dental education is inadequate to really practice dentistry at the level that it can be practiced. And by that I mean the diagnosis of the patient’s conditions in applying the proper treatment in a way that it will give patients long lasting comfort and durability. So prosthodontics trains us kind of from the beginning of the actual skills that are needed to deliver prosthetic dentistry as established good treatments in patient’s mouth.
Dr David McFadden: There is a couple of packages that come to my mind from me. I used to believe that the adage practice makes perfect and I think all of you will understand that it’s just not the practice that makes somebody better at their particular endeavor but it’s trying to get better with every day, every procedure and hone your skills, that’s how you actually get better. Practicing poorly or quickly and not trying to hone your skills really doesn’t make you a better doctor in the long run, it really just makes you faster. And it’s nice to be faster but again our practices are built on as long as it takes to make it right. So Malcolm Gladwell’s books, in a couple of his books he talks about ten thousand hours of becoming an expert in something. And I think our laboratory background really facilitated our ten thousand hours in a very quick way because we made actually made all of these processes ourselves for many years early in our career. And still do a lot of lab work ourselves to this day because we want it to be right for our patients.
