“I’m in an insurance practice and they don’t pay much for composites, so why bother learning to do them well?”
I hear this all the time.
Interestingly, many experienced dentists — who are often amazing at ceramics — would still name composites as the one area they desperately want to learn more about. Why?
Until composite mastery, this nagging doubt lingers as to whether they are as proficient as even a general dentist fresh out of school. They want the type of confidence that allows a dentist to handle any challenge that comes their way.
When a dentist truly believes in themselves, the result is sustainable confidence. What do I mean by sustainable?
If you are confident beyond your actual ability, it is fragile confidence. You are one disaster away from losing your confidence.
Sustainable confidence is the bedrock of consistently good treatment planning and high treatment acceptance.
“But I can’t afford it,” some say. “If I spend any more time doing composites, I can’t cover my costs.”
However, there are plenty of ways to manage the productivity of your clinical practice while you sharpen your skills. For example, you can block appointments. If you’ve spent all morning doing highly productive procedures, you can afford to spend the afternoon doing consultations and brushing up on the more basic things. Or, if you do a rehab prep on Tuesday, then you can go back to the basics on Wednesday.
Strangely, we can always afford to do something right, when we are redoing it. Like when the patient comes back with complaints of food getting stuck or tooth sensitivity. We’ll get it done right even if it takes a significant amount of extra time that was not on the schedule. But by then, the confidence is gone.
Recently, I had a large ceramic cosmetic case. The patient had left his previous dentist because a composite restoration was failing (again). Their pain point was the cost and inconvenience of having a composite fall off four days after multiple redo’s by that dentist.
Despite charging 20 times as much for the case as what the patient had to pay for the composites at the previous office, the patient didn’t complain about the price tag on the ceramic cosmetic treatment plan. They knew what they were getting: confidence that the treatment would be a lasting success.
So, if you want your patient to be confident that you can provide high end services, they also need to trust you to do basic ones — and to do them well every time.