Money Ruins Dentistry

Money ruins dentistry... There, I said it.

Unless you were born wealthy, dentistry cannot just be a "calling". Or an art form. It is a job. It can be a great job or a terrible one, partly depending on our personalities ability to cope with the stresses and emotions of doing surgery in the second most intimate part of the body.

Of course, if your practice is not sufficiently profitable, you will dislike dentistry.

There are very people who enjoy being a starving artist. Eventually, if there is no market for your work, you will resent it. Especially if you have borrowed money to start a business.

Often folks say that if you just do the best for your patients, then success will follow. But that is not always true. We cannot provide unprofitable levels of care for long periods of time, especially as we get older and need to think about paying for kids and retirement.

Alternatively, if we want to provide a higher than average level of care, we need to provide this higher level at the same price for a while, until our reputation follows our work.

On the other hand, I have been through stages where my focus was entirely the business of dentistry. It was just about money.

The problem with making dentistry all about money, is that it loses the artistic side, and can easily just become a job. After awhile we tend to resent jobs.

The big pressure is not our business overheads, but usually our personal ones.

All those personal payments we have to make. Mortgage. Schooling. Cars. Posh cars. They all become a saddle on our back that we have to carry about all the time. We have to make money. We are forced to.

In my career, the times when I've enjoyed dentistry the most are when my personal overhead has been much lower than my income. Then I have freedom to do dentistry largely in a profitable way, and occasionally in an unprofitable way for the right patient, the right case, or just when it is required. And strangely, when I don't have to earn as much, I usually earn more.

In my experience, most dentists really would like to do fine work, but their circumstances are what often stops them, and this causes frustration.

Now you will get people who will teach you how to make dentistry more business like. More money focussed. This is necessary as we are not taught business at dental school and going broke will make use hate dentistry too. But notice that most of these people do not practice dentistry much.

So the hard part is not making money. Or doing great dentistry. It's trying to balance both.