Foreign Trained Dentist Narratives

Jun 30 12 under The Narratives : Meenakshi Bharthi

Chronicle 19 : Certified Help ?

I had just started working in a new dental office and I was greeted by a dozen new faces. All the staff was very cordial and greetings exchanged very pleasant. I was assigned two assistants for the day and I had to see a lot of patients that day. I was about to start working in a super busy office and I curious and skeptical how this day was going to turn out to be. I was assigned two assistants – one who had been to the Dental Assistant  program and the other who had not.

A certified assistant concept was pretty new to me as a dentist from India. We had assistants back home but they pretty much were modified versions of chai walas. In the little practice I had back home, I had noticed that the dental assistants that I worked with were not educated young people and most not wanting a career in dentistry. Most of them were there because of reasons other than that.

Being in a new world and looking at a different dentistry world, it did surprise me when the assistant said she had been to dental assistant school. She did that program to get into the dental program to be a dentist. This work experience on her resume would give her a leverage to get into the dental program.

I started working and I was seeing way too many patients that day. I saw that the assistant pretty much had a huge role to play. The dental assistant who was new and did not go to a program was bringing in patients and needed to be told at every step what I needed her to do. She seemed to be slowing me down rather than helping me out. She had to be explained what a prophy was and what instruments were needed. She almost picked up a dropped instrument and put it back in the sterilized pack.

On the other hand the trained assistant seemed to understand things better. She knew the instruments and could do a prophy as she was certified. She could also do simple procedures like doing temporary restorations, doing sealants and fluoride application. In the US, certain states allow dental assistants to do amalgam restorations and composite too. These reduce the stress and the burden on a doctor and can help run an office smoother and efficiently.

Many countries have such programs and introducing them in others who don’t have will ease the system and encourage a healthy practice. Well some may say that there are way too many dentists in the country that we dont need any assistant programs. But one has to realize that the roles are clearly defined. A dentist cannot indefinitely be the dental assistant. This is my observation that having  some education with the assistant than none is better for the safety and better treatment of a patient.

Dr Meenakshi Umapathy is a General Dentist who graduated from India. She moved to the USA and completed her DDS from New York University College of Dentistry. She is currently practicing General Dentistry for Kids in Indiana. She shares her stories about  dentistry in India and the US through her narratives at the DentistryUnited every Saturday

Disclaimer : The views expressed in this blog are solely the views of the author and need not reflect the views of  DentistryUnited.com . For any clarification you can get in touch with the author directly at the address mentioned above.

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Foreign Trained Dentist Narratives

Jun 23 12 under The Narratives : Meenakshi Bharthi

Chronicle 18 : All in the Books

I was out of dental school in India  and was ecstatic to start working. I thought school had taught me pretty much everything and was ready to dive into practice. I started working with a private practice. Things were going as expected for the first few days and then one evening, there walks into the practice a medically compromised patient in pain. He had oral cancer and undergone surgery and chemotherapy and lost apart of his tongue. He needed a few restorations and an extratction. I was just standing in there for a few seconds and did not know how to proceed. I waited for a few minutes and tried to get maximum information as possible. I felt like I asked the same question 3 times to the care giver. After getting a lot of strange looks from both the patient and the care giver,I decided to think calmly and refer the patient to an oral surgeon who would have better knowledge of treating a medically complex patient. As I was talking to this patient my senior associate walked in. He calmly took the file, read through the history and gave a few recommendations. He said he could do the restorations with a medical clearance and extraction had to be done with the oral surgeon. I was pretty amazed how he went through the treatment plan.

After dismissing the patient, I went upto my senior and asked him how he got to this point where he could treatment plan with such ease. He was a few years out of school and he had started his practice just a few months after his graduation. He said he was in the same situation as I was when he first started his practice. The curriculum at school appeared insufficient to start a general dentistry practice as we discussed. He gave me incidences where he was stuck with medically compromised cases, posterior roots canals, posterior crown preparations and huge list of many others. But he went back to the books. He learnt and relearnt the hard way to practice general dentistry. It was learning curve. But if he had not gone back to the books, he would not be as knowledgeable and successful.

I moved from my country to the US. I was at school again and I learnt a whole new way of working with different patients. We had complex scenarios presented to us and the cases discussed and analyzed. We were made self sufficient to practice dentistry after school here in the US. I was out to practice again. But this time, I was more confident and could handle situations more clearly. I got my dental license to practice and I saw a clause that to renew my license, I needed CE credits. I realized that to continue to practice here, I needed to update my knowledge in dentistry. It was a really practical concept to keep all the practitioners on the same page and keep everybody updated. Wasn’t that what my senior colleague was trying to do on his own back home? What if he decided not to go back to read up on the journals and keep himself updated? He decided to help himself when the system did not help him.

CE in the US is both free and paid from various recognized sources. They all are accounted for and have to be submitted to each state licensing at the renewal period. It is an accountable and reliable way to update the database. The plus factor is that all the dentists take it very seriously to keep themselves updated with the new techniques and advances. There are many ways to do the credits- online, in person at certain state board CE programs, conferences and journals. Some corporate offices even bring all their dentists together and call upon the state board CE instructors to do the programs for the benefit of their dentists.

I am sure I would have benefited with such interesting and must do programs if it was present at that period of time back home. I am sure it’s being implemented now and many new dentists will be benefited from it. CE if properly monitored and implemented is a great tool for many dentists to be updated with the latest in dentistry.

Dr Meenakshi Umapathy is a General Dentist who graduated from India. She moved to the USA and completed her DDS from New York University College of Dentistry. She is currently practicing General Dentistry for Kids in Indiana. She shares her stories about  dentistry in India and the US through her narratives at the DentistryUnited every Saturday

Disclaimer : The views expressed in this blog are solely the views of the author and need not reflect the views of  DentistryUnited.com . For any clarification you can get in touch with the author directly at the address mentioned above.

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Dentistry Hope : The Presentation – Part 2

Jun 21 12 under Dentistry Hope - Dr. Sanjay Jamdade

So now we knew that she was infact Mrs Gloomy and not a Miss.

So she was working for that famous man or was working there in the past or husband worked there? She referred the patient there to him?”  “No my husband is much senior to him and more qualified, and neither did I need to refer, I have been doing these cases since a long time, why would I refer?”

“The case being presented was indeed my case which was treated in my office completely by me and I have never been to this presenter’s clinic nor has he come to mine and I have never discussed my case with him or send him the pictures! I had heard about him but never ever met him or even talked to him before, Infact the last picture was taken just 2-3 days ago, and even that picture was there” she volunteered that information.

Well then what explains Mrs Gloomy’s case appearing inside someone else’s slide show? We all put on our Sherlock Holmes hat and started interrogating and investigating. The mystery was indeed most intriguing. Everyone was a suspect. First the close to home suspects, the staff and associates.

“Well the only party outside our clinic with whom we shared all the pictures with was our technician. We thought at that time that he had a right to the pictures as he contributed to the case immensely. We happily shared the pictures when he requested to have a look”

Oh so that was the source of the leak! Should have thought about that!

“We took our technician to task late yesterday, he admitted to leaking the pictures. What had happened was that a day before the lecture when the speaker was trying out his slide show to see how it looks on screen. His own case pictures looked dull on screen because of some projector issues. He didn’t like what he saw he kept trying many things but nothing seemed to work so at 2 am in the morning he called my technician asking for another case fitting the description of his own case. And my case exactly fit the bill. It was too late in the night for them to take my permission to do what he wanted to do. Present my case as his own. So they mutually conspired to use my case as it looked beautiful on projection!

Well shouldn’t you be happy instead that such a great speaker used your case? “I was inexperienced  and I shouldn’t have said that. She was all vitriol after that “He stole my case. He din’t even ask me. Atleast he should have shown the courtesy to atleast attribute it to me. He didn’t do it. Infact all the while when I was asking him all those questions he was answering them with great confidence and conviction. And lastly I had recorded the case with the intention of publishing and presenting the case myself.”

Yes publishing and presenting it! That was the answer! “What stops you from doing that now?” I suggested. “Who will believe me now? If I submit the case to a publisher or to a scientific committee of a conference it will most probably get rejected and I will be branded as a fraud when in fact the other guy is a fraud! And he is powerful man with the original pictures in his hand he can prove me to be a fraud. In the audience that day I saw many eminent members of scientific committees of many magazines. This case is lost to me permanently! Such a pity, I ran around to the lab for the shade match, put up with the patient’s tantrums and other trouble. Took pictures at every step put everything together all with the hope of getting it published and presented and now someone else takes the credit. What is bad is that this very same association was pestering me to showcase my work for the benefit its members and very shortly I was to present this very case to them but now I have lost my ace case to theft and there isn’t much that I can do about it”

Well then she should take him to court and complain to the Dental associations and councils “Well we may do that eventually but as of now I will still have to look out for another case. It’s so bothersome to go through all the trials and tribulations of recording an esthetic case. I am not so eager now.”

To be fair both sides should be heard. And what was imagination and a flight of fancy should be analyzed completely. Plagiarism is the bane of the profession and much more rampant then we like to acknowledge.

That day I went home ruminating about our little lunchtime gossip. What I could conclude was that if a case was very important to oneself one should never ever share it with anyone not even your technician! Leaks happen and after that there is no way out.

It wasn’t as if she might have got no justice at all, all the complaining in the background amongst other dentists obviously spreads like wild fire. It takes over tea time gossips, telephone gossips and internet chats across the region and by the time you know half of the profession knows what wrong you did!

Unfair treatment or cheating of colleagues doesn’t go completely unpunished! There is often a hidden mechanism in nature that evens out all odds!

Concluded


Dr Sanjay Jamdade is a speaker on dental implants and is a visiting consultant with few prominent dental clinics in and around Mumbai for implants and oral rehabilitation. He is also the CEO of Dr Jamdade’s Dental clinic and Implant center since 23 years which is a practice devoted to aesthetic dentistry, microscope assisted endodontics, implants and oral rehabilitation situated near Tarapur Atomic Power Station at Boisar Tal Palghar Dist Thane near Mumbai, India,  email: – sanjayjamdade@gmail.com

Disclaimer : The views expressed in this blog are solely the views of the author and need not reflect the views of DentistryUnited.com . For any clarification you can get in touch with the author directly at the address mentioned above.

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