#6 Providing Exactly the Right Treatment
For this lesson we look at providing exactly the right treatment to promote healing, the third and final principle of our practice.
This is easier said than done. Learning the right treatments, along with when and how to do them takes years of practice and focused effort.
Mostly though, it requires a consistent, compassionate attitude. You need to be on your patient’s side, always on the lookout for your patient’s best overall interest.
The most obvious advantage here is for your individual patient. Providing the right treatment directly results in good health, offers the best value, and strengthens the doctor/patient relationship.
Read More ...A less obvious advantage is for all of your future patients. What you learn and observe as you go along in your practice hones your skills and makes your treatments more accurate. So, treatment for the next patients will continue to improve.
And the truth is that perfect treatment interventions can still be illusive, no matter how much you try.
A more generalized advantage of providing the right treatment concerns the dental profession itself. The dentists of today have benefited from the ideas of the best and brightest dentists of yesterday.
So too, the dentists of tomorrow depend on the dentists of today for guidance and direction. For the dental profession to advance, today’s dentists had better have something useful to offer those future dentists.
For a powerful example of this process, you need to look no further than our very website. We have built on the conservative treatments taught by brilliant dentists before us. And after 40 years, we have something useful to offer to future dentists.
We rejected old, incorrect ideas about gum disease and offered better ideas for your consideration. Using these better ideas, we have attained a higher level of health and saved more teeth than ever before. We know this works. And we ask you to consider our ideas seriously.
The final and most personal reason for providing the right treatment concerns the individual dentist. A dentist who consistently and conscientiously applies this principle becomes more and more valuable for his (or her) patients as time goes by. That dentist attains a sense of fulfillment that accompanies ethical and moral behavior.
On the other hand, a dentist who offers too little treatment to promote healing and good health is guilty of dereliction of duty. And a dentist who over treats patients for financial gain is guilty of assault and battery.
The dentist who over treats another human being for financial gain suffers a much greater loss. That action diminishes his or her humanity. And a dentist who consistently practices in this fashion loses all sense of right and wrong.
Over time that dentist becomes a zombie, completely devoid of humanity, a dead person walking. Why would anyone accept this fate?
