Contrary to popular belief, a great dentist isn’t just someone who can fix your teeth. A great dentist is someone who really cares about their patients.
In this blog, we’ll be sharing why it’s so important to have a dentist who cares not just about giving their patients a beautiful smile, but also a healthy one that will last.
The lists of specialist dentists are "designed to protect the public from unwarranted claims of specialist skills and experience". UK General Dental Council.
Therefore, patients are able to trust all the advice given because they have independent verification, from the General Dental Council, that the specialist dentist they are seeing is an expert in their field of study. Specialist dentists offer a very high standard of clinical dentistry and they are therefore not the cheapest option out there.
There absolutely is a difference in the qualifications a specialist provider holds versus a general practitioner. For example, periodontists like myself do an additional 3–6 years of postgraduate study after becoming qualified as a dentist. This means that we can give you the most in-depth, thorough, and expert care possible, and that we’re creating beautiful and healthy smiles.
However, this is not to say that all specialist dentists are good and all general dentists are bad – far from it! As you can imagine, there’s more than one way of achieving excellence. But before receiving treatment, you aren’t able to know who is truly excellent and who is not.
It’s no surprise that you want to make sure you are going to be treated by the very best person for the job. In the UK, the General Dental Council offers a list of specialists so that, by checking the provider against this list, you’re able to answer that most important question – does this provider have the clinical expertise to provide the service I want?
Being a technical expert at something does NOT automatically make someone a great dentist. A great dentist is a technical expert AND someone who also understands and cares about the lives of their patients and looks after them.
Technical skill is important, yes, but a great dentist is someone who understands that fantastic customer service both from the dentist and the support staff is equally important. Does your provider really look after you? Do they reassure your worries and concerns? Do you feel safe in their care and expertise? Is their customer service as good as their technical skill?
SmileDirectClub Aligners and teeth whitening services are the most common teledentistry offerings. Many people can be tempted into taking up their service because of their lower price point and promises of convenience. However, they might regret this later.
We spend a lot of time examining our patients – both their oral health and their lifestyle – to ensure that whatever treatment we recommend actually suits them. With direct-to-consumer aligners there is very little in the way of clinical examination and understanding of the patient before the treatment starts.
Let me put it this way: you wouldn’t decide to build a house on a patch of land without having surveys carried out and architectural designs drawn up. I’m sure nobody would dream of doing that! For exactly the same reason, you need a clinical assessment and full survey of the mouth alongside the design of a product or service before you go any further. This just doesn’t happen with direct-to-consumer clinical aligner systems.
If you do start to treat an issue using direct-to-consumer products without doing the groundwork, you will be risking the health of your mouth. To highlight the mission of our practice, which can be seen in each and every one of our patients, we create beautiful and healthy smiles.
It’s very easy to make a smile beautiful. What is difficult for patients – and even some dentists – to identify is whether or not that beautiful smile is actually healthy. The only way to know this is to be extremely observant of any tell-tale signs that might point to disease as a result of treatment. That’s what we mean when we say beautiful and healthy smiles: we’re working from the root up and missing nothing along the way.
When you carry out examinations beforehand, you can identify these potential threats. If you skip this crucial step – as with direct-to-consumer aligners, for instance – you could find yourself spending a lot of money to build a house on quicksand. This puts you at risk for:
These are the main issues we have noticed with patients who haven’t received the right treatment plans prior to coming to us. Our mission to create beautiful and healthy smiles extends to patients who may have gone down the direct-to-consumer route before and who need some help in correcting issues as a result.
Through our upcoming blog series, I aim to give you a better understanding of what a beautiful and healthy smile really is, and why it is of crucial importance to have both. I want patients, both current and future, to have a better understanding of the intricacies and complexities that both myself and my team bring to bear in the care of each and every one of our patients.
At London Dental Specialists, we have one overarching goal in mind: to make sure our patients are well cared for. Our practice is a safe and reassuring space where patients know that we are here to help, irrespective of any past treatments they’ve had or what they’re genetically predisposed to.
The way we achieve that feeling in our practice is through our core values, which are fundamental in everything we do:
These things are important because they come up time and time again in our patient feedback. Our patients regularly comment on our excellence and professionalism. They know we will put our blood, sweat, and tears into ensuring they get the very best possible care – and that’s what a specialist dentist does.
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