DON’T DO IT.

Buy less expensive gloves, get more efficient, make less trips to the chair, anything… But use new gloves every time you glove up. Every time.

While we are on the subject, don’t let your assistants walk around the clinic with gloves on or reach in drawers with gloves on – even if they are clean. No one else knows that they are clean. It’s nasty or it appears to be nasty and either is bad.

Trying to cut corners and save money on gloves is a perfect example of “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies” because having patients and potential patients believe you aren’t taking care of them properly is a practice killer. And, honestly, if you actually are willfully cutting corners on sterilization and putting people at risk, you deserve to go out of business.

Seriously. Don’t do it.

I know you’re “only reusing gloves on the same patient” (well, I hope that’s it) and I know that you don’t believe it’s a big deal but IT IS A BIG DEAL!

I also know there are old people in old practices who showed you how to reuse gloves to “save money” and that they say it is ok. I know that many of them are also your professors. I don’t care.

They are wrong. It’s nasty.

It’s nasty for patients, it’s nasty for parents to see and it’s nasty for you because I guarantee that if you do a dye study it will show that you’re contaminating yourself.