SDC, DSOs & ROI, Oh My!

The last few years have been terribly interesting! Unforeseeable and even unbelievable events seem to have become the norm and the pace of change is ever increasing. Adapt or die has never been more a...

White Coat Syndrome

Online, in lecture halls and in print, there are fanatical devotees of evidence based orthodontics whose shrill voices lament the absence of science in our profession. For proof and for comedic relief...

AAO/Gaidge Report – We Kinda Suck…

It’s amazing to me that we, as a profession, still don’t consider keeping braces on people beyond estimated treatment time a bad idea. It IS a terrible idea for many, many reasons – ...

Carriere Motion & MEAW – Birds of a Feather

The last couple weeks have been more interesting than usual. I attended the SAO in New Orleans – the first time I’d been to an AAO constituency meeting in a while – and was shocked b...

Key Stressors in the Orthodontic Office

It shouldn’t be but practicing orthodontics and running an orthodontic business is generally considered  very stressful by orthodontists. Conceiving, implementing and getting Smiley Face running wa...

You’re Asking the Wrong Questions

I get survey requests from the AAO regularly and I like to take them to see what residents, and thus their faculty, think is important. It also gives insight into what the people handing out grants ar...

Orthodontist with $1,000,000.00 in Student Debt

Utah Orthodontist, Dr. Mike Meru was featured yesterday in The Wall Street Journal for his outlier status of being one of 101 people in the US with a seven-figure student debt. I find the article int...

A Call for Professionalism

I listened to the talk “A Call for Professionalism” by Dr. Peter Greco and Dr. Eladio DeLeon, Jr. on the AAO member website (their talk starts about 1:34:00) and it was interesting to say the leas...

Protecting the Public?

The last time organized dentistry and dental boards tried to “protect the public” they warned of the dangers of tooth whitening done outside the office of a licensed dentist. Of course there was n...

Calling It Like We See It: Two Questions

It’s highly possible that at some point in the next couple decades it will be legal for non-dentists to provide tooth straightening with clear aligners directly to the consumer. Outcome data from pa...