Lesson 1
A Life In Dentistry Is Challenging
“Dental school is a launchpad for divorce.”
That was the first thing I remember hearing from one of our deans at Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry. What an incredibly demoralizing thing to say to a group of people aspiring to be healers.
But the dean was correct, to a degree. A fair number of our married classmates entering dental school in that summer of 1977 did wind up divorcing. Having been married a week and a day before hearing those words, I was scared. Forty-plus years later, I feel blessed.
The dental school was primarily interested in creating oral repair people with disregard to anything else.
So, the stress of the dental school curriculum took its toll. Perhaps the stress accelerated the inevitable on young couples who couldn’t get through it “for better or for worse.” Or perhaps a little bit of preparation or counseling might have helped. We’ll never know.
Back in the seventies and earlier, no school saw its responsibility to anything other than academics, which was the norm for that era. But if our education blinded us to the human reality of being a student, how could we have been expected to see the human side of the people we would treat or the human side of what it’s like to practice as a forever imperfect dentist and human being? The simple truth is that it couldn’t. The simple truth is that the actual dentistry is merely a part of what we do; in fact, it is the end product of a long process that must begin with some level of connection.
So many things have to happen before we do that technical stuff school taught us. And it is these things which really affect our lives and enable us to powerfully affect others.
What we do is special. Rachel Remen, in her book,My Grandfather’s Blessings, teaches that many of us live far more meaningful lives than we know. This is so true for anyone practicing dentistry. What impact does your work have on the day-to-day life of each soul you encounter? From the rehabilitation of a diseased mouth to (what we see as) asimple direct restoration, you have altered the quality—and sometimes the quantity—of a person’s life.
Whether you provide elective or essential services, you can create sacred moments and affect someone for the better every day; and, in doing so,
