Things are looking a bit grim at the moment ay?
We were getting ready for holiday, and all the automatic passports at the borders just shut down.
The real strikes seem still to be going on, and the nurse's strikes are about to start to kick in.
Everything seems to be breaking.
Even The passengers stuck in the queues because the passport machines weren't working said that the air conditioning was breaking down and they were sitting in 40-degree heat.
Broken Britain seems to be up and up and up and carrying on.
We seem to be the laughingstock of countries around us.
A few weeks ago, I flew to Zurich, and the airport in Zurich was not at all like Birmingham Airport, where I'd flown from.
And so, what's the point of this, and how does this reflect?
Well, the thing is that much of the stuff in the United Kingdom at the moment is busted, and it's going to take a while to fix it.
I'm not political, but I'm not convinced that any of the parties are able to fix this quickly, and I suspect that one of the last things on their mind will be dentistry.
Trying to cut the waiting times for the NHS so that GPs who are sick are not left waiting on a trolley in a corridor for 48 hours (one of my patients) is going to be a priority over whether little middle-class Johnny gets his orthodontics.
For a long time, orthodontics for middle-class children should have been carved out of the NHS.
I wrote a blog ten years ago about an NHS orthodontist who had just bought his second plane (he didn't do private work). The NHS bought him two planes, that was too many.
Through whatever set of circumstances, those days have passed, but let's be under no illusion they are not coming back.
If I were you, I would pony up.
I would train the sh*t out of myself to be the best possible general dental practitioner I can be.
I think the future is the exceptional general practitioner, and the best clinicians I see worldwide are guys who are good at that.
They can prep.
They can operate like a periodontist.
They can restore like a restorative dentist, but they've got the confidence to do any surgery that you'd like them to do.
They can almost always do their own orthodontics to a point, and they understand aesthetics and cosmetics and shade and shape and hue and form and all of those things that you're supposed to understand when you're a brilliant dentist.
Added to that, they're usually quite good at research, and they're brilliant at presenting, but they're also the most extraordinary communicators.
All of this stuff is learnable.
If you want to stick anywhere close to the top of the pyramid while everything else below is melting, you may want to learn some of that stuff now.
If I were a young dentist just graduating, I would be kicking the sh*t out of training as hard as I could right now for the next five years, trying to get access to the best people you can find because if you don't, there is a significant risk you'll end up in the swamp. There will be therapists who are better qualified than you and more motivated with more opportunities.
A thought, probably wrong (but I was right about the orthodontist from 10 years ago).
Blog Post Number - 3466
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