I've been in dentistry as a student, and then a dentist and then all the other jobs I've had for getting on towards 40 years.
It was 1989 that I started dental school.
A lot has changed in that time, needless to say. What's coming next for dentistry, though, could well be just the completion of the circle.
In 1989, dentists were colleagues; they used to talk to each other and collaborate a lot. There was not so much of a dog-eat-dog environment because everybody was seeking patients from the same massive, big pool and getting paid what they needed or what they wanted (most of the time).
There were a few idols and heroes in dentistry, and we looked up to those, but we got on with what we were doing. We moved on from that. The NHS started to deteriorate and then collapse, and in 1992, there was a massive dispute amongst dentists and the government, and the contract changed, and private dentistry was actually born at that stage (apart from the tiny amount that was carried out previously).
From this point onwards, it sparked a commercialisation of dentistry in a way that has never been seen before and then many other factors dialled into this. Not least what happened in orthodontics and the development of brackets and wire orthodontics instead of bands, and the ability for the orthodontic community to earn hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, doing the same orthodontics that they were doing before in a different form.
This allowed us then to bring in lots of influences from lots of other places. The veneer guys arrived from America and then the white smiles, and the implants were pushing on then and then we headed into digital dentistry and a line of dentistry, and composite bond ups and turkey teeth and all of these things and amongst all of that, there was always the discussion about the ‘specialist’, and the General Dental Council bowed to pressure and created specialist lists to ‘protect the public’. What this meant was that the public would be aware that they could go to a specialist and not go to a specialist, and the market would find its own place.
Dentists would automatically refer things that were more complicated and outside of the sphere of practice to the specialists, who would have special practices called specialist practices, and this happened for a while, and we were part of that, but then what happened was in the commercialisation that occurred previously. Lots of dentists didn't like sending the work out of their own practice, and therefore, they got people into the practice to do the work.
Some people were specialists, some people were not, and so specialist dentistry then started to die a death. Some people have noticed this, and some noticed early, but many people are still pretending that that's not the case.
I can promise you that it is.
And then the industry got more and more complicated, it got digital, and many more products are available. An infinite number of materials and procedures that we could carry out. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of experts on all sorts of media telling us how and why we should do things because it suited them, their ego, the people they worked with, etc, etc.
But as we reach this junction, we need to consider how dentistry moves forward from here. In a world that has created a chasm between the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and dentistry that's done under private arrangements.
Blog Post Number - 4327
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