Recently, Tom Parkin spoke with our founder, Dr. Scott Dudley, about the difference between a good dentist and a great dentist at Branin Center for Dentistry. Here's the video and transcript. Colorado Health Matters is a half hour television series showcasing the latest in healthcare in Colorado. 

Transcript: 

When you choose a Branin Center for Dentistry, you are choosing an office with exceptionally trained dentists and team. You and your family benefit from their unrelenting commitment to their patients and their results. 

At Branin Center for Dentistry, we value preventing expensive dentistry, proving that great dentistry can be affordable. We strongly believe we can help our patients live healthier happier lives, by helping each of them look and feel their best. 

People don’t usually love spending money at the dentist. I’d say the average dentist fixes things. If you break a tooth, they do a root canal and a crown tooth. If you chip a tooth, they put some bonding on it. For bleeding gums, they offer a deep cleaning. For the average dentist, it’s a lot easier when patients know they have a problem, to pay for a solution. 

Great dentist get ahead of those issues so they never happened in the first place. Great Dentists encourage patients who have signs of issues, but lack any symptoms, to do dentistry that will save them pain, procedures, and money over their lifetime. That is a really big difference in knowledge, training and philosophy. 

One of the things that makes our job difficult is when a new patient comes in who is just a trusted provider, but they have all sorts of issues they have not been made aware of. It is a hard, but very common situation. 

Their last provider was a fixer, not a preventer. Probably a nice person, but they come in with crowded teeth, worn teeth, teeth with cracks in them. Their fixer dentist was not looking for signs of crack teeth. They may have been told their crooked and worn teeth were just the natural aging process. 

These signs are 100% avoidable, and are just a recipe for disaster, if patients want healthier teeth and gum in their later decades of life. Do not be fooled by memberships and associations which anyone can be enrolled, or technology that anyone can buy. 

Great dentists don’t delegate work to assistants. Instead, they do nearly all of it themselves. Great dentists tend to use very high magnification loops, 5x or 6x. You just can’t be as precise using 3x or 4x. 

Great dentists tend to have advance certifications like FAGD, MAGD. AACD after their names. You can ask how many continuing educations hours they have. Divide that number by years worked. The bare legal minimum is 15 to 20 hours per year, anything over 50 hours per year would be evidence of exceptionalism.

With many offices conveniently located throughout the greater Denver Colorado area Branin Center for Dentistry values preventing expensive dentistry. Proving that great dentistry can be affordable. They strongly believe that they can help their patients live healthier lives by helping each of them look and feel their best.