How to Swim With Sharks: For Dentists & Their Patients

The biggest problem I see right now in dentistry is best summed up in the analogy of a truck stuck in a tunnel. There is one tunnel that separates two major cities and it was stuck one day when a truck try to make it through for hours the road and commerce were shut down because of this one truck so they needed to remove it, all the truck drivers came and they tried to look how they can wiggle it out, all the tunnel experts came to see how they can make the tunnel a little bigger. All of that would require engineering expertise and professional licensed work. After 3 days of bystander after seeing so much struggle mentioned did anybody think to deflate the tires?

And the truck was released within minutes...

You see as professionals when we focus on a problem sometimes that's all we see and we must take a step back and take a different perspective to realize maybe we were focused on the wrong problem in the first place

Dental insurance never was meant to be a primary coverage and by its definition is not even an insurance plan it's more like a defined benefit plan but that's beside the point now that you're out of college and I'm speaking to all the clinicians in the room if you're working on a living patient you must be a licensed doctor that gives you the ability to lay hands on a person that's why you have doctor of in front of your dental license however most dentists are not credentialed to be recognized for that part and thus why when they try to medically integrate talk to other doctors or even get paid for the most important valuable part of their work through medical billing why they get denied.

It's like showing up on the football field without a uniform without gear and getting mad that the referee kicked you out of the game, it's naive and it's childish to fight against or blame the referee for not letting you play. There's a reason why they wear that protection and people can die without it.

In the same way every dentist should have an NPI and a PTAN but according to a study that I saw 99% do not, THIS is the Archimedes lever and the real Crux of the issue.

you see, if you look up the definition of a dentist we all know that it is a person qualified to treat the diseases and conditions that affect the teeth and gums, especially the repair and extraction of teeth and the insertion of artificial ones.

However the biggest problem with that is we are doing all of the work but not getting paid on it there are no Dental ADA codes that pay for treating the diseases and conditions, so medical billing and integration isnt a matter of it you want to or whether you feel comfortable with it, its part of the deal, the biggest fundamental part, that you are missing out on, just saying...

Ill end by saying this, this is what I know to be true. And in today's age there's very few things that I know for sure but here is something that I know 100,000% to be true. Health starts from the mouth, and so does 90% of disease. The mouth is part of the body, and our mouth has the best leading predictors and indicators of Health, short, middle and long-term. Health is from head to toe, and you cannot have a healthy body without a healthy mouth. therefore, Dental is Medical and Dentists are doctors.

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