Working in healthcare is challenging for many reasons. I would bet that most people in healthcare are high-achieving and have a strong desire to help others. This makes people susceptible to burnout.
Dentists, however, have the added level of patient fear, distrust, and isolation to contend with. Spend enough time with a group of dentists and you’ll hear stories of patients expressing their hatred of our profession interspersed with fierce comparisons about procedures, production, and staffing.
These experiences can create a negative environment for members of the dental community.
Bringing Light to Burnout
Experiences of burnout, isolation, and negativity are common and widely talked about and we should discuss these issues in our profession so that we can work to tackle these issues and bring light to those who are struggling.
However, in bringing to light the less-than-ideal parts of our job, I think we can lose sight of the amazing parts of being a dentist. We forget why we wanted to enter this profession and allow the fire that got us into dental school to burn out.
Gratitude for Dentistry in Light of Burnout
As I reflect on my first year practicing outside of an academic institution I have found gratitude for my chosen profession.
You have been blessed, bless others.
There is an inherent privilege in becoming a dentist. At the most basic level, we all had to have a certain talent for academics and a level of handskills to allow us to get into and then graduate from dental school. Not everyone has the ability to do what we do successfully.
My residency director always reminded us that
“You have been blessed, so use those talents to bless others.”
Being a dentist doesn’t mean much without patients to serve. We have the opportunity to make such a difference in the lives of those around us and it can be so easy to overlook that fact.
Patients come to us in pain, embarrassed, and in need of our specialized skill set and we are able to solve their problems by using our brains and our hands. Each and every day we are fighting active disease through our work and making a difference in the lives of those we come in contact with.
What we do is honestly pretty cool
Few illnesses can be fixed same day. However, several dental/oral health problems can be treated in a relatively short amount of time, especially acute problems.
Patients can resolve the cause of their pain with an extraction or root canal. Caries can be fixed with crowns or restorations within a few hours. Temporary crowns, flippers, and removal prostheses can change a person’s smile in a few appointments.
It is easy to lose sight of how magnificent it is to see a problem and use your hands to reshape or rebuild a tooth.
Work-life balance
As Dentists, we can choose to practice in many different settings, which can allow us to tailor our work to fit our lifestyles. Practices can offer a wide variety of days and hours of availability.
Typically dentists don’t take calls or work overtime unless they choose to. You can create a practice around the type of dentistry you enjoy doing. You can offer more surgical procedures or focus on cosmetic work and still have a highly successful practice.
We take for granted the flexibility dentistry can give us.
In Conclusion
I firmly believe that one of the antidotes to burnout is gratitude. Even on the hardest days, I try to remember how incredible my job is and am thankful for the skills I possess that allow me to work in this profession.
Keep Reading: Transitioning from Dental School to Clinical Practice
