Bookings and Fees


This is our PREMIER hands on occlusion program, If you are looking for predictable, practical & profitable-this is the course you are looking for!

As aesthetic, restorative treatments continue to gain in popularity, more and more practitioners are delving into larger and more complex cases. These can be some of the most rewarding treatments that we can provide for our patients or become a great source of frustration and stress for everyone involved.

The accurate recording of occlusal relationships and their communication the clinician and ceramist can be quite a challenge and perhaps even a deterrent from practitioners incorporating full mouth, aesthetic rehabilitation into their practices.
In this three-day program, we will explore the rationalization and use of appliance therapy and occlusal philosophy & records in diagnostic and restorative dentistry and much more through lecture and hands-on experience!

Express your interest or ask a question: gayle@harriscallaway.com

Now all that was a bit simplified but it does emphasis how expensive a mistake is and how big a profit killer they are! 

Now multiply that to replacing twenty veneers (yes, I did that once) or a whole fixed implant retained restoration and you can see that you are going to have a real bad day.  And that is assuming you don’t get involved with lawyers.   So what is the solution?  There are three.  We can do nothing.  Doing nothing is a sure fire way to have absolutely no failures.  We can avoid failures through training, dedication and experience.  And finally, we can make a failure a success. 

Doing nothing is not a bad thing.  Some personality types handle failure very poorly, and if you fall into this category, it may well be better for you to stick to doing just a few things really well, rather than a lot of new and risky things.  Treat the patient with a referral. 

We can try and avoid failures.  Probably the most expensive failures in dentistry are related to occlusion.  Many factors can cause damage to our dental work.  However there is nothing like a patient who severely clenches or grinds their teeth to destroy a whole mouthful of dental work.  It is also these patients that are most likely to present with worn teeth and require a whole mouthful of dental work, which they will then try and destroy. 

Through more advanced training, we can learn to assess who is a crown destroyer and who isn’t.  We can learn how to fabricate splints or orthotics to protect our dental work.  With any procedure, more knowledge and experience lead to lower rates of failure.  When we have failure, it is important to take a picture and learn from the failure.  Yet, even the most expert dentist in any given field will still get failure from time to time.  Perhaps the patient clenches their teeth in the day as well.  Perhaps a diabetic smoker will lose an implant from time to time no matter how good your skills.  Perhaps if you do enough composite restorations, the odd person is going to get tooth ache afterwards. 

The final, and most powerful tactic in the arsenal against remakes is to make failure a success.  And how might we do that?  We predict it. Telling the patient that something will fail before it fails is a diagnosis. 

Telling the patient that something will fail after it fails is an excuse.  The irony is that when we are the least experienced at a new procedure, and the most likely to make a mistake, we are also the most likely to promise the patient the moon.  It isn’t necessary to promise the moon to sell a lot of dentistry.  In fact, there is a lack of sincerity to promising too much that patients seem to see through. 

On the other hand, to be able to look a patient in the eye and tell them that they destroyed their natural teeth, so likely, they will damage some of the work you do, exhibits a confidence that people find sincere.  Of course, that does not mean you do anything less than your absolute best.  But a detailed analysis of the likelihood of failure and an accurate estimation of failure can make for a lot less stress in your life.  If you don’t make promises you can’t keep, then you are much less likely to be paying for things that are really beyond your control. 

A PFM crown that you said the patient would eventually break if it wasn’t in gold, is not something you have to pay for or when it breaks.  It was the patients choice, so they pay.  Veneers that you said would break if the patient did not wear a bite guard, are the patient’s problem when they don’t wear a bite guard. So really cut down on this unnecessary cost.
1.    Learn when to refer.
2.    Learn how to avoid failures.
3.    Learn how to predict and promise failure, thus making failure a success. 

And above all, look after the lining of your stomach.

Linc.