Allan Deutsch
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RECENTLY RETURNED from a trip to Beijing, China. Thirteen hours on
the plane is a very long time. However, it was quite a unique experience
and well worth the flight. When we got out of the airport, you could
not see more than a block in front of you. I asked the dental dealer
if that was fog. He replied, “No it is smog (pollution).” Pollution
is incredibly thick and bad in Beijing. Many people wear surgical
masks just to walk in the street. Controlling pollution is not their
main concern yet; they want to increase the standard of living to approach
a western country as quickly as they can. We came to China to meet
with a new dealer who wants to sell Flexi-Post® and Flexi-Flange®,
Flexi-Flow Auto™, Ti-Core®, EndoExpress®, SafeSiders®, Glove’n
Care®, Scrub’n Glove®, and the PulpOut® Bur.
At the dealer’s office in Beijing, I met with the
staff and gave a lecture on all the techniques to about twenty dentists.
It seems that continuing education is desperately needed in China.
They told us that there are about 60,000 western-trained dentists in all
of China for 1.3 billion people. There are about 86 dental schools,
but they only turn out about 200 dentists a year. I am not sure if
these numbers are correct; translation is sometimes difficult. However,
they did mention that dental school is only 1.5 years long after college.
I thought the old three-year programs in the U. S. were too short; this
seems almost impossibly short. Consequently, continuing education
is highly sought-after in China.
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| FIGURE
1: The dentists listening to Allan’s lecture. |
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| FIGURE
2: Giving the lecture. |
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| FIGURE
3: Allan discussing the fine points of Flexi-Flange. |
We went to the Sino dental show while we were in
Beijing. It was held in an old convention hall built when the country
was communist (Figure 4). It is a very basic building with no frills.
The booths of the larger dental manufacturers were nicer than the building.
On the first floor it looked like any dental show anywhere in the world.
Booths were very large and very showy. Any booth that had a flat
panel TV and was showing a “how to do” film was mobbed. There are
approximately 13 million people in Beijing (twice the size of New York),
so “mobbed” is a magnitude of order bigger here in Beijing. The second
floor was totally unexpected. It appeared to be the Chinese version
of the “Dental Bazaar.” Booths displayed vast numbers of jars of
different sized burs, racks and racks of impression trays, all sorts of
dental materials sold by the piece. You could purchase anything dental
for cash (Figure 5).
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| FIGURE
4: The outside of the old communist-built convention center in Beijing. |
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| FIGURE
5: The second-floor dental bazaar. |
Once the show was over, we went to dinner with our
host the dental dealer. The restaurants are as modern and beautiful as
any in New York. However, the one thing that did amaze me was the number
of employees working in all the restaurants we were in. There was
not one hostess, but six; not one waiter, but four. It looks as though
they are trying to employ as many people as possible. Naturally,
the service was beyond outstanding.
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| FIGURE
6: At dinner . . . |
These were just some of the highlights of a very
short (three-day) visit to Beijing. The way it is going, I may be
there often in the near future.
July - August 2006
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Do not force the Peeso drill when removing
gutta percha to make a post hole. Gutta percha is really soft, so running
the drill at full speed with gentle pressure should melt the gutta percha
away. If you have to push hard, then you are drilling into the tooth structure
and are going to perforate out through the root.
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