Barry Musikant
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 HIS
ARTICLE is really directed more to endodontists than to the general practioner.
When I was a good deal younger and just starting out, I wanted to meet
dentists so that I could build my endodontics practice. My father
was a well-known dentist in Manhattan, many of his friends were dentists,
and as a result I had been surrounded by dentists since early childhood.
So, when I had to meet dentists to build a practice it was not an uncomfortable
situation for me to be in.
I knocked on doors and introduced myself, and I
also became an instructor at one of the local dental schools. In
addition, my partner Allan Deutsch and I started throwing singles parties
for dentists, dental assistants, hygienists, and anyone else remotely associated
with dental offices. This was easy to do when I was single.
I don’t recommend this approach if you are married. We also gave
many lectures at localities throughout the greater New York area.
The standard we always attempted to reach was something
that set us apart from the “others.” That was why we opened up seven
days a week and twelve hours a day, because no one else was doing it.
The same motivation was behind the the singles parties. When we lectured
originally, it wasn’t on endodontics, but rather on post and core buildups,
because no one else at the time was doing it.
Today, we teach dentists how to perform efficient,
inexpensive, and predictable endodontics by learning the SafeSider®
instrumentation and the EZ-Fill® obturation techniques. When you teach
an effective simplified approach in contrast to all the other techniques
out there, the practice-building potential is amazing. It dwarfs
whatever we had done over the preceding 25 years.
Many times I speak to an endodontist and say that
one of the things you probably do is to call up new dentists and ask them
out for dinner. In effect, you are trying to charm them into sending
you referrals. I understand that. I did plenty of that over
the years. Now maybe I’m being cynical, but most dentists really
don’t want to go out for dinner. I think most of them want to get
home when the workday is done, and when they agree to go out with an endodontist
(or any other specialist) it’s because they are being a nice guy (or gal).
So here we are teaching dentists how to do much
better endo simply and effectively without spending a lot of money and,
in fact, virtually eliminating the chances of fractured instruments.
We tell other endodontists, our potential competitors, how and why it works
for us. And the results are amazing. Most endodontists believe
that if they really teach an effective method of endodontics it will result
in less work for themselves, so they don’t want the general practioner
to learn these simpler, more effective systems. We tell them that,
in reality, they are only half right. If they teach these systems,
many of their referrers will send fewer patients because they can do more
on their own; however, what these endodontists fail to see is that teaching
the Safesider and EZ-Fill techniques will result in their meeting many
new dentists whom they would have never met otherwise.
By the way, most of the individual hands-on courses
we give last two to three hours. That means that both the dentist
and the endodontist get home earlier than if they had gone out to eat.
In addition, you have not polluted yourself with alcohol and fat-drenched
steaks, adding to your long-term good health.
The endodontists who teach the techniques that allow
the gp’s to make more income in a simplified fashion will get less work
per dentist, but they will have many more dentists who send work.
As for being charming, I tell them that if they teach a dentist to make
$125,000 more a year, there are few things that are more charming.
It certainly beats sending a case of wine or a dozen steaks from Omaha,
not that we are telling those specialists to stop sending the wine and
the steak.
Teaching the SafeSider instrumentation and EZ-Fill
obturation techniques is particularly timely, considering the fact that
rotary NiTi has two things that are going on concurrently. Many recent
graduates are coming out of dental school having been exposed to rotary
NiTi techniques, and a low but persistent incidence of instrument separation
keeps occurring. While the major manufacturers say that instrument
separation is a result of the practioners’ techniques, the research clearly
shows that instrument failure is directly connected to NiTi’s poor resistance
to torsional and fatigue stresses. Studies have shown fracture rates
between 2 and 9 percent, a level that translates into great inefficiency
when attempting to remove embedded segments of broken instruments.
Once the dentists see and understand the SafeSider
alternative, they begin to appreciate the formerly inconceivable notion
that rotary NiTi is truly an irrelevant departure from safe predictable
endodontics, and its abandonment results in superior results and less anxiety.
Spring 2004
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When
you teach an effective simplified approach in contrast to all the other
techniques out there, the practice-building potential is amazing.
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