We've all had the experience of looking through old photo albums of ourselves and laughing (and cringing) at the style choices we made back then. Those wide lapels, the shaggy long hair, the bell-bottom jeans. There we are, gathered around the 8-track player, feeling vital and modern. The thing is, of course we were – for that time. It's the same no matter what era you grew up in and it will be the same for us again in later years: Today's hot new trend is tomorrow's quaint curiosity.

In dentistry we see this, too. You ask a patient to open wide and you see what I call a "museum of dentistry." You see repairs and restorations of different vintages that represent the best professional standards at the time they were done, but are the oral care equivalent of 8-track technology in today's world of high-performance digital dentistry.

I'm not suggesting that dentists should feel bad about the old-school dentistry they find in the mouths of longtime patients. The work that was done then was great for its time. You need to honor the past and acknowledge what you achieved with what you had, while at the same time always adjusting your sights to that ideal baseline as it stands today.

It's not that you have to put a time limit on restorations, or suggest to patients that they overhaul their dental work every time something new emerges, but there comes a point when the functional and esthetic advantages of new procedures and materials are hard to ignore. You're not rejecting your earlier standards as being wrong. You're simply accepting that those standards were the best for that time, and that patients must be given the choice to engage with dentistry at the level of today's possibilities.


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