The Importance of Being Current

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. 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—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 Walkman technology in today's world of high-performance digital dentistry.

This kind of obsolescence used to take a generation or so to become evident but the pace of change is accelerating rapidly now. In dentistry today, 10 years is a very long time. In fact, when we're talking about technology in general, even last year is ancient history. A student starting on a four-year technical degree today will find that half of what they learn in Year One will be outdated by Year Three.

This is the world we live in. If we truly want to be able to say we offer the highest standard of care we have to be prepared to keep up with a swiftly evolving standard. But we shouldn't look at it as a burden; I prefer to look at it as an exciting time to be alive. This is a time when new opportunities for advancement and growth are improving every day. Often the greatest challenge in grasping today's opportunities lies in being able to let go of yesterday's conventions.

I'm not suggesting that dentists should feel bad about the old-school dentistry they find in the mouths of long-time patients. The work that was done then was good for its time. You need to honor the past and acknowledge what you achieved then with what you had, while at the same time always adjusting your sights to that ideal baseline as it stands today. You don't have to put a time limit on restorations, or suggest to patients that they overhaul their dental work every time something new emerges. There is a point when the functional and esthetic advantages of new procedures and materials are hard to ignore and you need to be aware of when that time has come.

Many of us held on to our VHS tapes for a long time until we reached the inescapable conclusion that DVDs offered several advantages that made our tapes seem clunky and retro. Now it's all about streaming video. It really comes down to a process—a way of thinking that embraces continual re-evaluation and improvement. That's the way life is and that's the way your relationship with dentistry should be: always advancing and evolving. After all, if there's one thing we can learn from looking at our old high-school photos, it's that the past is a nice place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there anymore.