20 Feb Why I love dentistry

Written by:  Dr.Marco Maiolino

So after my paper on why we are an unlucky race now, I want to highlight why i love dentistry, especially to wish a good 2019!
For sure I love it…how can you explain otherwise that in the last 15 years I have spent most of my free time reading articles, looking at the photos done during my working days, looking for new topics and techniques on the web, spending time on dental forums and so on..?
I love it and I love to spend time trying to understand how these teeth, gum and bone and joint works together…
We are forced to understand because we constantly see failures of our work and failure of the dogmas written in the book…we see perfectly detailed techniques fail miserably after perfect execution and we see horrible works doing fine after 20 years with happy patients…
At the beginning, I was very frustrated by this scenario…
I was spending all my energy and focus to do the so called state of the art dentistry just to see that in some cases this wasn’t working as expected…
So fiber post was failing? That was an adhesive failure so maybe the substrate was not clean enough I thought…and I bought a microscope, I bought a sandblaster, my post space was literally shining after my preparation inside the root canals and before post placement …yet in some cases, fiber post failed…for fracture or decementation.
I was doing orthodontic treatment… at that time i was using the MBT technique and I was finishing my cases with a perfect I class with perfect canine and incisor guidance just in order to see that, despite this so acclaimed occlusal scheme, some patient with joint problems didn’t benefit from these, some were also doing worst.
I was frustrated…but the reality is that this was also really interesting ….I understood this some days ago looking at my 3 years old son playing with some lego…he is able to spend a lot of time joining pieces enjoying the simple fact to be able to make them work in the desired way, enjoying the simple ability to build something you like.
In that moment I ‘ve seen that what I did in my life in dentistry (and I realize now, in many things) is the same…spending time on something just to understand how it works and this is the real deal.
In the last 15 years, i spent a lot of moments of frustration but I perfectly remember the excitement when I was able to go over that dark problem and got that small piece of truth that make things go better…..
We never acclaim failures in our life but the reality is that failures are not only a big part of our life but they are that special thing that makes solutions so rewarding…
I still have  a lot to understand in dentistry …but I ‘ve finally clear that failures are no more a sad thing but that they are like a treasure …. hard to open, but when opened you discover much more.. and when I realized this I started to love much more dentistry and everything I do cause I see always more behind a failure and I see them as the starting of a new game.
Without failures I would be bored for sure….certainty is a boring state at the end.
This is the game we play, this is the life also, to fall, to raise, to try again…and, you know, once understood, I ‘m in love with this.
And I hope I’ve helped some of you to realize the same.

Happy 2019

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