Ep. 11: Dr. Dan's Personal Journey Into Dentistry

Part 10:00

This is Podpopuli, podcast for the people. Hello and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Arches. I'm your host, Dr. Daniel Noorthoek. Today we're going to be talking about my own personal journey into full-arch. How did I get into full-arch? And given that it's kind of a sort of an interesting topic and it's one that sort of feels a little bit awkward for me to just sit here and talk about my story and about myself so much. And so what I did is I asked Erica, we have Erica with us today, and I asked Erica to come on and create some questions that would kind of bring out sort of the story of how I ended up in full-arch, sort of my personal journey to full-arch. And so she came up with a list of questions. I don't know what they are. I have no idea where this conversation is going to head.

And so I'm going to kick it over to her, but that will sort of be the focus of what we talk about today. And it'll be very... It'll be sort of the personal story, the personal journey of how I ended up on this track. Thank you. I'm excited. I have a few questions here to kind of see just your story, like you said, and kind of where you came from. What drew you into this? I'm nervous. My favorite color is blue.

So we'll see. I don't know if we'll get through all of them today, but we'll see where this conversation takes us. So let's start off basically at the beginning. What is your story? ▶What did your training and early years kind of look like? So I was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I went to school there for several years. My father is a printer. He is the job foreman at a printing company. They print a lot of biblical devotions and Bibles and things like that. And so when I first started school, as I was taking certain classes to get...

A few things. I started working there second shift. So I'd go to school in the morning and then at night I'd work with printing Bibles and cutting them and doing all those things. And this wasn't just... It wasn't just him and two or three machines. This was a pretty big operation. This was... Over the summer, we would kind of print millions of Bibles and we would be chopping them and doing all of the things that you have to do to get a book ready, which is also a totally separate thing. Very fascinating and very mundane, and it's a very easy way to make your brain melt out of the back of your skull in manufacturing.

So I then decided that I wanted to move to Florida, partially because of barefoot water skiing. At the time, I was really into barefoot water skiing, and I had a chance to come down and do that for a school in Florida. And so my father and I went on a road trip as I was searching for schools. I knew I wanted to be a dentist at that point, and we came down. And interviewed and talked to the school. And on the way back, I told my dad, listen, Florida is where I would want to go if I'm going to do this. If I'm going to do this dentistry thing, I wouldn't really want to go to University of Michigan. I'd be pretty much set up to establish my life in Florida. As a side note, growing up in Michigan, I respected it. It was great. Family values, all of those things. But climate-wise, I knew from the time I was three or four.

I definitely wanted to live somewhere that had summer year-round. And so I was a Florida boy before I was a dentist boy. And so on our way back on this trip, we decided to take a tour of the University of Florida. And I fell in love with that campus, but the tour was given by the Dean of Admissions in the dental school. We kind of hit this very strange time in the summer where the Dean of Admissions had a chance, had almost all the time, had a chance to go to the University of Michigan all day to give us a tour. And so we kind of got this very personal tour. I had never even seen a dental office or dental school at that point. And she gave us a tour all the way through it. And I think we were with her maybe three or four hours. It was a long time. She gave us a lot of time. And during that conversation, she said, well, if you're going to be a dentist and you want to go to Florida and you're not going to get a 4.0, which I did not get a 4.0, people might be shocked, but I didn't get a 4.0. I had no...

Plans of getting a 4.0. She said, you might want to check out Florida. And so she arranged for me to go look at the undergrad school and arranged the person for us to go take a tour. So my father and I then jumped over to the college, the school of the University of Florida that I went to. ▶And we went through that as well. So immediately after I got home, applied, got in, all of that stuff, I went and did my bachelor's degree at the University of Florida.

Graduated. When I graduated, this is turning into a long convoluted story, but I was homeschooled as a small child until about seventh grade. And when I went to go enter back into school, I was supposed to be in eighth grade and I had already taken all of the classes that they had listed there on my schedule. And so this was a small private school. When I say private, I'm not talking about Boca private. It's not 50,000 a year. This was three to $5,000 a year, but it was a private school. And I didn't, I told my parents, I'm not going to let you spend this money. And we're not going to make these sacrifices for me to go to school here for me to just to take the classes that I've already taken. And so we went and sat down with the principal. I ended up skipping a grade and went into ninth because it was just the next level of curriculum. So I graduated a little bit early. I also left high school with a decent amount of credits. I was on a one track, like I want to get done with school kind of mine.

▶And so I also did my undergrad, my bachelor's degree in three years as well. So by the time I graduated, I believe I was, let's see, I was, I was 19 turning 20. I turned 20 about a week before my graduation. So it was very, very young, couldn't drink yet or anything. And so when I was trying to get into dental school, that, that fall, essentially the admissions, there were some things I needed to tweak about my application as well. It's not just make it an age thing, but they essentially told me I needed to take a year off, get more mature, be able to drink, like be able to hang out and socialize with everyone. So I took a year off, went back to Michigan. I worked in quality control using, actually what was really cool about it is I graduated with a microbiology degree and I ended up doing microbiology for a year. I graduated with a microbiology degree and I ended up doing which was really cool doing the testing and the quality assurance for a lot of Johnson and Johnson products and Unilever, like L'Oreal shampoos. We would test those to make sure that there weren't microbes that were going in your hair. I have a few little dirty secrets and a few little sort of like pins on my record for that. That was, that was a fun time, but then I was accepted that following year.

And ended up going to school. I think I was accepted in the fall of 2006. I went to the university of Florida, Florida for those four years. And then about my third year going into fourth. So the end of my junior year, so we'll say June ish of 2009, I decided that periodontics really interested me and doing extractions and taking teeth out. And the surgery side really was interesting to me. And so I started going to school and I ended up going to school. And then sort of selected periodontics through a number of different things and ended up going through the process of applying for periodontics and going through that process. And so the unique part about that was I started my schooling at Virginia Commonwealth university in Richmond, Virginia.

It was one of the coolest places I've ever lived. It was really, really fun. I was there for a year, made some really great friends really quickly, learned a lot. ▶A lot of really good surgical fundamentals. And then after that first year, there was a spot that had opened up and the dynamic and the climate and the culture had changed at the university of Florida's periodontics department. And so I ended up transferring, which you don't really do, but I ended up transferring after my first year into the Florida program. And so I ended up finishing at the university of Florida.

And the three degrees I have on my wall are all Gator. And everything about my life is all university of Florida Gator fan. So that's sort of my educational background story. Go Gators. Yeah. Yes. And go owls. I live here. I can be a fan of the owls. So throughout this journey through kind of all of these schools and places that you were, you know, having your educational background, did you have any specific mentors or was there anybody who kind of guided you through this process?

Yes, a lot, a lot in the beginning formative years, right? There there's a lot of when you're first learning a skill, especially something that's sort of traditionally like apprenticeship, you know, there's, there's certain things that are very like book historically, right? You look back at the medieval times and then there's certain things that were like apprenticeship. You know, blacksmiths, you just lived your whole life for blacksmithing or painting. And dentistry is sort of one of those things that was always learned on the job. It's very intimate to learn that job. It's very artsy. It's very scientific based. And so there were a lot of mentors along the way, especially, you know, when you're just starting and you're kind of gravitating towards who am I and what am I, right? In dental school, there's a, uh, oral surgery,

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um, attending faculty. His name was Dr. Dennis. I worked with a guy named Dr. Baxter, Dr. Abate, really good, solid people to teach us sort of the ground ethics of how we treat patients and what kind of work we do and how we think about things and just diagnosing and breaking down critical thinking and problems. And then when I moved into periodontics, then you kind of move into like, okay, now it's time to get serious about learning these skills. And so I was like, and there's a, there's a host of names, right? Uh, Dr. Waldrop, Dr. Sabatini, Dr. Neva, a lot of different people along the way didn't even need to be professors, right? Uh, Dr. Fettner in Jacksonville was a big influence. And so you have these influential people that kind of drop in and drop out of your life. Um, but I will tell you the number one person who had the biggest effect on me was, uh, his name was Dr. Waldrop.

He was the, the clinical, uh, and Dr. Katousis, by the way, he's a, he's a clinical professor at university of Florida. He was the adjunct professor, and now he's the clinical director here at Nova Southeastern. And even though he's only about 30, 40 minutes away, I don't really work with him directly except for he's who Blake Hauer, who I believe we're going to be working with and bringing in, he trained Blake as well. And, and so there's a lot of names that come along the way. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, but as I was saying, Dr. Waldrop, I've never felt in awe of a person, you know, how, uh, Erica, you and I have talked about how I respect you for sort of your pension and your look for details and your ability to sort of be resolute and figuring things out. When I started working with Dr. Waldrop, the man is intimidating. He's scary. He's the most driven. He's the most driven person that I know. And his ability to have committed his life to training periodontist future periodontist is something that, that will, that had a very, very lasting effect on me. And I still think about today, he's probably definitely like the number one person that I think about in terms of how I was formed. And the way I say that is the first year when I was at, uh, Richmond, like we talked about VCU, was the most intense year of my life. The expectations on us were ungodly. I mean, they were unbelievable, but you worked so hard and wanted to be like this person, Dr. Waldrop, just an absolute driven, I'm going to say maniac, but I'm going to say it in like the, the most loving way. I'll give you an example of how driven this guy is. He is a military guy.

And has committed his life or did commit his life to training, you know, future students and periodontics, et cetera. And his commitment to that, he was always on time. He never had fancy goofy things to do. He was always, uh, when we were reviewing literature, which we did once a week, really twice a week, but we'll say once a week was the big one. He was always there. He was on time. He was the one that set a better example than any of us who are trying to be good. Right.

So I'm going to give you an example of just how resolute he was in his drive. This man, uh, I think

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he was in like the over 50 years old class of triathletes. Okay. He was top 30 in the world in this class. Okay. Just a small little story. And, and I may be telling this story wrong. It may just be a legend at this point, but I'm, I'm positive. It's pretty true. This man was in the world championships for, he was in the top 30 of triathletes doing an Ironman, right? And he was an Ironman. Do you know what an Ironman is? I believe it's the biking, the running and the swimming. Yes. Okay. But to ungodly levels, right? So it's, uh, I think it's a two and a half mile swim. Wow. Um, 112 mile bike and a, and a full marathon, a 26 point, um, 26.2 run. Right. Amazing.

And he's in the top 30 of the world for over 50. Right. So this man falls off of his bike. Okay. He has a collapsed lung. Medical comes up to talk to him and they say, sir, like, we don't think this is a good idea. We've checked you out. This is not great. You shouldn't finish this. Like, I know it sucks, but you should come off the path. Man gets on his bike and starts biking some more and they ended up physically pulling him. Like they pulled their card and said, no, no, no, no. This is not how this goes. You know, after a mile or two or whatever, we're pulling you for your own safety. You cannot do this, but he intended on finishing. I say that as a story of, I've never been in awe of a person more of like how committed he was. If he started something, he was going to finish it. He enjoyed excellence. He, he wanted it. He craved it. He made you crave it. And what I appreciate, the reason why I'm telling you this story, what I appreciate the most is that that wasn't the most formative time of my career. That was when I was first really learning who I was as a surgeon, as a periodontist.

Right. And, and I'm glad that that was the experience there, not just dentistry because dentistry, you end up losing a lot of skills. You carry a lot, but when you're focused on, this is going to be my life, I really want to do this well. And I want to excel having that drive or that person to strive after was, is something that I still get to carry on, hopefully get to carry on his legacy every day. And the, the dedication and the commitment, the commitment to following fundamental basics, that things that you don't violate surgical basics. I was always able to see when I did transfer us, since I did have a different approach or different perspective, I could see there was a big physical difference there in the way that I was trained and in the pressure and the, and the, you know, pressure forms diamonds. There was a difference. There was a definite difference. And I'm not just calling it to myself. I'm going to say, I knew that there was somebody practicing and, and Richmond with that same pension. And there was a difference between that and a little bit more of a laid back program. And so I will always, always be indebted to Dr. Waldrop. He had a, he had an impact on my life that I don't think he could ever ascertain because again, from his perspective, I was the weak guy that took off from his practice after a year, right?

After from his program after a year. And it didn't really have anything to do with him or what I was getting in terms of fundamental basics. There was a reason why I went to Florida. One, I could work during the week and make some money to live. Two, I could set myself up for a job. Three, ▶I needed a shoulder surgery at the time and it was free at UF, but 23 grand at VCU, which I couldn't afford. So there are a lot of different reasons. It wasn't just me running away.

But my point being is that from his perspective, I was probably just that goofy guy that he didn't get all the way through to, you know, if you start something, you're going to finish it. But I kind of live every day hoping that even though he may not, will not ever find out or know, sort of carrying on that legacy or like sort of respecting what he gave me is something that I carry pretty much every day.

Awesome. I think you show that very well in our office, obviously being a very, very strong, leader and always finishing, you know, what you say you're going to finish. So I think that's followed you through. You mentioned, so during school, you fell in love with periodontics. What specifically kind of drew you into full arch?

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That's a good question. An easy one to answer. So when I was in school, when I was first getting out of the didactic part, didactic being the book portion of, dental school, which is kind of your first two years, you play around with dummies and do some dental type stuff. But when you first learn on patients and do things on patients, third year. Okay. And to tell you this story, I have to also let you know that in my freshman year, I was in school, I was, was in class and I did a little bit of quick napkin math and figured out that on the weekends, I was going to the bar and, and hanging out and, you know, spending 30, 40 bucks on a tab, 60 bucks on a tab, whatever it may be. And I realized I was spending quite a bit of money hanging out with and socializing with friends and being that we already kind of talked about barefoot water skiing.

I also had the big pension or, or desire to have a boat again. Right. And I also knew that that kind of attracted like a big social circle we'll say. And so I was searching, I was searching boats online freshman year. I promise this as a point. And my roommate at the time said, you won't do it. No way you'll do it. So I did, I bought the boat. Okay. And I bought, it was a ski boat. It was kind of, at the time it was like borderline, my dream ski boat that I could afford barely, not really financed it over 10 years. Okay. Ludicrous. I would never let, like if I had a kid, I would never let them do that. But, uh, uh, it was $165 a month. Right. So here's the math, $40 a week, less than I was spending at the bar. It was a whole lot more fun. Didn't require that. I sat in a smoky, stinky bar and hung out with people. I was in control of the party. Right. And so I, all I had to do was call one or two people and I bam, have eight people on the boat. They would all bring beer. They'd all bring ice and they'd all bring five or 10 bucks for gas. And so literally just for that, $165 a month, I was on the water skiing and wakeboarding at least we'll say two to four times a week. Okay. One of my main friends that we would go wakeboarding with, his name is, uh, we, everyone calls him Obi, Obi Sullivan. Obi Sullivan actually is an endodontist up in Jacksonville now. He and I became very, very close friends. We'd go out on the weekends, get a quick little session in, come back. And so, um, we became really close friends and he was a year ahead of me being a year ahead of me.

He had a lot of cases, right? And he was kind of into the sort of sunset portion of his dentistry as I was coming into, uh, my clinical portion of, of dental school. And so I told, I promised you there was a point. The Obi gave me 40 or 50 patients that he didn't. Cause he was a very social guy too. So making patients and get building relationships was pretty simple for him. And that's also why I'm grateful for having that boat is it really taught me a lot about interacting with, with other professional future successful colleagues, but being social and having a good time and letting things roll off my back. And there was a physical aspect because you're all wakeboarding, you're all sort of doing, some physical exertion and things like that. But he gave me 30 or 40 patients we'll say.

And as I'm looking through it, he had brought almost everyone to the level of higher end work that you would generally have to spend a year or two to work towards, right? ▶We're talking crowns, bridges, dentures, all kinds of different things. So after the first, we'll call it semester and a half in my junior year, I pretty much had essentially all I needed to graduate, which isn't saying much because dental school requirements aren't insanely hard. They're hard to get. If you have to work traditionally, like I get a new patient, I bring them to the treatment planning clinic.

I bring them through the cleanings, et cetera. But being given that sort of like ready to go list allowed me to then build new relationships and new patients very quickly. And so the, the lucky part of it, the amazing part of it was I was very quickly done with everything I needed to do. And so that gave me essentially a year, year and a half to then kind of scope out what kind of things that I enjoyed doing. And so when I would show up to work or we'll call it work, but when I showed up to school, we had to check in, see if anybody needed anything. And generally we had to be there no matter what they could call you and say, Hey, we need you in the afternoon. So I would go down and volunteer.

In the student oral surgery clinic, that was sort of my passion because it was a good way. It was a

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fun way to go in, get something done, be able to practice some dentistry, learn a new skill, learn something different and do it sort of on the fly. You didn't have to have this big, um, sort of big to do to get that person there. You didn't have to do all the boring work of sorts. Uh, and so I found myself going there every single week. And as a side note, I can remember the first tooth I took out. When I try to describe to people what it's like, the best way I can say is that the feeling of taking a tooth out for me is a little bit electric. And I know that that may sound gory, but here's what it's like for me. Imagine yourself taking an Oreo. We've all done this, taking an Oreo and turning it right. You know, that separation, that feel of it slipping and being done, right? That's that.

That feel is what it feels like to take a tooth out. And for me, it was like an Oreo on steroids as well, right? Like not everybody gets that same satisfaction as I do, but that's where it came from. And so I was sort of kind of, we'll call it chasing this little high, right? And I went there every single day. I ended up winning the student oral surgery award for, for taking out teeth. Um, I was there on the, not on the weekends. I was there on our breaks. Like say we had a two week break. I might go home for three or four days, but then I'd come back and volunteer in the student clinic. It was sort of addictive. Now I've kind of limited my options in the future to periodontics or oral surgery. Okay. Oral surgery. If you want to take, there's two routes you can go. There's a four year path and a six year path. The four year path, you sort of do a lot of medicine, but a lot of it is also dentistry. So when you're doing this dentistry, you learn, you don't get an additional degree yet, or I don't believe you get another degree. You're an oral surgeon. That's fine.

The six year degree for three years, you go all the way back to start. You basically got, you know, it's in monopoly when you go to jail, right? You go right back to the book work and going in with the students and in medicine. And for me, that always seemed a little bit too much outside of the realm of dentistry, right? Remember I'm just chasing the high of the Oreo separating. And that seemed a little bit too far away from it. Also, I didn't really have the interest. Nothing piqued my interest about trauma cases and cutting into jaws, like on the big scale, nothing to that. Nothing of that seemed great to me. I, when I would go through rotations and things in oral surgery, the patient would be like, Oh, I don't fully under general sedation and working on in that environment just didn't do anything for me.

▶It's amazing that we can do that. It's amazing that that can be done. It's definitely necessary for a ton of cases and tumors, resection, all of those things. But that didn't really tickle my fancy. So as I'm trying to decide, I had a good friend, one of my best friends in dental school. His father was a periodontist. I already mentioned his name, Alan Fettner, but Michael Fettner was my father. And he said, I think you should go check out my dad. I think you should check out periodontics. So I was, my interest was piqued after the day of working with them. And then we were coming up on a two week break. And Michael said, well, since you're interested, my brother

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and I are going to go on a tour and we're going to go kind of up the Eastern seaboard and just take our time. And we're going to go tour and visit a bunch of different perio residencies. And so we're going to go to South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, which is where I kind of ended up. That's how I kind of ended up at Virginia. So those four places that I went to, we kind of took, I forget what it was, 10 days, 14 days, seven days. It was a long time. It was more than, I think it was about 10 days.

We'd go spend a couple of days in the city, spend a couple of days in the residency, move on to the next one, stop a couple of different places. It was a really fun time. And in that, that exposure, I got exposed to a lot of different residents and a lot of different attitudes. And most of them were all positive. Now to finally complete the home run, to finally complete it all the way around. When we got back, I started to say, okay, instead of spending the time, just figuring stuff out on my own, taking out single teeth, I'm going to go spend some time in the perio residency, kind of learning from the residents. The first day I did that, I met a guy, his name is Matthew Waite.

He has also a very interesting story. He was displaced from, I think it was Katrina. Katrina went through New Orleans, right? So he was displaced from Katrina when it hit. He was displaced from the residency there. And those, his co-residents and him got essentially redistributed around the country into different programs so that they could finish on time rather than just have to wait while their clinic was being rebuilt, et cetera. So he was sort of a, I believe it was LSU. But anyway, I met him and the first time I met him, I think he spent two to three hours explaining all of the different nuances of what to look for an implant. What does a thread look like? What is it? Why does an implant work? And this is, I probably should have known, but I didn't know what an implant was until I started looking into periodontics.

Honestly, I was in my third, heavily into my third year, had no idea what a dental implant was. And so to have that guy kind of take me under my wing and teach me all these like little cool, interesting engineering, fascinating little tips and tricks about how to look at an implant and such. I definitely still take that into my work today. One of my biggest fascinations is how does an implant work? What is the tolerances? What does the inside look like? And that all really probably is spurred on from that conversation with him. And it ended up being because I went through different programs.

I kind of was the, the orphan misfit foster child of different research projects because it's a master's program. So you have to do a master's research project and then defend your thesis and all that. So I had been balanced between five, six, 10, who knows how many research studies from changing around programs. And so when, when I, when it came down to, it was really crunch time and they had to put me in something and they couldn't find me any research to really put me on. I kind of went to them. I said, listen, I'd really like to do my research thesis on implant design, both microscopic and macroscopic. What, what does a, how does the thread and how does the pitch and how does all of this stuff work in? And what does the inside look like? All of that stuff. So I wrote essentially a review paper.

And I'm on that. And that was my research study. That was my thesis in, in mass and my master's. And so I've kind of taken that on, right. The fascination with the mechanics and the structure. And, you know, I've, I've mentioned several times, I like woodworking. I like little nitty gritty kind of engineering. If I didn't do dentistry, I probably would have done something engineering. ▶So I love that like little nitty gritty and the mechanical stuff. And so being able to combine that into dentistry has always been really fun. And I know that was like a 30 minute explanation on how I ended up in periodontics, but that's ultimately kind of what set me from down my path.

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So with all of that being said, what was the inflection point that changed your career? There's two, two points. One was the ability to transfer the opportunity to transfer back to Florida. It allowed me to come with my surgical basics, my fundamentals, my classic literature allowed me to, to kind of have a really good starting point, but then the freedom to do really big cases with Dr. Neva, who was incredible at the time. He was the new director that was there.

▶He gave us the freedom to do big things and dream big and, and think up new techniques in different ways. He was always like there to encourage basing off of your fundamentals. So that was a big inflection point was the ability to kind of, think outside the box instead of just inside the fundamentals, build them on top of your fundamentals. And then the second one was easily the phone call that I got out of school, right out of school about the week after I graduated for the opening in the job that I took in Jacksonville. That was easily the luckiest, most opportune, you name it, however you want to describe it, biggest break I've ever had in my life.

And we'll be eternally grateful for it because that's what really opened my eyes up to how does marketing work in dentistry? Who am I as a clinician? What are the procedures that I want to do? What is the income that I want to live off of? What do I want to be remembered for? That's really what opened up the doors. I mean, not that it's to anyone's chagrin or discredit, but I probably would have ended up in a normal, much more normal, simple sort of career doing your classic. I bought a practice and I play around in a bunch of different, smaller periodontics type stuff, your traditional way of practicing. But that one phone call changed my life and my wife's life and my family's life and your life and everyone's life forever. That one phone call of this isn't really my speed, not judging. It wasn't his speed. I think it's yours. What would you, would you be interested in checking it out?

And, and taking that phone call and taking that wasn't even really a leap of faith. Taking that job was incredible, just indescribably like quantum leap. And from there, it's been all just running up and downhill, but, but running nonetheless. Definitely. And my last question, I'm going to go ahead and close this out. Why do you still love doing it? ▶I love, as I, as I've gone through it, I've been doing it for a long time. I've been doing it for a long time.

Through the phases of this career, I've had different passions at different times, right? In, like I said, in dental school, my passion was just to sort of satiate the, the passion for helping some people, but also taking teeth out and, and relieving them of that. In periodontics, it was sort of this vast sort of, well, niche, but this vast sort of topic and really nailing those fundamentals down and really nailing down who are the giants that came before me and how do I learn from them and build on top of what they have built before me? Really trying to wrap your head around that, right? And then, um, as I went on to, to in practice, my focus or the biggest thing was sort of, what do I want?

To do with this career? What, what is going to make a mark? What's, what's going to change the most people's lives and also make me feel amazing for doing it. And, and initially that was a full arch, right? You, you got that initial dopamine hit of big change person needs and is in horrible infection, et cetera. And like, boom, the next day they've got, or that day at that time, they've got teeth and they're smiling and they're crying and their family's happy. And it was worth

Part 836:31

it. And all of the complexity that goes along with it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, that's kind of involving all the skills that's involving the extractions. It's involving knowing about the implants. It's knowing about the machinery. And that was a big part of my career was getting a handle on, getting a handle on that aspect, the patient care, what, what you would typically think of, Oh, he's a full arch guy. He's a dentist. He must like X, Y, Z that X, Y, Z is what the sort of beginning.

We'll call it seven, eight years of my career. We're all about right. Just getting a handle on, how do I want this to go for my patients? What goes better? Well, how do we make this smoother now? As I'm, like I said, tell us grandpa now, as I've moved on into more of a mature side of my surgeries, the surgery is, I won't say boring, but the surgery is sort of routine. Mundane is something that I do where I draw off. The feedback is the, the enjoyment of showing up to the office and seeing it go smoothly and having employees that have been here for three, four or five years and having them enjoy their job and seeing them buy a house or go to a Panthers, you know, Stanley cup final game and being able to afford those things. And knowing that we built that sort of on this niche of dentistry is very, very rewarding.

And, and of course, you know, that's not to like leave out the patient base, but for me, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, me showing up and seeing a group and a team of people that are pushing that forward without me being there is very, very satisfying. That's, that's my drive is to sort of pass that on to the next group of people and pass it on to a lot, right? Not, it doesn't have to just be the person doing the surgery. It's you, it's the lab guy. It's everyone that's involved in the system.

That's where I get up in the morning is being able to see that kind of grow and mature. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So, yeah. So, um, I think that pretty much tells the most of the story of how I ended up in the full arch. There's probably some topics actually, that's mostly like how I ended up where I am today. We'll talk, I, we should probably do, we should schedule one, you and I, where we do the same thing, but specific to full arch. How did I really end up in full arch and how did I really end up committing my career to that? But we want to thank you for listening again, like subscribe. This is just opinions.

Don't follow it as medical advice by any means. Um, but, uh, continue to listen, like subscribe, all that stuff. And, uh, we'll see you next time.