The Russian Dentist
The Russian Dentist and TeethTeacher founder. Read full bio
I use social media to make oral health less intimidating, because so many people meet dentistry first through fear. They hear stories about pain. About cost. About judgment. About drills and needle...
Writing about dentistry made me a better clinician, because writing forces precision. Thinking about a topic in my head, I can get away with a vague understanding. Sitting down to write about it, I...
I was making content for social media when something became clear to me. The posts that drew the most likes and shares were not the ones that helped people most. A post titled "Ten signs your denti...
When I realized my content was reaching large numbers of people, I started thinking hard about the ethics of what I was putting out. A short video can be very persuasive. People who are vulnerable,...
I was scrolling through the comments on my content one day when I noticed something striking. The same fear, over and over. Thousands of people writing versions of the same anxiety. I am terrified ...
She arrived with questions she had collected from a social media post about root canals. The post claimed they always fail, and that extraction and implants were the smarter choice. She was confuse...
I was building a treatment plan for a patient when it struck me that the treatment itself was maybe half of what would decide the outcome. The other half was whether she understood what was happeni...
Access to dental care is often treated as a luxury, framed as cosmetic or optional. But dentistry is fundamental to health and to a person's ability to function in the world. When someone cannot ge...
When I built TeethTeacher, I had no idea how many people would come. Within months I was getting messages from around the world. People asking questions. People telling me the information had helpe...
The pain in her lower molar had started suddenly, she told me, with no warning at all. She had no idea anything was wrong until it arrived. The radiograph told a different story. The decay was exte...
A patient arrived for her appointment and told me she had watched a short video about what to expect during a cleaning, and that it had taken the edge off her anxiety. Before the video, she had not...
I was watching a dentist use a digital scanner instead of a physical impression. The technology was excellent. The scan caught the detail precisely and the workflow was efficient. But the patient d...
When I started making dental videos, I assumed the goal was to demonstrate procedures accurately, to show people exactly what happens during a cleaning or a filling or an aligner fitting. What I fo...
During my time in Bangkok I started a project called TeethTeacher, a site for dental education outside the clinic. I built it because of something I kept noticing in the culture around me. People w...
Artificial intelligence could change dentistry in real ways. It can analyze radiographs, flag patterns of decay or bone loss, assist with treatment planning, help produce patient education. But the...
After the earthquake, I understood patient anxiety differently, because I had now experienced fear in a setting where I could not control what happened. During the earthquake I could not escape. I ...
In the days after the earthquake, I understood presence differently than I had before. Before, presence had meant attentiveness. Listening to a patient. Not being distracted. After, I understood it...
I lost count of the flights somewhere around fifteen. We were descending the emergency stairwell, and the building was still moving in small shudders, the cracks in the walls widening, another trem...
The day the earthquake hit, my fiancé and I were home doing ordinary things, working on our laptops, talking about the day. Then the ground began to move. I did not recognize it at first. I had nev...
I was scrolling one afternoon and saw a photograph of teeth. Impossibly white, perfectly symmetrical, so bright they seemed to glow. It was an advertisement for a whitening product, promising anyon...
I was trying to explain to a patient why she needed a root canal. I gave her the clinical version. I described the pulpitis, explained that the tooth required endodontic treatment to be saved. She ...
Should she stop brushing her teeth altogether? My patient asked it seriously. She had read somewhere that brushing causes gum disease. I asked where she had read it, and she showed me a social medi...
I was exhausted. Working, studying, keeping a household running, supporting my fiancé through his own transition, doing all of it in a country where I had no permanent status yet, holding onto a fu...
I was sitting in a waiting room in Los Angeles for a medical appointment, and I was anxious. Not because I expected bad news, but because I was inside an unfamiliar system. I did not know exactly w...
She was certain the sensitivity in her lower teeth came from brushing too hard, and she had come in to fix her technique. We worked on it. But examining her more closely, I saw something else. Her ...
I was working night shifts at a hospital in Tarzana. I was shadowing during the day. I was studying for the INBDE. I was living in a small apartment in Los Angeles with my fiancé, who was working t...
She came in with photographs of celebrity smiles already pulled up on her phone. "I want mine to look like this," she said, asking to have her teeth whitened and her smile reshaped. I examined her ...
The earthquake in Bangkok lasted seventy-six seconds. It was the strongest in the city's recorded history. When the shaking began I did not understand what was happening, because I had never felt a...
I packed everything I was bringing into two suitcases and a carry-on. My parents stood at the airport to say goodbye. My mother had cried the night before. We did not talk about how long I might be...
Six months into her clear aligner treatment, the teeth had moved well and the alignment was tracking as planned. Then my patient said something that revealed she had misunderstood the whole device....
A patient sat in the waiting room before her appointment. I did not yet know her, but I could watch her before she could see me. She was studying how the staff spoke to other patients. She was noti...
I was reviewing radiographs with a patient when she said something that exposed an assumption I had not realized I was making. I had pointed to a small dark spot on the film and said, "This is earl...
I was assisting on an appointment when I watched a clinician brush a patient's anxiety aside. The patient said, "I am nervous." "Do not worry," the clinician replied. "I do this all the time." The ...
Before I started clinical training, I thought of fear as an emotion. A patient might feel anxious before an appointment, nervous in the chair. It was something happening in their mind, something th...
I was explaining to a patient why she had developed a cavity when she said something that caught me off guard. "I thought sugar just ate a hole in the tooth." Her whole model of decay was wrong. Sh...
I was assisting on a root canal when I noticed the patient's breathing change. Nothing dramatic. A slight holding of the breath, a bracing for something. I was standing at the patient's side, just ...
I was examining a patient when I caught her jaw tightening as I touched the probe to her gumline. A little bleeding. Not dramatic, just a few areas. "There is some bleeding here," I said. "The tiss...
I was assisting on a complex restoration when I noticed something I had been overlooking for months. Before my mentor touched the patient, before she examined the tooth closely, before she even put...
Nothing about her looked like a problem. She had come in for a routine cleaning, her teeth were a normal color, she reported no sensitivity and no pain. By every measure she could feel, she was fin...
The cold lecture hall at Pavlov had a particular quality in winter. The heating labored and never quite won against the cold seeping through the old stone walls. We sat in rows, taking notes, liste...
My first anatomy exam at Pavlov was on a Friday morning. I had spent the previous six weeks doing what we all called the burial. You study until the material is part of your nervous system rather t...
The infection had already reached the point of needing endodontic treatment by the time she sat down in my chair. While we talked through the plan, I asked when she had last had a cleaning. "Maybe ...
A mother brought her eight-year-old daughter in because the girl's tooth had broken. Clinically it was nothing complicated. A bonded restoration would put back the function and the shape. But the m...
A patient called the clinic two days before her appointment. "I am going to cancel," she said. "I am too anxious." She had not yet sat in the chair. She was already in the state the chair creates. ...
I was twelve years old when I watched my father watch a surgical video. He sat at the kitchen table with a notebook, observing how a surgeon's hands moved through tissue, how damage was repaired me...
The gesture is small enough that most people never notice it. A patient is talking through their concerns and a hand rises. The fingers spread slightly. The smile stops halfway. The mouth goes quie...
Embarrassment is one of the most underrated obstacles in dentistry. It is quieter than pain and more stubborn than anxiety. It works on a person for years, gathering evidence of failure until they ...
A patient arrived early for a filling. I watched her sit in the waiting room before I introduced myself, and I read her before she said a word. Her hands were laced together, not loosely but under ...
I watched a patient scrub her gumline as if she were trying to lift a stain out of tile. Her pressure was so heavy that her knuckles went white. The bristles of her toothbrush had splayed sideways,...
A patient raised her hand to her mouth before she spoke. I was still reviewing her chart when the gesture registered. It happened so quietly that I might have missed it entirely if I had been scrol...
