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 cannot. I have to be precise. I have to explain it so that someone without my knowledge can follow, and that demands a deeper grasp than I often realized I had. When I cannot explain something clearly, it usually means I do not understand it as well as I assumed. I remember trying to write about how local anesthetic works. I had used it hundreds of times. But putting it into words, I found gaps. I had not fully connected the pharmacology to the clinical effect. So I went back and studied the mechanism more carefully, and when I finally understood it well enough to explain it, I was a better clinician for it. I could anticipate which patients might need more anesthetic. I could explain to a patient why they might still feel pressure even when they could not feel pain. Writing also taught me empathy for the patient who does not understand. To explain a complex idea in writing, I have to simplify it, break it into pieces, make clear why it matters, and doing that repeatedly trained me to do it at the chair. A confused patient is not being difficult. The confusion is information, telling me my explanation was not clear enough, and practicing explanation in writing made me quicker to notice when understanding had broken down and to adjust. And writing gave me room to think about the ethics of the work. In the moment of treatment you make fast decisions. Writing about those decisions afterward gives you the time to examine them, to ask whether your approach was the best one, to consider what you would do differently. A clinician who is thinking deeply about the work is often also one who is reading and writing about it, and a clinician still engaged in learning is usually a better clinician than one who has stopped. What writing taught me, in the end, is that teaching improves understanding. The act of trying to make someone else understand a thing makes you understand it more fully yourself, which is reason enough to keep doing it.
