A Childhood at the Kitchen Table
I was eight years old when I watched my father watch a surgical documentary on television. He was sitting at the kitchen table, absorbed in how a surgeon's hands moved through tissue, how damage was repaired methodically, how what appeared broken could be restored. He was not a surgeon himself, but when he was younger he had dreamed of becoming one. In the end he chose a different career path, for family reasons. I sat beside him because I wanted to understand what could hold his attention so completely.
Discovering Medicine Through My Parents
Later, my mother asked me what I wanted to do with my life. She was a dermatologist, and she had let me shadow her in the clinic. I had watched her examine skin, explain conditions to patients, see people check their reflections after treatment. She did not impose anything on me. She simply let me observe what it looked like to practice medicine. I noticed in her work something that I noticed in my father's surgical documentaries: the moment when someone felt seen.
Why Dentistry, Not Another Specialty
Medicine in general was very interesting to me as a science. Besides that, in middle school I fell in love with biology class. All the scientific facts seemed to me so logical and intriguing that with every day I wanted to explore them deeper and deeper, by watching YouTube videos and reading university-level textbooks. That is why I decided at the end of high school to take natural sciences as my finals, including biology and chemistry. I passed them really well; in biology I scored 98 out of 100. Because of that, and because of my excellent grades overall, I received a grant for fully paid study at the best medical university in my city. Medicine and biology were always my favorites, and I think you should work in a field that brings you pleasure. That is why I ended up in medical school. But still, why dentistry, and not any other direction?
Dentistry, compared with other medical specialties, is performed on organs that you and others can see easily every day. When you cure someone from pain or shame, you can see the result of your treatment almost immediately, because it is literally facing you. Is that not remarkable?
During my practice, I worked with patients who had come through multiple clinics with multiple dentists. Some of them had been told their cases were hopeless. Some had been charged enormous amounts of money for treatments that did not work. Some had been made to feel that their lack of compliance was a moral failure rather than a practical challenge. When they came to me, they were already skeptical.
The Practice I Want to Build
What I want is to practice the kind of dentistry that knows choosing to work on your teeth is an act of self-care. It is choosing to invest in your own presentation to the world. It is choosing to participate in your own healing. That is not vanity. That is integrity.
Helping others get rid of shame and pain makes me happy. That is why I chose dentistry, and that is still why I practice.
