Your hygienist says she doesn't have time to scan. Between X-rays, perio charting and the cleaning itself, where is she supposed to fit it in? One of our mentors heard the same thing. So she grabbed a stopwatch. A scan took her assistant about 70 seconds. X-rays took two and a half minutes. Time was never the problem. Buy-in was. So she stopped asking and started a game. A whiteboard went up in the back. Names down the side. Days of the week across the top. Every day, each person wrote down...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Happy Halloween. Here's the scariest aligner story I heard this month. An orthodontist on our team had what looked like the perfect patient. She walked in asking for aligners. Nobody had to sell her. She's a doctor herself. Meticulous. Committed. Lower arch only. Ten steps. Easy case. Five, maybe six months. Three months in, she came back for a check. "Which aligner are you on?" "Number seven. I've been in it for two weeks." The ortho pulled the aligner out and read the number. It was number...
15 days ago • 1 min read
One of the challenges that came up on our coaching call : Knowing when an aligner case is actually done. It's a fair question. Especially with inherited cases, where someone else set the goals and you're left guessing what "finished" was supposed to mean. Here's what we landed on. The finish line was set the day the patient sat in your chair. It's their chief complaint. Not the ClinCheck. Not the perfect photo. Not the last 0.2 mm you can see and they can't. When we lose sight of that, we...
29 days ago • 4 min read
A doctor on our call had a patient walk in on a Monday with a broken front tooth. Not a new problem. She had bonded that lateral before. More than once. His canine was crashing into it every time he closed. So the bonding kept coming off, and this time the tooth itself fractured. He is 82. She gave him two options. She could crown the lower tooth that was doing the damage, and warned him that might turn into a root canal. Or she could move it out of the way with aligners and make room for the...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
A dentist I know crowned a molar. Routine case. Nothing eventful. The patient came back a week later with her husband. She was furious. She said there was a gap between her two front teeth. She said his crown caused it. He could have argued. He could have explained why a crown on a back tooth cannot open a diastema in the front. Instead he pulled up her scan from before he touched her. The gap was right there. She looked at the screen. She said, "Oh." Her husband looked at her. He had taken...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
A doctor on our call kept sharpening her script. She explains wear. She explains recession. She shows old scans next to new ones. She asks what the patient wants for their teeth in ten years. Patients nod. Then they defer. She thought her communication was the problem. Then she told me how her office collects. Cases are about four thousand dollars. Half up front. The rest inside two or three months. No monthly option. That is not a communication problem. I asked her a question. Someone offers...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A doctor on our call said something I think about a lot. She told us her consult is good. Her financing is good. Patients say yes. Then the ClinCheck lands in her inbox and she freezes. She scrolls through the movements. She tries to remember what to look for. It looks fine, so she approves it. And then she feels sick. Because she has no idea what she just approved. Her words: "I feel like I don't know what I don't know." That is the real bottleneck for most doctors. Not the pitch. The plan....
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
An orthodontist on our team shared a case that went sideways. A 24-year-old walked in with one complaint. Her top front teeth stuck out and she hated how it looked when she smiled. That was it. That was the whole list. Her back teeth were a Class II. But the bite was stable and had been for years. The ortho went after the Class II anyway. Distalization. TADs. Elastics. Attachments. Two years of treatment. The patient hated the elastics. She hated the attachments. She stayed compliant the...
2 months ago • 4 min read
A doctor on our coaching call told me he feels like a broken record. He joined his practice a year ago. The practice already sells a lot of Invisalign. Every recall patient has heard the pitch from three other dentists. So he says it again. And they look at him like they have heard it all before. Because they have. He asked me how to break through. Here is what I told him. I had a patient who cracked a molar. I showed him the wear. I told him his bite was doing it. I told him we could fix the...
3 months ago • 4 min read
