The Dawson Academy Blog

Host: Dr. Shannon Johnson, Association President
Guest: Mr. Larry Guzzardo

Thanks to all those who attended this Association Member Webinar Sneak Peek! It was wonderful to hear all of your questions. For those who could not attend, you can watch the webinar below.

Get ready for this new year by being prepared!

We all know signs almost always precede symptoms when it comes to practicing dentistry, but are you recognizing those signs and symptoms in your practice? Watch as Larry Guzzardo discusses how to put your practice through a complete exam in 2022. Learn what to expect regarding hiring team members, overhead expenses, setting fees, and the overall forecast for dentistry. Larry shares his experience and knowledge from over 25 years of dental practice management, consulting exclusively with complete care dentists and their teams.

In this webinar, we share how the Dawson philosophy can place you in the top 10% of dental practices. Learn our 5 tips and strategies for implementing key principles taught in Functional Occlusion—From TMJ to Smile Design. Transform your patient's experience, improve clinical outcomes and begin your journey towards Complete Care Dentistry.

So facebows are essential and a key point in dental treatment. We want to capture the facebow records for two very important reasons. By relating the maxillary arch to the condyles, we get a couple of very key pieces of information.

Treatment planning is absolutely key to what we do. We take care of our patients with treatment planning, and the better that we can treatment plan for that patient, the better the outcome, the happier the patient, the happier we are.

So when you're trying to decide if your patients have an internal derangement or an occlusal muscle problem, how do we go about doing that?

First part is the screening questions you ask before you start to testing.

Especially when you're an associate dentist, you have to start out with foundational principles. Dental school is amazing. It's taught us a lot. However, it didn't teach us everything.

Stop wasting time.

Some of our students are really frustrated because they're getting these incredibly bulky crowns back from their dental lab and they have to spend a lot of time adjusting the crown. A lot of time, 30, 40 minutes, and chair time's very valuable.

When I first started waxing up my cases in the Dawson Philosophy, I learned later that I had encountered a mistake where I had really steepened anterior guidances on the wax-ups and didn't really quite understand why I continued to do it. When I slowed down and I took a look, I realized that I wasn't taking into account that the articulator helps us. It gives a little fudge factor.

So, a tip to keep improving and growing your office is to focus on the new patient experience. Every month you should be having monthly meetings. I would recommend that at least quarterly you and your office staff actually go through your office as if you were a new patient.

Transcript continued below...