Dr. Nada Albatish, a multifaceted dental professional, discusses her approach to dentistry, emphasizing the importance of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach. Dr. Albatish shares her experience with restorative materials and advises on the proper use of digital tools without neglecting traditional knowledge.
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Dr. Luisa Schuldt (LS): Hi everyone and welcome to Brush Up, presented by Oral Health Group, the dental podcast where we chat with industry experts on a variety of topics, from technology and finance to practice management. This episode is sponsored by Ivoclar. I’m your host, Dr. Luisa Schuldt, a prosthodontist and periodontist based in Fonthill, Ontario. Today we’re joined by Dr. Nada Albatish, a truly multifaceted dental professional. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. Nada Albatish (NA): Thank you.
LS: And Dr. Albatish recently opened Smile Story Dental Centre, and she’s also the founder and principal dentist of All Smiles Dental Centre and Smile Story, both multi-disciplinary practices near Toronto. With her motto, “Creating beautiful smiles that last,” Dr. Albatish has carved out a niche in cosmetic and rehabilitative dentistry. She’s also a sought-after speaker for her ability to simplify complex concepts in comprehensive dentistry and for her vision in the business side of the profession. In addition, Dr Albatish serves as Clinical Director for the Seattle Study Club and is a director of Study Club in the Six, the Toronto chapter. She lectures nationally and internationally on topics like comprehensive restorative dentistry, interdisciplinary treatment, leadership, and the business of dentistry. Welcome Dr. Albatish again. Thank you for joining us today. We’re excited to dive into the business side of dentistry, and congratulations on opening your new centre.
NA: Thank you so much. Luisa, thank you for having me. It’s an honour.
LS: Oh, it’s a real pleasure to have you here and to have this nice conversation one on one with our listeners. You opened Smile Story Dental Centre in Aurora about six months ago, a beautiful new facility. What inspired you to take this step?
NA: You know, Luisa, it seems like my entire career culminated in the opening of this practice. You know, I graduated in 2007 and on the day of my graduation, I remember being so happy and thinking I never have to sit in another classroom again. And I think we, a lot of people, identify with that feeling. And it turned out that it was actually the beginning of my learning journey. Since then, I’ve associated, I’ve opened, this is the third practice that I’ve opened from scratch, and in that time, what I’ve done is I’ve honed my skills. I’ve learned comprehensive dentistry; I’ve built this incredible team that helps to treat patients in the best way. And I’ve really also gotten very involved in dental education, in continuing education, on the cosmetic and functional side. So basically, what I’ve done is, over the years, I started to think I’m doing things so differently now than I did 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And so, the idea behind this practice was to build a place where, when people walk in, they feel the difference. It really is different, and the workflow supports comprehensive care. And you know what? It really is a happy place, like I feel like when you do things like this with such intention, I am happy to be there. Anyone who comes through that door, be it a patient or an industry person, is happy to be there. My team is happy to be there. And on the other side, there’s beyond the patient comfort and the technology and the innovation that’s in the practice and the workflow in every step that you take. Beyond all of that, there’s also education in mind. So, there is opportunity in that practice, and you’ll see as things unfold in the future, we’re using this facility to support dental education.
LS: Navigating the business side of dentistry can be tricky. How do you approach it? This is your third time around. You seem to be doing it very successfully. Is there anything you do specifically to understand the needs of the local community?
NA: You know, it’s funny, because a lot of people approach me and say, Nada, business like, you’re so good at this. And like, what’s the secret sauce to the business of dentistry? And what are the steps? What do I do? And the funny thing is, I’ve had a real evolution in my way of thinking around this. So, 17 years ago and forward, I would always say, patients first. Patients First. That was our philosophy, and it is true, because we are serving the community. But the truth is, as a leader, it really is team first for you, because business is actually about people and building a really good culture and an excellent team with the right people there with you. Surrounding yourself with people who are aligned with that patient care philosophy really enables you to serve the community in the best way. So, you treat people while you build trust with your team. If your team doesn’t trust you, how will your patients trust you? How will your community trust you? And you know, the best way to think about that is when you have an opportunity to make a decision, think to yourself, what’s the right thing to do? And when your team is watching, you’re teaching them how to make those decisions too, every day in practice. And so, to me, that’s really what business is about. We can go do a full course about key performance indicators, about your demographic, about how to do your marketing, about systems and workflows and what to set up and how to take down, and case acceptance and communication, all of that. But at the end of the day, if you’re the only one preaching that, and you don’t have a really good culture, and you didn’t choose the right people and lead your team well, you really don’t have a good business model.
LS: That is a really good collection of so many tips right in that nugget regarding the business side of things. On the clinical side of things, I have to say, completely empathize with your view of an interdisciplinary approach and always including that in the development of your treatment plans, having that holistic approach. What about that is important to you and your patients?
NA: So, you know, interdisciplinary and comprehensive care is the path that I went down with my continuing education, and it’s the reason why I built this new practice, so that we could service patients in this way. But if I think back, and I think back to the journey when I was in dental school, and we all experienced this, we graduate from dental school with a really solid foundation in what we call single tooth dentistry. We can diagnose cavities, caries, diagnose periodontal disease, and treat one tooth at a time, even if you’re treating a quadrant at a time for basic needs. And it really is important to have a solid biological foundation so that you can be successful in anything that you put in your patient’s mouth, right? But here’s the thing, let me give you an example, a patient comes into the practice, and it happened in my practice, male patient, about 40 years old, gap between his two front teeth. It’s a standard story. Patient comes in, they have one concern. He looks and all he sees is a gap between the two front teeth. He’s delayed the last 20years doing anything about this because he’s been focused on work. He’s been focused on his family. He’s now in a financial position where he’s willing to do something more about it, and it’s bothered him for long enough that he finally feels like, hey, I want to smile more comfortably. It’s time to take care of me. And I hear this from men and women all the time, once their kids get to a certain stage, it’s super common. And so, I said to him, so what? What are your thoughts like? What would you like? Right? What’s the patient’s chief concern? And really, he wants to close the gap. How he’s imagining that that’s going to be done is with a filling or a couple of fillings. And that would be, you know, what would the standard response to that be? The standard response to something like that is, okay, yep, we could do fillings on two teeth, and we learn it. We learn it in school, and we learn it in advanced continuing education, diastoma closure, right? So, we put on our clinical dentist hat, we take out our composite resins. Maybe if we’ve done a couple of courses, we try to shade match, and we go, right? And the difference between that approach and a more comprehensive approach is that when that patient comes into a practice where the perspective is comprehensive and evaluating the patient comes from a more broader view, you don’t just look at the gap between the two front teeth, you look at all the teeth in the upper arch, and then you notice, actually there’s spacing in multiple places. There’s also some misalignment. Oh, and if I put the teeth together and I look at the lower arch, we’ve got a deep bite. We’ve got minimal overjet. We’ve got those lower anteriors almost touching the palate. We’ve got wear on the lower front teeth. We’ve got chipping on the upper anterior teeth. And that very simple request from the patient to close a gap between his two front teeth, he’s thinking, maybe with a couple of fillings, actually is best treated with a combination of orthodontic treatment, restorative treatment and minimally invasive restorative treatment. Because when you put teeth in the right place, and you plan your esthetics in advance of picking up your drill then you don’t have to cut as much tooth structure. So, we have an article actually coming out in the near future in the Oral Health magazine about this case, actually in particular, but it’s a really great example of the importance of taking a more comprehensive approach with our patients. And you know, I really believe it’s our responsibility to give patients the options, right? And the challenge is, if we don’t even know, then we can’t even tell them, right? The patient comes in, says fill the gap with my two front teeth. And what happens? You fill the gap with the two front teeth, you get two super wide front teeth. The teeth are disproportional with the other teeth. Maybe he looks better than what he came in with before, and you did address the chief concern, but you’re setting it up for failure, right? Because it’s functionally not going to work over the long term. So being able to look at that bigger picture, being able to articulate and communicate the bigger picture to your patient and being able to understand where the patient is at in their journey. And you know, it is overwhelming to me that patients will come in having no idea what’s truly possible, maybe having a single basic concern. And when we look at how everything works together and really educate them about how to do this in a way that can make things last better and look better, superior esthetic, superior function, and you get greater longevity by doing that. It is shocking how many people will actually choose to do the best thing for themselves, right? And that’s what I do in my practice. But also on the education side, that’s what my goal is, to teach dentists.
LS: I truly agree that by empowering our patients with education communication, they will make better decisions for themselves. I completely agree with absolutely everything you just said Nada.
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And now a message from our sponsor. Thank you for joining today’s podcast, sponsored by Ivoclar, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of integrated solutions for high quality dental applications. For over a century, Ivoclar has been shaping the dental industry, enabling people to achieve the best oral health and enjoy a beautiful smile. In 2025 Ivoclar is celebrating 20 years of success with IPS e.max, the world leader in all ceramic restorations. We hope you enjoy the stories and knowledge that Dr. Nada Albatish will share on this podcast. And now back to the episode.
LS: A big buzz word in dentistry right now is digital dentistry. What does this mean to you and your practice?
NA: Well, digital dentistry, I mean, it’s simple, right? What it should be is the incorporation of technology to make us more accurate, more efficient, more predictable. I’ll give you an example of the coolest thing I discovered, and I didn’t even know that that was going to happen when I bought my first intra oral scanner eons ago. Okay, so I was doing analog impressions for everything, obviously, and I was doing custom impression copings for my anterior implants to try to record the emergence profile, the shape of the gingival tissue, so we could build an emergence profile with the lab for a front tooth that looks like a tooth and doesn’t look like a rectangle or something, right? And I used to have to book a long time for that appointment, say an hour or an hour and a half, and I’d have to literally customize coping, you know what I’m talking about, Luisa. And thinking about how long that appointment takes, and how many steps we do, and how many things I have to think about to, like, get it right. And listen, we had great results, right? But it’s one of the things I appreciate the most about having a scanner. Like, my God, I at first I didn’t trust it, but I’m like, What do you mean? You just scan, you just take out the healing cap, or you take out your temporary crown, and you just fatten the tissue. That’s it. Literally is a 30-second procedure you don’t even have to think about. You don’t have to do anything special for, right? And it saves us all that chair time. It saves the patient. I mean, who likes to sit around with their mouth open waiting for a dental appointment? Take the morning, whatever it is, like it is a win, win, win, win, on every side that I can think of it. And that is just one of the many examples I could think of, but I feel like that was the biggest change in efficiency that I’ve seen in my practice, you know. But here’s the thing, with digital dentistry, there’s a lot of digital stuff. Now there’s tons of automation. We’ve got a scanner, we’ve got 3D printers, and we’ve got Mills available to us. There’s so many things we can do in our own practices. I still do not think that all digital dentistry replaces all dental professionals. Like I still love my lab technicians for my esthetic work. You can still get superior margins in some of the traditional ways that we’ve done restorative dentistry, so we’re not 100% of the way there yet. I do believe in using digital dentistry for things that make us better, right? Not things that speed us up and make us worse. So that’s something to consider, but what I really, really want us to all be aware of, and I’ve seen it over the years, especially on the education side. What digital dentistry should not be is a crutch for our profession to stop learning, right? You still have to understand analog for you to be able to use digital effectively. So, here’s a simple example of what I mean by that. If you’ve taken analog impressions of your crown preparations, you know that if you don’t retract the gingival tissues, and you can’t visualize with your eyeballs or with your magnification the entire perimeter of that crown margin of that tooth, you’re not going to capture it in the analog impression. If you never did that, and you don’t understand that concept, and you think the scanner is all you need, you will scan and you will have gingival tissue deficient right, obstructing your gingival margins. So, knowing and understanding the reason why things are done which happened in an analog way, first, allows us to use the technology for superior results and excellent results. The way to use it for inferior results is not to retract those tissues and scan your crown prep and have gingival tissue over your crown margins, right? So that is sort of a very simple example of using technology as a crutch without having a real understanding for how we should use it to do things properly. But here’s a more complex example for occlusion. So, if you’re doing an equilibration, you know you don’t want forces on inclines on the teeth. Okay? So, if you’ve learned this and you’re doing this, you know that now, if you use a digital sensor and you identify that the force on one tooth is super high, right? Then, if you don’t know about forces on inclines, you don’t know what that means, and you don’t know how to adjust for it. What do you do? What does the standard dentist do coming out of dental school? Erase the blue, right? We all know it. Anyone who teaches knows it. And the truth is, every dentist sitting in that doctor stool knows that they do it, right? But that’s not a superior use of the technology, right? The way to use the technology effectively is actually to understand, whoa, I’ve got really high forces on this tooth. Let me now check the occlusion and see where the contacts are that they shouldn’t be and remove those contacts. So then, if you were to remove contact on incline, and then you recheck, you see that the force on the tooth goes down. That might have been a complex example, but it is for those of you that have done that training and know what I’m talking about there and that really does demonstrate that technology is not a replacement for clinical knowledge. It’s an adjunct, and your learning should not stop because technology is available or you might be at risk of providing subpar treatment, and you wouldn’t even know it, right? The first part of the Dunning-Kruger effect is where people overestimate their capabilities. And one way to overestimate your capabilities is to not really have the clinical knowledge and rely on your technology, then you don’t even know what you don’t know.
LS: So, understand the limitations of the technologies you are using, for sure.
NA: 100%. So, the best advice I can give young docs is, when you’re wanting to use technology, make sure you understand the concepts behind it so you can actually use it to benefit your clinical work, so that it’s better and to your patient’s benefit.
LS: We’ve talked about a few really wonderful concepts already. Dr. Nada, how about restorative materials? When selecting a restorative material, what are some of the qualities that are most important to you that are going to help ensure esthetic, long-term, good outcomes for your patients?
NA: Well, it does depend on the restorative material that we’re talking about, and it also depends on the location of the mouth. So, the answer is, it depends, right? So if we’re treating anterior teeth or posterior teeth, so typically in the anterior, we are more focused on esthetics. But if you have a patient who’s a bruxer, then you have to consider high-strength materials in the anterior and in the posterior. Obviously, esthetics matter less, but I’ve seen people on social media posting pictures of posterior teeth with incredible anatomy and all that fun stuff. But for me, I would say, you know, reasonably good esthetics in the posterior without going crazy, but strength and function is what determines longevity. In those posterior teeth, right? Because those are our chewing teeth. And then in terms of materials, are we talking about composites, or are we talking about ceramics, right? So, in the posterior for me, science today has given us bulk fill materials that have similar properties to packable composites and are more efficient. And sometimes people are like, Oh, I’m more efficient. I can do more per hour. I can be more productive per hour. And yes, true, that is a benefit. But, you know, I think it’s a byproduct of the true benefit, which is that your patient doesn’t have to have their mouth open for as long, right? When you’re done faster and you’ve delivered an equivalent result, then why should the patient be there for an extra hour? If you remember when we were placing and we had no option, 17 years ago, 18 years ago, when I graduated, we’d have to place composite in two-millimeter increments, and that was superior physical properties. And today, some of the bulk fills rivals that. And so you can do a really excellent job. Resins that really last a long time, that are more efficient and more comfortable for patients, because they can be more in and out of the chair. Like, how cool is it that the thing that used to take me the longest, which was layer and composite, now the prep time on that appointment takes me longer than the restoration time. So that’s what I think about when I think about the composites and when I think about ceramics. Luisa, you alluded to this in your question. I’m thinking about esthetics. I’m thinking about adhesion. I’m thinking about strength. So, I would say, you know, we want a material that has been tried, tested and true. And, you know, the two kind of big categories of ceramics that we’re seeing these days are lithium to silicates and zirconias, and both are bondable. Now, studies are showing that zirconia can also be adhesively bonded inequivalent strength to lithium to silicates or e.max. So that’s pretty cool, but e.max is still my go to material. It is my go-to material for especially anterior respirations, because it has the esthetics, and it has the strength and it has clinical reliability. So, in I think it was the year 2021, Kenneth Malement et al published a study, I think it was in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, and it was of something like 2400 e.max restorations, complete and partial coverage in the posterior. And they found 97% success rates over a 17-year period. Like, really incredible. So that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. Because, you know, when I lecture on this, on the topic of esthetics and restoring even full mouth rehabilitations, a question that I always askis for your patients that are looking for esthetics, for your esthetic cases, what is even more important than esthetics? Not a lot of people get the answer, but the real answer is longevity. So clinical reliability, reliability over time really matters.
LS: A lot of dentists are now adopting a more conservative or minimally invasive approach when doing treatment planning. Why do you find this is so important?
NA: Okay, so I think I’m gonna define a couple of things in your question, because I today, I think of conservative and minimally invasive as two different things. Okay, so the way I think of conservative is sort of how we learned in dental school, right? It’s doing less, it’s watching more, especially at the University of Toronto, right? That is really a conservative approach. And sometimes, like what I’ve seen in the past, is dentist sees a large, five surface amalgam restoration, maybe some radiolucency under it. And says, My goodness, if I take this out, it’s going to be a can of worms. Can of worms, that’s the saying that is often used, right? And so, they just watch. And to me, when we’re doing that, we’re really waiting for. What are we waiting for? We’re waiting for a bigger failure.
LS: After extensive breakdown to potentially a point that it can’t be fixed anymore, right?
NA: Yeah, so what really are we signing up our patients for with this super conservative approach, right? We’re signing up the patients down the road for a more invasive, more involved, more expensive treatment, but it’ll be just at some point down the road, right, and it’s compromising, like you just said, Luisa, the health of their dentition. Alternatively, if we just go in there and take care of things instead of sometimes, like yesterday, I had a patient come in. He had a mesial buccal cusp fracture of a lower molar. I could have repaired the mesial buccal cusp, but he had a large old amalgam in there. I took the whole thing out, cleaned out the whole thing, did a really large restoration and treatment planned a crown, right? That was the right thing to do in that situation. Now, the thing about being minimally invasive. Let’s talk about that, because conservative can have a negative connotation, depending on how you use it. But there are times where let’s picture this. You have a worn dentition. Patients like obliterated two or three millimeters of their teeth across the arch have grounded down. Okay? And a patient comes in and they fractured one tooth. So only one tooth, they’re asking you for, and you think you’re going to restore it with a crown. So now for you to restore that tooth with a crown, what does your crown preparation need to look like? What does it need to look like? You need to have a one-to-1.5-millimeter reduction all around circumferentially, one and a half to two-millimeter incisal reduction, right? Alternatively, if you were to look at a worn dentition and say, You know what, instead of removing tooth structure, even on one tooth, what if I was to rebuild this dentition? What if, before I pick up a drill, I design a new occlusion that is additive, I replace the lost tooth structure, instead of taking away existing tooth structure, one tooth at a time. Now, what happens, that entire dentition has a chance to last longer, less fractures over the long term. Is it more dentistry? Yes. Is it more minimally invasive? Yes. Is it more conservative? Yeah, it sure can be. And I am not advocating for, you know, 28 crowns on every patient. I also see those kind of treatment plans, and I don’t agree with that. I do think it’s customized and individualized, and sometimes you only need one restoration, sometimes you only need four. But what I’m really thinking about is, what am I setting the patient up for in the future. Where is this going, right? So, to me, a more minimally invasive approach actually comes from proper treatment planning, and proper treatment planning actually comes from proper diagnosis, and proper diagnosis actually comes from your education and you taking the time and not just picking up a drill.
LS: Clearly, you love dental education. As a dental educator, are there any procedures that you often notice dentists are confused about and could learn more about?
NA: Yes, there’s one that I think everybody in this space would agree to. But I’m going to, I’m going to answer that sort of twofold. Okay, so the one that everybody will agree to is most dentists, when they come through courses about cosmetics, comprehensive care, restoration, ceramics, there’s confusion about cementation protocols. And this is what we kind of see in every program across the board. So really most of what we learned in dental school and is still being taught, is a lot of conventional cementation is what’s being taught, done, practiced. And conventional cementation really is about mechanically filling in the gap between your restoration, your crown or your veneer. Well, not veneer, your crown and your tooth structure, right? The other type of cementation is adhesive cementation. I’m going to keep this very general. So now I’m going to talk about totally adhesive, versus, like, self-adhesive. We’re just going to call it adhesive cementation, which really is a chemical bond, right? So that’s where you’re etching. You’re applying your adhesive, and you’re using a resin cement. I’m using Ivoclar Variolink Esthetic. People always ask me, What are you using for these things? For my anterior cases, the light cure, and what it does, what the adhesive layer does is creates finger-like projections of the adhesive into the dentin and creates a chemical bond and partial coverage restoration. And our ceramics really get their final strength from that bond, right, especially those really thin restorations. So that is the thing that I find a lot of dentists to be really confused about. And it’s something that when we teach, we really try to clarify for people.
LS: You were mentioning that really high success rate with restorative the Malament paper. I think managing the cementation correctly is what gets that type of a success rate. Anybody who says this type of treatment doesn’t work, minimally invasive or adhesive treatments don’t work, it’s because they haven’t mastered the art of cementation yet.
NA: 100%, I could not agree with you more. And what comes to mind when you say that, Luisa, is, if I have to cut off a really well bonded restoration, like, how hard is that to remove versus something that’s been cemented, right? You’re basically prepping it off if it’s well bonded, and if it’s been cemented, you can just make one cut across buccal two lingual and split it in half and take it off. That’s how you know it’s not adhesively bonded or not properly, right? So, I couldn’t agree with you more. And then the other thing that I think, and I did allude this to this in an earlier question, and I really do think it’s so important, so I’m going to bring it up again. You know it really is simpler than what you might think, although I’m building it up. And that is, that is diagnosis, right? The diagnosis of wear, diagnosing the etiology of wear, but I also think diagnosis in general. But I am partial to wear because I talk a lot about it, and I teach a lot about it, about worn dentitions and hygienists and dentists alike. Like, you know, one of the things I do in my lecture is I show a bunch of cases of worn dentitions, and I say, what’s the number one treatment plan coming out of your hygiene chair for this? And everyone knows the answer. It’s a night guard, but is the night guard the right answer for every patient? And here’s the reality, a night guard is a treatment, and every treatment has to have a diagnosis that you’re treating. And if you’re just saying night guard, what was your diagnosis? Your diagnosis was wear. But wear can be coming from lots of different places. It can be extrinsic, it can be intrinsic, it can be parafunctional. So only if it’s parafunctional is a night guard the correct treatment for wear, right? So here’s the thing, a lot of it’s really interesting, but if you Google “treatment without diagnosis in medicine,” they call that malpractice, right? So, in dentistry, we have a responsibility to have a working diagnosis, have a differential diagnosis, and it’s really important for us as a profession to understand there’s only one correct diagnosis. You can have many correct treatment plans. So, people can do things in a multitude. 10 clinicians can do things in 10 different ways, execute treatment in 10 different ways, and it can all be correct if it was all based on the same correct diagnosis, the one correct diagnosis. And so that, to me, is something that is, you know, people come to courses looking for how to execute treatment, and that is important. I want people to go home and be able to do what we’re teaching, but I want them to do it on the right cases, right? So, it really is an important part of anything you learn is, what is the diagnosis?
LS: Nada, thank you for the wonderful information you’ve shared with us so far. I think this is going to benefit new clinicians, older clinicians, just absolutely anyone dealing in adhesive dentistry or incorporating new technology to their offices. Specifically, though, for a young dentist, what can you tell us about the importance of continuous learning, networking, mastering the craft of dentistry, or a specific aspect of course of dentistry? Would you have any advice for those young clinicians?
NA: You know, Luisa, when I think about the best advice I can give to young dentists, is the advice that would have been amazing for a younger me, and some of this I learned in Ray Dalio book called Principles. He divides his book into two sections, principles of life and principles of work. So, I’m going to kind of split this answer up into these two parts. The first thing is, take care of yourself professionally, right? The importance of continuous learning is not just about getting your minimum requirement for your CE credits. Find what you love to do and learn to do it really, really well. Find what excites you and get excited. One thing I remember learning when we did those, you know, those personality tests in high school that you do, that you figure out what career would be best for you. So, it must have been in the late 1990s when I did one of those tests. And one thing I learned at that time, not even about what career would be right for me, but actually about careers in general, this day and age, is that in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, people only ever had one career for their entire life. But in our time now, people change careers six to seven times in their lifetime. And what’s amazing about dentistry is that we have that possibility right within dentistry, because there are so many different subcategories of dentistry you can do. For example, today, most of my endos I refer out. I don’t really want to do endo. I really love doing esthetics, so I’ve really limited and focused my practice on this kind of treatment. So because of that, you learning, you finding what you love, you learning, going diving deeper into that, you making sure that you enjoy your days and you enjoy your time at work, it’s a good chunk of your life. And, you know, part of taking care of yourself professionally is not only advancing yourself and finding ways to get inspired, but it’s also finding people like you. And where I see this, we have Study Club in the Six in Toronto, which is the Toronto chapter of the Seattle Study Club. And right now, it’s a group of 50 doctors. And this is what I see, doctors of all ages, from new grads five years, 10 years out, and there are doctors that are 30 years in practice. And what aligns them is that they are all doing their best in life and in work, and they meet about once a month during the academic year, and it’s organized education, from lectures from incredible educators from all over the world, facilitated treatment planning. Everyone grows together. But beyond that, instead of everyone practicing between their own four walls and only having access to their own practice, we have this supportive, honest community that helps each other in the range of challenges that we deal with as professionals. And, I mean, everything from death of a patient to, I mean, you can’t even imagine the things that can happen on a daily basis that people reach out to each other for in a trusted and safe space, even if they’re practicing alone. This has really shifted dentistry for this group of people. So I think finding a group of like-minded professionals, advancing yourself, finding what you love, taking CE not just for getting your CE credits, but really for your love of something that you chose, you know, that you chose to learn more about. And then the other piece of this is taking care of yourself personally, because it is so important. It’s, you know, even though we’re dentists, and a lot of us, if people ask you about yourself, the first thing you might say is, I’m a dentist. But the truth is, there’s this 80-year study done by Harvard. I think it’s actually an 85-year study now. And I’m so aware of the study I read about it years ago, and it’s a study on happiness, and what they found is that in this entire group of people that they’ve been following for over 80 years, there’s a strong correlation between the closest relationships in your life and your wellbeing and happiness at the end of life. None of those people said they wish they worked more, none of those people said they wish they made more money. None of those people talked about anything actually related to that, right. What they really focused on in their life that changed their quality of life and changed their happiness was their relationships. So how amazing is it that we live in an age that we can have access to this kind of research and know quite early in our lives that at the end of life, no matter what somebody’s job was, no matter what they did for their entire 80 or 90 years they were on this earth, they all uniformly said the same thing about happiness being related to the quality of their relationships. So, a part of taking care of yourself personally, and sorry to bring science in a nerdy way into matters of the heart here, but a part of taking care of yourself personally is really nurturing your closest relationships with your inner circle, because it does have the greatest impact on your quality of life and taking care of yourself, right? Eat well, exercise. I know I probably sound very cliche, but how can you take care of others if you don’t take good care of yourself? And as dentists, and if you are a business owner, then you are not only taking care of your patients, and even if you’re an associate, you’re taking care of your patients, you’re taking care of your team. You’re looking after a segment of your community. You give a lot of you all the time. And if you’re caring about the outcomes you’re delivering, then you really are giving something to everybody all the time, so it really is important that you give back to you by taking care of yourself. And I’m going to wrap up on sort of one final note here, because as dentists, when we’re in dental school, how are we taught to do our job? We are taught to look for problems, right? That’s how we treatment plan. We create a problem list first, and then we come up with treatment from that. So a piece of advice I’m going to give you about mastering your craft and mastering your life is, don’t recognize that at our work, we are always having to look for problems so we can fix them, but there is a shift in mindset you have to make for you to be able to be a more positive person during the day, and that is, look for the good, right? Look for the good. And don’t hold yourself to some perfectionistic standard that is not you, because that is another thing that dentists suffer from, is trying to make everything perfect and trying to be perfectionists. And when you do that, you can’t be truly, authentically you. And I’m gonna give you an example. Okay, I’m gonna read this to you, literally from social media. So, Robin Sharma, who is the author of many books. First one I read of his was The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and the most recent one he published is called The Wealth Money Can’t Buy. And that was a gift to all our members at our study club, actually, at our Christmas dinner session this last December. So, he is a incredible, bestselling author, and talks a lot about, you know, principles of life and principles of work. And he gives a lot of advice. So, if you go on his social media, his name is Robin Sharma. Today, he wrote this post that says, “Read more books, walk in nature daily, let go of the past, drink more water, say thank you a lot. Get up at 5am, smile at strangers, meditate and keep a journal.” And that sounds amazing, doesn’t it? But if I’m really honest, I would love to do all of those things, but I am not going to wake up at 5am, right? Like I love nighttime, I really don’t love mornings. So it is okay to be me, and just because he prescribes that this is the best way to live life, that does not mean that it is the best way for me to live my life. And I responded to that post, and I wrote, okay, but not 5am and it’s funny, because, I mean, I was being a little funny, but people really identify with their ability to just be themself. So, allow yourself to be yourself, and don’t let anybody else tell you what perfect really is right. Do what’s right for you.
LS: Nada, thank you so much for joining us and for the great information.
NA: Thank you so much for having me, you guys. It was such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Luisa, and I look forward to speaking with you soon.
LS: To our audience, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to sign up for Brush Up Podcast alerts or subscribe on Spotify and YouTube to be notified every time we post a new episode. Keep brushing up!