Until recently I hadn’t fully appreciated how nice it is to work with top quality dental hand instruments. In my own office I have superb instruments from LM-Dental with beautiful balance and comfortable silicone grips.
Recently however, I worked in an office where they had a motley selection of worn out hand instruments that are obviously the cheapest available. They looked like they’d been bought at a rummage sale. The probes were blunt, the instruments themselves were dull, scratched and bent and of all different makes and models. In the entire office it was impossible to put together 3 trays with identically matched instruments.
Two weeks later I was in a different office that had really nice hand instruments. They were a delight to work with, made more so by the comparison with the previous office. They were sharp and I had a dozen matched sets at my disposal. The dentist working with the low quality instruments has no idea what he’s missing out on.
Outside of dentistry, us dentists like nice things. If we play golf we have good clubs with carbon fibre shafts. We buy expensive running shoes. We drive nice cars. We have the latest phones and watches. We live in nice houses.
That makes the instruments I see in some dental offices so perplexing. When your livelihood and day to day enjoyment of work is involved, why wouldn’t you want to have the best possible hand instruments? They last for years and so for just a few extra cents per day you can work with the best.
To me, the answer is obvious.
