Pointless pursuit of perfection
You will never find anything that works for 100% of patients. Stop looking for perfect solutions.
The dentist who had by far the greatest influence on my career was Dr Omer Reed from Phoenix Arizona. I mentioned him last week in my article about “How much is enough?” Another saying of his that influenced me greatly is:
“The cost of perfection is prohibitive.”
I’ve spoken before about the pursuit of perfection relating to clinical work. It’s not too hard to get a filling or crown 95% perfect but trying to get it 100% perfect is impossible and will drive you mad.
The amount of extra time and effort required to go beyond 95% increases exponentially. The same also applies to communication with patients.
When I present my seminar, The art of case acceptance, to live audiences attendees often worry about communication problems that seldom occur.
During the seminar, when I give a method of communication that is effective 95% of the time they worry too much about the 5% of cases where it does not work so well:
“But what about a patient who…?”
The type of dentist who says this is focussing on the exception to the rule, rather than looking at what most patients want.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
The vast majority of patients — over 95% IMHO — aren’t interested in the technical details of treatment. A small minority want to know all the technical details about what you are going to do.
Instead of giving the 95%+ what they want i.e. simple, non-technical treatment explanations, they worry about the very few patients who want more information.
This results in them giving all patients long, detailed explanations. For the 95% this is overkill. In fact it is counter-productive because it wastes time and annoys and confuses the majority of patients.
My suggestion is to stop trying for 100% solutions. Find a method that works the vast majority of the time and use that.
Then figure out a way to handle the exceptions.
