“Wise is the one who learns to dumb it down”
— Curtis Tyrone Jones.
Imagine if your car broke down and you took it to a repair shop to be fixed. What you’d want is for the mechanic to examine the car, tell you what’s wrong, tell you how long the repair will take and what the cost will be:
“The problem’s the gear box. I’ll have the car ready by Tuesday. The cost will be $1,450.”
If they did that you’d thank them and come back on Tuesday.
Now imagine instead that the mechanic pulled down a wall chart and gave you a lesson on how gear boxes work. Then when they’d finished they gave you a ten-page brochure to take and read at home. If they did that, you’d think that they’d lost their mind. You don’t want a lesson on gear boxes. You just want your car fixed.
Unfortunately I’ve seen many dentists act like the crazy mechanic.
Would it surprise you if I told you that dental patients feel the same way about dentistry as you feel about gear boxes? They want their teeth fixed but the technical details of how that gets done is not interesting to them.
In fact, if you bamboozle a patient with long, technical, jargon-filled explanations, that’s the opposite of good communication. Patients find it boring, irritating and confusing. The overwhelming majority don’t want to know where the reamer goes, or what a crown is made of, or the four stages of periodontal disease. They couldn’t care less about those things.
Of course, if there are some necessary warnings you need to give those, but do it simply without unnecessary technical details.
