Action: Assign a supervisory staff member (usually the hygiene or treatment co-ordinator or office manager) to dispense minute quantities of prophy paste to hygienists when they are ready to polish.

This ensures that you save money because the hygienists are not wasting prophy paste.

This is Part 1 of likely an infinite number of points that I’ll relate from experience (some mistakes that I’ve made, others that I’ve seen made). The points are self explanatory. The consequences vary, but unfortunately for many of us dentists, our egos are too large to learn from them, and so we blame others for their behaviour that caused us to do the action in the first place.

Action: Throw instruments (the sharper the better) at your assistant because you are frustrated with the patient or the case.

She’s coming off a year of maternity leave.

She: So is the patient coming back for work?

Me: Yeah I think so.

She: A pulpectomy or pulpotomy?

Me: What’s the difference–

She, cutting me off as she busily shuffles her paperwork around: One is all the way down the canal, and the other is only part way.

Me, pausing confused: Umm…yeah..thanks for the endo lesson. I know the difference that way. I meant what’s the difference in cost…?

She: Oh.

I caved in and bought a cheap remote shutter release from Ebay the other day for the Nikon (the remote is made in China). Using the remote, I can lock exposure settings prior to framing the shot and also minimize camera shake by not having to push the button on the camera itself.

Any shaking of the scope gets magnified a gizillion times. This is my first test shot. It’s an upper 6 showing DB and the two MBs.

Here are some answers to recent questions:

I have a digital camera (Nikon Coolpix 990) attached to my microscope. The scope is off to the left of the following picture. There’s also a video cam hooked up to the scope for my assistant to monitor what I’m doing. I’d rather have an intraoral camera than the Nikon hookup though.

I use my Canon SD500 camera for the other photos that I post.

I don’t have digital radiography in the office so I use an Epson scanner that has a transparency adapter to scan in xrays. I used to take pictures of xrays off the viewbox if I wanted them digitized. This worked decently, but requires a good knowledge of the camera’s exposure settings and some image manipulation on the computer. This was useful when I used to teach and didn’t have a scanner handy when some interesting xray came along.