How Can Halloween Help Our Practice?

BY DR. MARK MURPHY, DDS, FAGD

It is not what you think! My wife and I would usually be scrambling to find a costume when we were invited to a Halloween party. Upper and Lower GI (fatigue shirt for her, pants for me), The Blues Brothers (she is short, I am tall) or Raggedy Ann and Andy come to mind. These costumes allowed us to take on a different persona, even, if only for a night. What persona would you want to project if you were dressing up as a dentist in your practice? Although there is no ‘wrong’ answer, I would suggest there are some attributes we would want to channel if we could.

Dentistry is a challenging profession. We examine, diagnose and plan treatment for folks so they can keep their teeth the rest of their lifetime in comfort, function and esthetics. That is a tall task indeed. We need to be awesome listeners so we can come to understand their issues and help guide them towards health. If we can exhibit empathy and care, patients may come to trust us and ask us for our advice on what they need to do. These are not skills or costumes we learned in dental school, but are so very important to our practice success.

How do we get there? It is not easy. Perhaps, this Halloween season, we should think about what ‘costume’ we should wear to help us engage our patients at this level. The Listener? A Caregiver? Your Trusted Friend? All worthy personas to take on if we want our patients to better accept our treatment recommendations. By taking time to listen and care for our patients, they may come to trust us a little more. We all ask people we trust for advice. What better way to help folks make better health care decisions than to invite them to ask us what to do.

Listening shows we care.

We trust people who care.

We ask caring people for advice.

Mark T. Murphy, DDS, FAGD