Alright. Well, I am going to introduce myself and also jump into this topic here. I am Sheila Roth, head of clinical education here at Pearl and kind of one of all of you too. So I've built been a hygienist, office manager, and just really excited to be here at Pearl now. But this this topic is really kinda near and dear to my heart as well as I worked with owner doctors really closely in a consulting company and hearing, you know, all the things that they go through and all the way down to assistance and and hygienists in front desk, and especially in this world right now where we have, you know, this staffing scarcity. So it's good we're here tonight talking about all these topics. Question is really, have you ever paused to consider how your mental health impacts not just your life, but your ability to care for patients?

And today, we're breaking really the taboo around mental wellness and dentistry and facing the facts head on. I'm really thrilled to introduce our speaker, doctor Joshua Austin, a practicing dentist, nationally acclaimed speaker, editorial director of dental economics, and also still in private practice with the thriving practice as well. Doctor Austin combines deep clinical expertise with a signature you'll see tonight, comedic style, to make complex topics really approachable. He's a master of the AGD, a fellow of the American College of Dentists, and an award winning leader recognized by the Texas Dental Association and the Texas Academy of General Dentistry.

Today, 's gonna guide us through strategies to really strengthen mental health, cope with professional challenges, and help us build personal wellness teams, really kind of helping us perform at our very best. If you haven't heard doctor Austin, you're in for a treat this evening. And, Austin, just really wanted to thank you for taking this time with us this evening, and I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you so much, Sheila. It's great to be with you guys and great to, partner with a company like Pearl. It really does a lot for me personally in helping me get through my day, and we'll talk about some of those things like Pearl and how those those little things can help make your day a little bit easier, and those things certainly add up.

If you scan this QR code, this will take you to kind of an online version of a handout.

Handouts on here are some other resources of some things I'll I'll I'll minorly talk about. I make no money from this QR code. This QR code is just a a way to give you a more dynamic handout than just a a PDF file.

And I can I I can do go back in here and add stuff over time? And so, you know, if I send you a PDF, it's a onetime thing. But with this, it it has stuff that's constantly being updated on it so you can get refreshed information as new information comes out. So just a little bit more dynamic version of a handout.

Again, I make no money from it. It is just simply a way to to give you a little bit more information here. I love to start with this quote, and I'd like to think that we're in a safe space here, especially in a situation of colleagues and people who are all in in the same fight every single day. So I'd like to keep this a safe space and know that many of us may be coming from the same place that I am.

This is my dad, and, my dad practiced my dad was a dentist as well. I'm a second generation dentist. My dad practiced for, twenty five years in Amarillo, Texas. And then in nineteen eighty three, he sold his practice in Amarillo, and we moved to San Antonio where he taught at the dental school.

And I'm not sure if any of you are second generation dentists. Numbers say that at least some number of you in here are. The ADA says about ten percent of dentists are second generation dentists, which I always find kinda interesting that so many of us follow in the footsteps of those that came before us. And I I don't know why you guys got into dentistry, but for me, it was my dad.

It's it's just something that, like, my patients even ask me all the time sort of out of nowhere, if my dad was a dentist, which I honestly kinda find insulting. Because in my head, I automatically translate that question into why on earth would you wanna do this for a living if you weren't pressured into it by a helicopter parent? And I that's I know that's not what they're saying, but in my head, that's what I hear. And I I certainly wasn't pressured into this by my dad, but he is the reason that I became a dentist.

Today, it's clear to me that I wanted his approval. I became a dentist because I wanted to make my father happy. I wanted to hear that he's proud of me. I think that's something that probably everyone wants to hear from our parents.

I think we're hardwired to seek out and desire that kind of approval from the people that are supposed to love us the most. There's just one problem.

I'll never get that kind of approval from my dad because he died when I was ten, and I've been chasing his ghost for the last thirty five years. And in fact, I never even got the chance to tell him I wanted to become a dentist. And now as an adult, I realize it sounds crazy to try to work to get his approval without him even being around.

It's taken me a long time to figure that out, and there's always been an emptiness. There's always been a void. There's always been something missing, like, right here. And I've tried to fill this void with all kinds of things, all kinds of things that are bad.

Cocaine, escorts, base jumping.

Guys, I'm obviously kidding.

Do I really look like the kind of guy that goes base jumping? The other one's for sure. No. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. It's actually achievements. Achievements is what I've tried to fill that void with. Ever since I was ten years old, I've tried to do things I thought would make my dad proud because I thought it would make me feel better.

When I was in dental school, I ran for and became class president. Didn't make me feel any better.

My class picked me to give the speech at dental school graduation. Didn't make me feel any better. In fact, that was twenty years ago tomorrow.

Didn't make me feel any better.

None of it ever filled the emptiness. I I even one time was going through my dad's old stuff and found a lapel pen that was a twenty five year member pen to the Texas Dental Association. So I decided to run for the board of directors for the Texas Dental Association, and I won the election. Look at this photo.

It was terrible. It was terrible. I had to go to ten meetings a year for three years with all of these old people. Look at this.

The only diversity in this room is the two old white haired white guys wearing bow ties instead of straight ties. I'm like Benjamin Button in the bottom left hand corner, aging backwards.

In every meeting agenda at ten thirty in the morning, it would always say, reminder board members, take your Lipitor. I'm like, bro, I listened to Kanye driving over here. What am I doing in this room? Okay?

What an insane thought process to make me think that this would make me feel any better. The equivalent of this would be going through my dad's stuff and finding a Dallas cowboys cheerleader calendar and then trying out to become a Dallas cowboys cheerleader and making it who am I kidding? I can't pull this outfit off. I'm a b cup on a good day.

Okay? If I try to do those leg kicks in those boots, I am going to tear my hamstring.

What was I doing? None of it ever filled the emptiness. None of it ever filled the void. And what I didn't realize is that I started to resent dentistry for not filling that emptiness that could never be filled by it anyway.

It was unfair to ask dentistry to do that. And so I started to wear that resentment more outwardly. And I didn't know it, but the people around me started to notice, and I don't just mean my team. We use this software to reactivate patients if they haven't been in to the office in a while, and it sends them, like, a text message or an email if they haven't been in in eighteen months.

They're trying to get them to schedule their recall. And one of the options that they have is to to unsubscribe or to opt out of future mailings, like, if they've left the practice. And it does ask them a question, like, a sort of an exit interview, so to speak, of why they're leaving the practice. And there's a pull down menu of a bunch of things they can pick that would be, like, the standard things of why someone would leave a dental practice.

Like, my insurance changed, or I moved, or I saw a picture of you dressed as Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and had confront some questions about my own sexuality. Any of those kind of things, I think, would be the standard kind of things you'll find in there. And then it emails us so that we can archive the patient, and we don't have to keep bugging them. Right?

So one day, I come to my office, and I open up the office email, and I'm greeted by this email from Chris who is seeking care elsewhere because, and I quote, doctor Austin just seems so angry all the time.

This shocked me because I thought I was a great actor.

I thought I was Daniel Day Lewis putting on an Oscar worthy performance every day, and I thought my patients loved it. I thought they loved me, and it turns out they could tell. Turns out I wasn't such a great actor. The patients could sense it. They could sense that I was really unhappy.

And I remember I looked up from my office computer across the wall of my private office, and I remember seeing something on the wall of my private office.

It was this.

Maybe Chris is right. Maybe I do have an anger problem because this is a wall that I had punched through the sheetrock of my office for what reason. I don't even remember anymore. I don't remember what sent me off enough this day. This helped me realize that I needed help, that I needed to talk to somebody.

And when I had that realization, I remember being scared because I felt alone. I felt alone because none of my friends talk about this. I'm I'm in a group chat of a bunch of dentists that we all went to dental school together. It's about fifteen guys.

This group chat's been going on as long as group chats have been a thing on iPhone. I don't remember what year that started. I don't know. What?

Two thousand ten, probably somewhere in there. And it's fifteen guys over, what, fifteen years now, something like that. And never once in the history of that fifteen years has anyone in that group chat said that they were struggling, that they felt burnt out or depressed or anxiety or having panic attacks. Never once.

Now keep in mind, amongst these people, there have been things like divorces, bankruptcies. People have broken up professional relationships in practice, like practice partners. All kinds of really bad things have happened. Parents have died.

Siblings have died. Never once anybody ever said that they needed help.

I felt alone.

But was I alone? I mean, I don't know. Like, this the one thing you always hear about dentists. Right?

When you go to a party and you tell them that you're a dentist, like, the one thing patients always say is, like, is it true? And you're like, is what is what true? And they're like, you know, the thing. And you're like, what thing?

Like, you know, the thing. And you're like, the bruising in the back of your mouth after you've been that thing? And they're like, what? And you're like, no.

Never mind. Don't even worry about it. Don't even worry about They're like, this is suicide day. And we always make up a story.

We all heard we've all heard it a hundred times. We're just like, oh, no. It's not true. They're traffic controllers or something like that.

That's what we always say. But I didn't know if it was true or not, so I actually did some research. And and what I found was kind of interesting. I found this article from OSHA, from CDC and OSHA data that says dentists are two and a half times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

Two and a half times. That wasn't even the biggest number that I found. This was from the Journal of Deviant Behavior, which sounds like an unbelievable journal. Like, really, what are we doing reading the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry when we could be reading the Journal of Deviant Behavior?

Being a dentist increased one's risk of suicide by five hundred and sixty four percent.

Let that number sink in. Unbelievable. This is the list of dentists who I either know personally or I could find on Google News who have taken their own life in the last thirty six months.

And ever since I've started doing this lecture in twenty twenty two, I've had to add, like, six names to this list.

And I'm tired of adding names to this list. This is something we need to talk about. There's something going on in dentistry. There's something that's affecting all of us.

This is also from the ADA. Dentists have double the diagnosed rate of depression, anxiety disorder, and panic attacks than the general population. Two things about this study. Number one is it was done pre COVID.

Number two is this study was done by a self report. So I think these numbers are actually lower than they should be. I think they're actually a lot higher because people sometimes just don't feel comfortable reporting, a yes on these types of of questions.

Is from the British Medical Journal. Ninety percent of dentists, and this is actually true of dental hygienists and dental assistants, any chairside dental personnel, ninety percent report musculoskeletal pain at least three days a week. Three out of seven days a week. Ninety percent of dentists report musculoskeletal pain.

So ninety percent of us hurt at least half of the time. The reason that's important is because if your body hurts, you cannot regulate your mood, so you're way more likely to have things like depression, anxiety disorder, and panic attacks. Also from the ADA, thirty eight percent of dentists are frequently or always worried. Thirty four percent of dentists are frequently or always physically and or emotionally exhausted.

Physically and or emotionally exhausted is how more than one third of us would describe ourselves on any given day. Seems untenable. Right? And that's why we have so many issues. That's why we have the issues that we have.

If we look at the risk factors for suicide from the ADA, you're gonna see a lot of things with red arrows here that look familiar. Well, things like history of mental disorders, particularly clinical depression. Remember, dentists are at least twice as likely have clinical depression than the general population. History of alcohol and substance abuse. Seems like that's something I hear about dentists suffering from a lot.

Feelings of hopelessness. Remember, thirty four percent of us are walking around every day physically and or emotionally exhausted. That's how you get to that point.

Next red arrow down, isolation. And I don't mean rubber dams. I mean that fifty six percent of dentists still are the only dentists in their practice. That's even in a d s DSO situation.

So that type of isolation can be very difficult from your friends and colleagues. We don't have the typical, work environment that many people have where they work with other people who are at their job level.

Physical illness. Remember, ninety percent of us hurt, at least three days a week or more. And then finally, an unwillingness to seek help because of the stigma attached to mental health. So I do see meetings every week.

Last week, I was at the California Dental Association meeting in, Sheila's neighborhood there in in Orange County. The week before that, I was at the Nebraska Dental Association. Hold your jealousy. I know all of you wanna go to Lincoln, Nebraska in, May.

And I do this every week. And every time I go somewhere, I look at the book to see what other speakers are there so I see if any of my friends are there. And I see a lot of the stuff on the same topics. I see all on fours.

I see sinus lifts. I see implant placements. I see full mouth rehab. I see veneers.

I see all that kind of stuff. All on four. I never see courses on this.

In fact, I'm in Texas. In order to have my license, I have to do two hours of continuing education at least every two years on human trafficking, which is terrible. Don't get me wrong. What a terrible thing.

But am I more likely to run into a patient who's being human trafficked or a colleague who's in severe mental distress? Obviously, a colleague who's in severe mental distress. Right? But only two states in the country, Washington State and North Carolina, have any type of continuing education requirement for mental health.

You saw the list you saw the list of names. Every state should have this. Every dentist in the country should have to do at least one hour of CE on mental health in order to get their license.

I think that's part of the answer here is we just don't wanna talk about it, and we need to. So why dentistry? Why dentistry? As Taylor says, I'm so damn tired of running as hard as I can.

If you're a Taylor fan, you know. If you're a Taylor fan, you know. I I feel like every day I'm running as hard as I can. Right?

And dentistry is so freaking hard. So freaking hard. And every day, there's more and more stuff we have to deal with. Right?

When we look at at statistics for the United States, we will find just our people in general. This doesn't have anything to do with with dentists. It's just all adults.

Twenty three point four percent of US adults suffer from any mental illness, and almost six percent of US adults suffer from serious mental illness. So it's not just dentists who are struggling. It's patients too. It's the patients we're treating every day.

Right? And why do we care if our patients have mental disease? Well, the data tells us that patients with more mental disease have more dental disease. Patients with more mental disease have more dental disease, particularly two diseases that we deal with every day, caries and perio.

Right? So I'd like to think that we're empathetic, and and, you know, we we care about our patients, and I think most of us do.

But beyond that, like, it affects the dentistry we do. It affects our patient's oral condition. Right? So we need to know what's going on.

And we just weren't taught a lot about this in dental school. You know, I went to dental school twenty years ago. When I went to dental school, there was only one, mental health diagnosis that we were taught by our dental school faculty, and that was the c word, crazy. That was it. That was the only one we learned. Surprisingly, the c word, crazy, is not in the medical literature. And the the the the textbook that outlines all of the different mental diseases, that are accepted by the American Psychiatric Association is called the DSM five, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

It's a big thick honkin reference book, and it breaks down every mental disease into one of seven categories. And when you look at those seven categories, you'll see stuff that we deal with all the time. Right? We deal with anxiety disorders every day.

There's not a day I go in my office that I don't deal with somebody who has anxiety. Right? We deal with mood disorders. I'm gonna show you some demographics on mood disorders.

It's gonna kinda kinda wake your eyes up to that. We deal with eating disorders all the time. Right? We see patients with with bulimia, with, binging, purging, things like that.

Right?

If you've been involved in dental education in the last fifteen years, you know about sleep disorders and what sleep can do to the dentition and how the teeth and the and and the, stomatognathic system is a window into what sleep is doing and airway issues and all the great work that, like, Jeff Rouse has done at Spear Education on this. So we deal with this all the time. And, of course, we all deal with personality disorders because we all employ dental hygienists.

I'm kidding, Sheila. I love you guys. I love you guys so much. I can't work without you, but you are a crew, you dental hygienists.

You really are. You really are. The most common disease that you will find a patient in your practice to be diagnosed with is a mood disorder. We just sort of fall into three different categories, elevated mood, depressed mood, and bipolar, which is a fluctuation between the two.

Elevated mood is obviously like your mania, manic attacks, things like that. Right?

Depressed mood, the major diagnosis in there is major depressive disorder or MDD. This is what we used to call it clinical depression, unipolar depression. That kind of wording has now been replaced by MDD, major depressive disorder. And around twelve percent of the developed world's population suffers from major depressive disorder.

Twelve percent. That's more than who suffers from diabetes. And I hear a lot about an obesity epidemic. I hear almost nothing about a depression epidemic, and yet the numbers tell you that more people are depressed than have diabetes.

It's kinda crazy. For many years, our thoughts about mental disease were all based around neurotransmitters. Everything is neurotransmitter based. Every mental disease was a disease of neurotransmitters.

The neurotransmitters your your your central nervous system is just a a network of trillions of neurons. Right? And the way neurons interact with each other, way they communicate is through neurotransmitters. And so, obviously, neurotransmitters are really, really important in that.

Right? And all of these neurotransmitters need to be in the right concentration at the right part of the brain at the right time in order for someone to have mental health. Right? And so you can see, like, all the opportunities there are for things to go wrong here.

Right? So lots of issues, complicated cascade. Right?

But it's even more complicated than that, and we're finding new data every year. So this study came out two years ago. This is called the bidirectional relationship of depression and inflammation. And if you look in this study, it's a pretty landmark study. It shows that patients with major depressive disorder had a a unanimous increase in, aberrant pro inflammatory cytokines, like interleukin six, tumor necrosis factor, and c reactive protein. Where have you heard about those before?

Have you heard about those? You've heard about those in periodontal disease. So what we see is we see stress triggers alarmins in your immune system that trigger your innate immune cells to increase production of these pro inflammatory cytokines. And the pro inflammatory cytokines in the brain trigger depression.

So when we look at these, all of these cytokines can cause issues with serotonin reception, dopamine reception, norepinephrine, can change mood, sleep disturbances, anxiety. All kinds of things are affected by interleukin six, interleukin two, tumor necrosis factor, c reactive protein. Those are the same things that we see in periodontal disease. So the current thinking is this.

Chronic long term inflammatory disease of the endocrine system is diabetes. Chronic long term inflammatory disease of the vascular system is heart disease. Chronic long term inflammatory disease of the periodontium is periodontal disease, and chronic long term inflammatory disease of the brain is major depressive disorder. Depression is a chronic long term inflammatory disease, and we should treat it the same way.

We should treat it the same way we treat diabetes and hypertension and hyperlipidemia. Right? It's no different than any of those. There should be no stigma.

There should be no anxiety about talking about this with patients. It's totally okay. Same way you wouldn't be embarrassed to ask your patients if they have diabetes or if they have hypertension. Right?

It's the same thing. These are the same things. These are just different organs that these diseases are acting on. Now we've all heard a lot about the link of periodontal disease and systemic health.

Right? And if you have periodontal disease, does that mean you have heart disease? No. Of course not.

We're we're understanding that more and more. But what we're seeing is this, like, Venn diagram overlapping of the risk factors. Right? And that's where this falls in the same way.

Those risk factors overlap on the Venn diagram. Right? So when you see patients, don't be embarrassed to ask them about these things. It's okay.

Have it on your medical history. Right? You really wanna ask your patients what medications they're taking. Really important stuff.

Right? Are they taking antidepressants? Because it can affect things like bruxism, dry mouth, periodontal stem cell regeneration, and, osseointegration to implants. All those things can be affected.

So a lot of those citations are in the handout that I posted on that QR code. So this is really, really in-depth. And so I wanna make sure that you have an understanding about how this can affect patients.

When we get back to to us as as people who happen to be dentists, right, again, we talk about dentistry being really stressful, and it is. It's there's so much things going on at one time, so many things that we have to manage, and all of these things can add up. Right? All of these things can add up.

And at the end of the day, I think you need to spend some time figuring out what your triggers are. What are your emotional triggers? What are the things that cause you to have these negative thoughts? What are these things to cause you to have spiraling thoughts and to and to have, these depressive episodes and things like that?

And and and I look at it like, when I look at a case that needs to be treatment planned, The first thing that I do is come up with a problem list. And then once I have the problem list, I can make a treatment plan. And so your triggers are your problem list. Right?

You came up can't come up with a plan to deal with your triggers until you know what triggers you. So you've gotta spend some time figuring out what triggers you. And here are some of my triggers. Right?

You may agree with some of these. You may agree with none of these. These may apply to you a hundred percent. These may not apply to you at all.

But clinical failures bug me. I take them home. You know? I take them home. When I see that crown that I did on recall and it's got an open margin on it or a current decay around it, I remember it.

Think about it that night when I go to bed.

I know you're not supposed to, but I do. Social media and the access for it, just seems to tends to be really detrimental for me, and it's something that I really have to manage over time. Getting a bad Google or Yelp review, it's just brutal. It's just absolutely terrible.

And and it's the the thing is is it's the bad Google reviews is never about dentistry. It's always about their, like, fifty dollar Delta deductible. It just irritate like, why don't you leave the one star review for Delta Dental? Not me.

I do not understand it. Disorganization and clutter just really bumps me. I do not like that.

And I hate running behind. I really hate running behind. If I could add another one on here, it would be hygiene recall exams. I don't know why it affects me so much.

I just I used to, like, watch football, and you watch, like, Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, and they had just run a play, and, like, the defensive lineman on their other team got right through the the line. There's a misblocking assignment or something like that, and they just got, like, obliterated. Right? And you'd see, like, Tom Brady yelling at his lineman.

And I always be like, man, chill out, man. It's not a big deal. It's just a game. And that's how I feel sometimes, like, when when I get asked to recall when I'm, like, knee deep into three other patients, and I'm like, how am I supposed to get up and go to recall right now?

Like, come on. I feel like Tom Brady, like, yelling at his line.

But, yeah, I can recall exams, like, unnecessarily bump me because I feel like I have to drop what I'm doing and because I gotta keep their schedules on time. Right? So, like, I'm I'll sacrifice my schedule running behind for that, and it just is this, like, cascade of of negative thoughts. So once you spend some time coming up with your triggers, you can come up with a plan on how to deal with those triggers.

So one of them for me is my favorite one. The first one, avoidance. I love avoidance. It's my favorite one.

It's the best thing, and it actually can be a really good strategy. Right? If you're deathly afraid of snakes and you live a life where, like, you never deal with snakes, yeah. Yeah.

Don't go hiking. Don't go camping. Don't go mountain climbing. Right? I've never seen a king cobra slithering through a Lululemon store.

I've never seen a rattlesnake at Neiman Marcus. Right? Like, a five star hotel has never once had a coral snake in it. It's never happened.

Right? Like, like, avoid some of these things. Like, not put yourself in those situations. Right?

Some things you can do that on. Can I avoid clinical failures? Yeah.

I can retire from clinical dentistry. I can retire from that's the only time you're not gonna have clinical failures is when you retire. If you're doing clinical dentistry, you're gonna have failures. That obviously does apply to this.

Can I avoid social media? Yes. I will show you how in just a minute. Can you avoid getting a bad Google or Yelp review?

I maybe to some extent, but at some point, one's gonna walk into your office, like, ready to go off, and you're just gonna have to deal with it.

Can you avoid disorganization and clutter? Yeah. To a certain extent, but you also have to remember I remember one time, I went to a lecture, and it was a really well known lecture, like Mel Rushmore of Dental Lectures. K? I'm not gonna name who it was, but, like, everyone in here knows the name.

And they plug in their laptop. And while they're getting everything set up, you can see, like on the screen, you can see their desktop. And their desktop is just like files and folders just mismatched everywhere. No no sense of anything.

I literally got up and left. Like, I had spent, like, twelve hundred dollars on the CE because he's a well known speaker. Was like, can't listen to this. Like, if that's what this guy's desktop looks like, I can't listen to what this guy has to say.

So, like, the I can avoid disorganization and clutter, but I can't avoid everyone else's personality types, and not everyone is as fastidious about it as I am. So, I I need to learn how to deal with that better. And can I avoid running behind? I don't think you can.

I think dentistry is a game where at some point, something's gonna happen. You're gonna try to deliver a crown, and it is gonna need a bunch of adjustments or something. You're gonna miss a block. You're going to, break a route trying to take it to that.

Like, stuff's gonna happen. Right? What I need to do better is is react to it. And and running behind ruins my day.

And it's probably fine that it ruins my day. But my toxic trait is that when it ruins my day, I have to ruin everyone else's day. You know? And that's the problem.

Because it really is not everyone else's fault. So I'm sort of like the cellist on the Titanic. Right? Like, we've hit the iceberg, and the ship's going down.

And I've I've made my resolution that I'm going down with the ship. Right? And here I am on on the the deck of the Titanic playing my cello. And my dental hygienist runs by with her violin, and she's running for a rescue boat.

And I'm like, no, *****. Get in line. Like, you're coming right in here. Like, no.

You're not getting rescued. You're gonna play with me as this thing goes down. Right? Like, it's it's not their fault.

Right? Like, that's the thing that I need to to get better with with doing over time is not dragging everyone down with me. It's just what this demented part of my brain wants to do. It wants to if I'm miserable, everyone else needs to be miserable around me, and that's probably a really poor way of looking at it.

Realizing intentions kinda specifically relates to clinical dentistry. So when you sit down to do clinical dentistry, you know, not everything's gonna cooperate. Like, this is biology, and sometimes the easiest procedures don't work. Right?

Like, you can't control biology. So it may be an implant that is the simplest implant of all time, and it fails. It may be an Invisalign case that is the simplest Invisalign of all time, simplest Invisalign case of all time, but, like, none of the movements execute. Patient may or may not be compliant.

You don't know, but they insist that they are. Attachments fall off.

Can't get the IPR done. Like, just stuff. Right? Like and at the end of the day, like, you tried your best, and sometimes biology doesn't cooperate.

Right? You need to recognize that. Not everything is our fault Even though we're trained to believe that it is, physicians don't have that for some reason. I don't know why, why we have that thinking, but physicians don't.

I that obviously comes from dental school, but I I wish I could identify the sort of moment of that. I don't know. I don't know if it's the fact that insurance puts these, like, you do a filling, and it's two years. You do a crown, and it's five years.

I don't know if that's part I don't know what it is. I don't know where it came from. But sometimes biology doesn't cooperate, and we have to be okay with that.

Breathing makes everything better. If I would've just stopped to breathe for ten seconds, I would not have punched the hole in the wall. So that's one thing I wanna keep in mind.

Does that say mediation? That's a misspelling. It's supposed to say meditation. The meeting with your attorney is not gonna make your mental health any better.

In fact, I would argue the opposite. It's supposed to say meditation, which we'll talk about. Therapy, we're gonna talk about at the end. It's changed my life.

I think having tools to make your practice easier. Right? That's where Pearl comes in. Like, having this tool to help me in the middle of a busy day when I've got three rooms going and hygiene dinging me and I have four and a half seconds to look at the radiographs.

I know that I'm not gonna miss anything with Pearl. Right? It's just that little thing that makes my life easier. It's not this massive life changing thing.

It's like it it helps relieve the pebble in my shoe. Right? It doesn't move the boulder out of the out of the middle of the path. It removes the pebble out of my shoe, and the pebble out of the shoe is, like, more infuriating than the the boulder in the middle of the road.

Right? That's what Pearl does. And that's, like, one little fraction of what it does. It's a radiographs, plus, like, the practice intelligence, Pearl voice, like, all these things that are added, insurance verification.

These are all things that just, like, make everybody on my team's life a little bit easier. And those types of tools are, like, tools I'm willing to invest in. Right? Because, like, how much is my mental health worth?

It's definitely worth how much per us. Right? It that's one of those things. There's a we have a few of those products in my practice.

Weave is one.

Having an iTero scanner is one. Having a three d printer so we don't have to deal with impressions and model pouring is another one. Like, all those things sort of add up and make them kind of invaluable. And then something I've really tried to focus on the last, like, four years is trying to add procedures that like, for for lack of using a cliche, spark joy.

Right? Like, I think we get really good at determining the things that we don't like, right, as we're in our first five to seven years of dentistry. Like, for most of it, it's endo. Right?

If you don't like endo, you start referring out all your root canals. Right? And that's fine. And we talk about that part of, like, getting out the things you don't like.

But we talk less about, like, getting in the things that you do like. And so for me, it was Invisalign. Right? Like, for me, I found Invisalign, like, five years ago.

And just like, if I had my choice between doing an MOD composite number nineteen or doing Invisalign, like, it's such an easy choice. It's not even funny.

And it's because, like, the MOD doesn't spark any join me, and Invisalign does. Right? So you gotta find your things. Maybe it's implants. Maybe it is Invisalign. Maybe it's dentures.

Maybe it's injectables like Botox and things like that. Like, find your thing. And what you're gonna find is, like, when you start talking to patients about that thing, that thing grows in your practice. My friend, Mark Ryan Mullis, says where energy flows, gardens grow.

Right? And so the more energy you put into something, the more you talk about it, the more you talk with your team about it, the more it's gonna grow in your practice. So whatever that is, veneers, whether that's, you know, all on force, whatever. Find your thing.

Find your thing and get really good at it and start talking about it. Do all the CEO on it you can. Hang out with people that like it too. Another good friend of mine, Eric Gridler, has a saying that says, show me your friends.

I'll show you your future. And I think that's a hundred percent true. Right? Hang out with the people that, that help you grow that part of of the thing in your practice that sparks joy.

And it does make your practice a lot funner when you do a lot of the things you like versus doing a lot of things you don't like.

Again, we talked about the problems in dentistry. Right? Dentistry is really, really hard. And most of us who go into dentistry are givers.

We that's why we went into dentistry. Right? Like, it's it's standard question everyone gets asked in dental school interview. Why did you become a dentist? What else is? And we all wanna help people. Right?

And at some point along the way, you were told that you should you should lay it all on the line. Give it everything you got. A hundred and ten percent. Right?

And that's such a terrible piece of advice. It really is.

I think the reason a lot of us went in dentistry is we wanted to be in health care, but we didn't wanna be in a life or death situation. Right? Like, we didn't wanna be in those types of situation. Otherwise, we would've been, like, vascular surgeons or something. Right?

And that that's, like what's great about dentistry is there's no, like apart from, like, a Ludwig's angina, which you may have once every twenty years in your career, these things just don't happen. You know? It's it's everything is safe. Every there's nothing that's life threatening.

And and so to to make it seem like you have to give everything you have, it's just I don't know where this thinking came from. And and I know where it came from in my dental school. It's a story told to us on the first day of dental school by a dean of of of our dental school who who kinda told us the story of the young dentist who's been out of dental school for five years, has their own practice, and is, it's a Saturday morning, and they're getting their daughter ready to go for their first ballet recital. And they're excited to see this ballet recital because her daughter's been working on it for a long time.

And phone rings as they're walking out the door, and it's a patient with a broken tooth. And the story the the in the story, the dentist has to miss the ballet resettle to go fix this broken tooth, and that's sort of your obligation. As a health care provider, that that's part of of of what that responsibility entails. Right?

It's sort of the Peter Parker, with great power comes great responsibility. And, this ****** a terrible it's a terrible thing to teach a dental student. Because, like, when I'm dying, man, when I'm on my deathbed, am I gonna be talking about that crown prep on number thirty? Like, ugh.

Ugh. You should've seen those margins. Like, no. No. Of if I am, put me out early.

Okay? But you have full permission to to snuff me out with the pillow if that's what I'm talking about when I'm on my deathbed. You're talking about your kid's bowel or so. Right?

Like, that's the thing you're gonna remember.

You don't have to give them everything.

For for who?

These patients that would leave your practice in five minutes if you stop taking Delta? Like, no. Don't save some. Save some for home, which is who really matters.

Right? That's who really matters. And if you take anything from this tonight, take home that. Take home that.

So, these are some of the things that I've added to these solutions that I've added to my my life. And we'll we we'll go through kinda each one of these a little bit and, talk about how they they impact us.

Remember, ninety percent of us hurt three days a week. Right? Ninety percent of dentists hurt three days a week. This is an article that was in, the Journal of Dental Hygiene that showed the dental hygienists who did yoga one hour a week had longer careers than those that don't, which is pretty wild.

Longer careers. So I think yoga should be part of your of your, personal weekly self care routine, whether that be online yoga, YouTube. The Peloton app has great yoga. The Apple Fitness app has really good yoga too.

Like, you can do it online. You can go to a place and have the communal experience of it. Like, just do it. Just do it.

This is my yoga instructor, Sarah. Sarah is also my physical therapist, but she happens to be a yoga instructor as well.

And, I ended up at at her because I had back pains like everybody else. And she saw me as a physical therapy patient and told me I really needed to go to yoga. And it has been something I've I've I've tried to consistently add to my life, and it and and and it's made my life better.

Here I am at Sarah's yoga studio doing child's pose. And Sarah did this photo was on Sarah's yoga studio website, and she did give me a twenty five dollar Starbucks gift card in order to have permission to post this on her website, which means, technically, I am a professional yoga model. So I do need to upgrade, update my Instagram bio to say that. My LinkedIn needs to say it.

You know, was I nervous the first time I went to yoga? Yeah. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know what to wear. I didn't know any of the etiquette. I didn't know any of the poses. And I was quite honestly scared of farting in yoga.

That was absolutely something I was scared of. Fortunately, it didn't happen.

You know, been to yoga a few hundred times since then. Still hasn't happened. Does it happen to other people in the class? Yeah.

Like, every third time. No one seems to care. No one gets kissed out of class. No one makes a scene.

It's all fine. It's all fine. Don't worry about it. It's fun. It's a good time.

It's a good time. It's the only hour a week that's fine. It's the only hour a week where I don't have my phone. I don't have my stupid Apple Watch.

I'm not checking notifications. I'm not checking my email. It's the only hour a week that's fine. I think it's really important to stay active physically with some sort of exercise.

Exercise, releases endorphins into your into your bloodstream, into your in your brain.

Endorphins are nature's antidepressant. They basically, stabilize the mood, virtually instantly. And so exercise is really, really important for this. I think, just physically as dentists, I think you need to be doing some kind of strength training at least three days a week, and and core work to to help your body survive this physical onslaught that we do.

But some sort of physical activity at least three days a week, I think, is is really, really important, for your for your mental health. I am a Peloton guy. If you're a Peloton person, find me on the Peloton. You can follow me at Joshua Austin d d s on Peloton.

I literally did a thirty minute treadmill boot camp with Andy Spear right before I did this. This is my favorite Peloton instructor, Jess Sims. I think she's gorgeous. I think she's stunning, and there's nothing better than spending thirty minutes with Jess.

And it's the community part of it as well, that makes it really, really nice.

So do something physical three days a week, and it will always make you feel better. Always. Always.

I think meditation is really important. Right? So, when I talk about meditation, I'm not talking about something long. I'm not talking about something that takes, like, an hour to do, or even twenty minutes to do.

I'm really talking about five minutes of mindfulness breathing. So if you do five minutes a day of mindfulness breathing, there's really good data that will show that that lowers the physiologic signs of psychologic stress. So lowers cortisol, lowers blood pressure, lowers heart rate, all good things for your body. Right?

So just find five minutes a day. I try to find five minutes a day. This is my meditation kit, and I have this with me everywhere I go. It's a sleep mask, my AirPods, and the Calm app.

And I love the Calm app. I need a guided meditation because it kinda keeps me in line.

If I don't have a guide, I'm I sort of my brain starts drifting off. But with a guide, can kinda focus on their voice, and their voices are always very soothing on the calm and breathe in and breathe out. And many of them are British because British people sound so much more soothing than Americans do with their harsh accents. Breathe in and breathe out. Keep calm and carry on.

Keep calm and carry on. No one wants to hear Gilbert Gottfried doing a guided meditation. No one wants to hear Donald Trump doing a guided meditation. A lot of people are talking about guided meditation.

Let me tell you. It's tremendous. It's tremendous, this meditation. People have been saying that we're the best people ever in meditating, and we are.

No one's ever been better at meditating than we are. We are the best. We are absolutely amazing at at meditating. We're meditating all the time.

We're talking about JD meditating. He's the best. Elon Elon, Pete. Pete is such a good meditator.

It's not even funny. I want you to take a big deep breath in, and I want you to take a deep breath out. Okay? Deep breath in.

Okay? Deep breath out. Okay? Imagine you're on an island. Imagine you're on an island.

A beautiful island. The most beautiful island you've ever seen. I've never been to the island, personally. People I know have been to the island, but not me.

I never went to the island. I want you to breathe in. One wants to listen to that. Right?

Yeah. Fifty three percent of Americans wanna listen to that. They're always pretty crazy.

Do this for five minutes a day, mindfulness breathing. Do a guided meditation five minutes a day. Do it in morning. Do it the afternoon.

Do it at lunch. Do it in your private office. What if you don't have a private office? Go in the storage room.

Do it in there. Do it in the lab. Do it in the break room. Do it in your car.

Do it in the bathroom if the bathroom's fine. Now is everyone on your team gonna think that you're doing a two z when you're in the bathroom for five minutes? Yes. They are.

Who cares? Who cares? Do it at the same time. I don't care. Multitask. It doesn't matter to me.

Just get it done. Can do it five minutes a day. That's all you need to do.

Try to limit the amount of time that you're on on social media. Before we got started today, Sheila's talking about how she loves TikTok and, that her deal with herself is that she'll only go on TikTok when she's on a a treadmill or, like, an elliptical or something like that, exercise bike. So I think that's a great that's a great thing. For me, I try to set a usage timer on my phone for the social media that I'm on. So, I'm gonna show you how to do it on an iPhone. I'm gonna have to tell you how to do it real quick if you have an Android because I don't have one so I don't have the screen grabs.

So if you have a Android, step one to setting up a usage timer is go to the Apple Store and buy an iPhone. Okay? We're all judging you in the group chat when the group chat turns green. Okay? I'm just saying. I I I'm just being honest with you. Alright?

First step, if you have an iPhone like a normal person, go to screen time. Go to settings and then screen time. Under screen time, you're going to, turn on screen time. You have to consent to it.

Turn this on for you. Although if you have kids, turn this on for your kids as well. Sheila, I don't know if you knew this. The average amount of time that a teenager in the United States spends on TikTok is five and a half hours.

I told you earlier, I've never been on TikTok. I don't know what's there, but I know it's not worth five and a half hours of my time.

So turn this on for your kids too. Unbelievable number. Right? It's just I I told you it's brain rot. It's brain rot.

App limit is what you want. So once you hit app limit, it's gonna ask you what apps. What apps? I pick the apps that matter the most to me.

The ones that that get me the most, that's Instagram. One hour a day. One hour a day. I shouldn't be on Instagram more in a day than I exercise.

Right? That seems like a a normal thing. So set an app limit at five minutes. When you have five minutes left, like, at fifty five minutes, it will come up and it'll say you have five minutes left.

And then once that five minutes is done, like, the app grays out. You can't even open it until the next day. So it's a it's a cool feature your iPhone has that no one told you that it has. And so so set those boundaries.

It's it's really important. I'm not saying like, we all need it. We all have to keep up with our friends and loved ones and businesses and all that stuff, but just set a boundary. Therapy has changed my life.

Therapy has changed my life. And as Dennis, we talk about all the time, like, the team. Right? The team around you.

And and I'm not talking about, like, your dental team. I'm talking about, like, your professional team. Like, you're a lawyer, your accountant, your bookkeeper, your CPA, your real estate broker, like, those kind of people. And we never bring up therapists, and a therapist absolutely should be on that team.

Right? It's absolutely something like you are the go to in your office, and at some point, like, you need someone to go to, and that's what a therapist is. It has absolutely changed my life. Now you look at the data, the the the the mental health data, it it will tell us the literature tells us that, like, therapy changes your brain.

It actually changes the cellular and structural makeup of your brain, which is crazy. Because we change cellular and structural makeups, like, with thirty four elevators, fifteen blades, and three thirty bursts. Right? But, literally, the literature shows talking to someone can change your brain.

I don't know what any of these benefits mean. It's too scientific for me. I don't get it. But just from my life, I will tell you this.

Therapies help me develop healthy coping skills. Dentists, by and large, have terrible coping skills. Drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, junk food. Like, we have bad coping skills.

We're taught bad coping skills.

It's helped it's made me have much better coping skills. It's helped me process previous traumas. It'll be big t traumas or little t traumas. We'll talk about those as we close here in just a minute.

It's made me more empathetic. It's made me a better leader. It's had my made me have better relationships. And, honestly, if you look at, like, when I started doing therapy to now, like, my practice is more profitable.

And I think part of that is how to connect with people better. And when you connect with people better, you, get more yeses to big treatment plans, comprehensive treatment plans, right, which is kinda what we all want.

I'm only gonna recommend one book, and this is the book. This is called The Body Keeps a Score. This is written by a guy named Bessel Vanderkolk. He is the world's leading expert on psychological trauma.

He is the chair of psychiatry at Tufts University in Boston. And the hypothesis this the the hypothesis of this book, which is written in layman's terms, it's not a scientific book. It's a very easy read. You can read it in a weekend if you wanted to.

The hypothesis of this book is that if you don't process your previous psychological traumas and all of us have previous psychological traumas. If you don't process those traumas, those traumas will come out of your body, and they will come out of your body in unhealthy ways. And the hypothesis is based on this study called the Kaiser ACE study. So this was done in the Kaiser health care system out of California.

Kaiser is a huge health care system in the West Coast. And they study and and they they have millions of data points on millions of Californians over their entire life in the health care system. And they follow kids who had ACEs. And ACE stands for an adverse childhood experience.

What's an adverse childhood experience? It's things like, being abused as a kid, being abandoned by your parents, being put up for adoption, having a serious illness, like that. Like, the bad things that happen to kids, the terrible things that happen to kids. They follow kids with ACEs throughout their entire journey through the health care system.

And what they found was that kids who had ACEs were more likely to have chronic long term inflammatory disease, like diabetes, hyperlipidemia, hypertension.

They were more likely to have drug and alcohol abuse issues, which makes sense. They were more likely to have autoimmune disorders.

Explain to me how that works. You got abused as a kid. Now you're more likely to have rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. It blows your mind.

How is that even possible? But that's what this data showed. And you're more likely to die in early death. If you don't process your traumas, your traumas will process you, and they will do so in a rare really unhealthy way.

And we all have traumas in our life, and so we all need to process those traumas at some point. And a type of therapy that's really good at this is called EMDR therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. And it's a really effective therapy at processing trauma. So if you have some of these things that have happened to you in your life and you wanna deal with them, EMDR therapy is a great way to do this.

That's what I do every Monday is EMDR every Monday at five thirty PM. We have an EMDR session. So what are traumas? Right?

Well, there's two kinds of traumas that Vanderkolc talks about. There's the big t traumas. The big t traumas are the terrible things that happen to us in life, abuse, divorce, bankruptcy, loved one dying. Right?

We all have stuff like that. All that's happened to all of us. This is me. If you look over on the right hand side of the photo, the kid in the orange baseball hat is me.

That's my tenth birthday party, and the wheelchair is my dad about three months before he died. My dad in health was six foot seven, two hundred and sixty pounds. He actually played division one college basketball at the University of Tennessee.

And then before you know, right before he died, he was in a wheelchair, and he was a hundred and forty pounds. Like, being ten years old and seeing your dad, he was your hero, go through that, is a is a big t trauma. We all have those things. We all had to process them.

We all also have little t traumas. Little t traumas are, like, the awkward thing you said to somebody at a party that you still think about when you go to bed. And the party was seventeen years ago. Right? And that's those are those little, like, the cringeworthy things that happen. Right? We all have those.

I'm gonna share one with you. I used to just tell the story, but I realized I told the story different every time, and I would always omit some details. And so I just recorded the story one day, but I'm also mentally ill. So I can't stop at that. I had to hire a cartoonist to draw a cartoon to go along with it. So enjoy this video.

Do you guys get a lot of spam calls on your phone?

I know I do. Every day, it seems like I get a few. It got so bad that I never wanted to answer my phone. This was a tech problem, so I went looking for a tech solution.

And I found this app called RoboKiller. It's supposed to alleviate this problem in the background of your phone so that your phone number rings when a spam caller is calling. And there's two kinds of spam calls, though. The first kind are robot calls.

Those are just like the we are calling to tell you about your car warranty calls. And RoboKiller just zaps those without your phone ever ringing, which is great. The other kind of calls are call center calls. Those are harder to deal with, but RoboKiller has a method.

It has these prerecorded conversations to try to keep the call center on the phone for as long as possible, thinking that they're talking to a real person. Meanwhile, it's just the app. The longer they're on the phone with you, the less time they can be calling other people. Kinda like answering machines.

You guys remember answering machines? Such a relic of the past.

Everyone had a dumb friend that had an outgoing answering machine message that just said, hello, and he'd always fall for it saying like, hey, Greg. We're going to be dubs for the game about seven thirty.

Gotcha. Leave a message. And you're like, damn it. I hate that guy. I hate Greg.

I fall for it every time. Why do we even invite him to the game? You guys remember that? You guys have a friend like that?

Well, that's what RoboKiller does to call centers. It has these prerecorded conversations that it plays, and it records all of it and saves it in the app so you can go back and listen to it later. Well, one day, my car needed an oil change. I dropped it off at the dealership at, like, seven AM, and I took the shuttle back to my office.

And I'm working away on patience and finally get back to my desk and look at my phone around eleven forty five in the morning. My phone says RoboKiller intercepted a spam call from this phone number, and I recognized the phone number, which meant it wasn't a spam call. So I was pretty terrified. I opened up the app, and this is the recording of the call that it handled.

Hello?

Hi. Joshua Law office? Hey, miss Johnson. It's Rosie at NorthPark Lexus. Are you here at the dealership? Okay.

I was trying to page you, so I thought I'd call you. Your car's ready.

Okay.

Come to me at the cashier's office.

On one second. No worries. Here's the deal.

You just caught me in a vocal training exercise mode. I have been training for six months to go on to America's Got Talent because I wanna be a singer. And I'm looking for, like, unbiased people to listen to me sing and give me their honest and, like, heartfelt opinion. So, like, this could be kinda like the voice where you can't see me, but you can hear me and, like, give me and you don't know me, so you can, like, give me, like, an honest opinion on whether you think my voice is nice or not. Are you cool with that? And and Yeah.

Just hear me, like, sing for, like, thirty seconds, give me your opinion, and then I'm all game to what to what you need from me. Feel?

Oh, I thought that you were doing that already when you were doing that off.

Ready or not.

Here I go.

Okay.

And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.

And I wouldn't like to know you, but I was just accused.

Candle burned out long before Your legend never did.

Alright. I was a little hoarse there, but can you just, like, give me your honest opinion about what you thought of that?

I would tell you. I I would vote for you. I would give you a chance.

I need a little more feedback than that. Come on. Give me the goods. What do you think? Do I have the heart? Do I have am I gonna win a million dollars on America's Got Talent?

Honestly, I would say you probably wouldn't win the million dollars, but you probably go a couple of rounds.

That's a little rude.

But you wanted my honest opinion.

Okay. You sound good. I mean, you know I mean, you sound good. That's why I said that's why I said you probably go a couple of rounds. I mean, come pick up your car.

Your car's ready.

Okay. You know what? I have to gargle some eggs, so I'm gonna cut this conversation short. But thanks for listening.

That is one hundred percent real that actually happened. And I remember listening to that message in horror because that woman had my car. So I had to go pick up my car, and I was like, I actually thought of letting her keep it. Like, that was definitely on the list.

But I realized, like, you can't do that. So I went to go pick up the car, and I remember waiting in line at the cashier station hoping it'd be someone else. And then, of course, the person who was like, next, please. I look up and guess whose name it is?

I'm like, oh my god. So I walk up to the front of the line, and I'm like, hi. I need to pick up my car. She said, what's your name?

And I said, it's a white r x three fifty. She said, no. I need your name. Like, I actually see it through the window right after.

It's the third one and on the second row. She's like, have to pull up your name in the computer to pull up the blue bar. So it's like, Josh Washington. And Rosie says, oh, the singing guy.

And I'm like so then I start explaining to her. Like, Rosie, here's the thing. It was this app on my phone, and I thought your spam number obviously weren't. I don't know why I thought your spam call, but it has these prerecorded conversations.

Blah blah. And never once in the entire conversation, do you think you're talking to a robot? I can't believe it. It's one in a million shot.

Can you believe it? Blah blah blah. And I'm like, giving you this whole big, like, PhD level dissertation about it. And it's just flying right overhead.

I'm just seeing, like, blank space. Lights are on, and no one's on. So I realized at some point, like, I'm explaining myself to this woman, and I don't have any reason to explain myself to her. Like, there's whatever.

And so I'm like, you know what, Rosie? Nope. I'm gonna get out of your hair. Here's my credit card.

You can run it for whatever I I owe you for, and I'll I'll I'll just take my car and get out here. She's like, okay. Great. She runs my card.

She said, you know, go stand over there. They're gonna pull your car around. Here's your receipt. Have a good day.

I'm like, thank you so much. I'm walking away. I got, like, five feet away. Rosie says, mister Austin.

And I turn around, and she says, it's gonna be a no from me, dog. And I'm like, you still think it was me singing? And was it me singing? That's a little t trauma.

I've been thinking about that since that happened every night for the last, you know, nine years. K? And I share it here with you guys. You can laugh at my pain.

Sometimes you have to do EMDR on even things like that. If you don't know where to find a therapist, and I totally get it. It's, like, it's super easy to ask your friends. Like, where do get your haircut?

Where do get your nails done? It's much harder to ask your friends. Like, hey. You're crazy.

Where do you go?

It's you're gonna have to find it online. Right? So the AAMFT is a good place. The American Academy of Marriage and Family Therapist, AAMFT dot org. They have a find a provider tool that has a area where, therapists can list themselves by, their core focus, their core philosophies, and beliefs. I was looking for somebody, who specialized in previous trauma, the loss of my dad.

And I found, Holly, who's amazing. Because of me, Holly now sees half of her clients are dentists, which I'm sure is a weird curveball for her career that she didn't expect. But all you really need is someone who's licensed in your state. So Holly is in Dallas.

I'm in San Antonio. I've never met her in person. Everything is virtual on kind of a virtual version of Zoom, and it works really well. So a m f t a dot org is a great place.

Psychology Today, also a great place. Psychology Today dot com, great find a therapist tool. Again, you just need somebody who's licensed in your state. Holly is licensed in seven states, weirdly.

She's in California, Texas, Colorado, New York, and I think a couple others. I don't even know. So if you want her information, email me. I'll give it to you.

She sees, like, again, like, half her role as Dennis, which I think is kind of wild, and I sort of feel bad for hijacking her career. But it is what it is.

When I first started giving this lecture a couple years ago, this was the title of this lecture, and I really like this title. The only problem is that no one knew what the hell this meant. And I think the reason I like this title so much is that I just hit an edible pretty hard when I came up with it.

I'm kidding.

And I just thought it sounded cool. But, like, I think at the end of the day, like, we, as dentists, are focused so much on minutiae. Right? We refine our margins with red stripe diamonds until they are perfect chamfers.

We polish our interior composites until they're so bright we can see our double chin reflected back at us in a minute. If we could just spend a portion of the time that we spend on our margins or polishing on ourselves and our mental health, we'd be better.

Our patients would be better cared for. Our teams would run better. And most importantly, our families would be better.

I I talk a lot about my dad. I think a lot about my dad, and it it used to be my life's goal to be the best restorative dentist possible.

And I've come to realize that that goal is really unhealthy for me because it's totally one-sided. It ignores the other even more important parts of my life. So I changed that goal. It's not my goal to not only put in the work to be a good restorative dentist, but also put in the work to keep me centered as a person. That's you. So my patients and my team and my family can sense how grateful I am to have them in my life. I don't wanna become one of those awful preventable statistics.

And that, my friends, is something I think my dad would definitely be proud of.

If any of you have felt any of the things that I've talked about today, I want you to know you're not alone. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. You're gonna be okay.

Any of you can reach out to me anytime at this contact information. Thank you guys so much, and be well.

Thank you, Sheila.

You, doctor Austin. That was so great, so funny, but, yeah, so serious and also so informative.

I was already meditating when you were doing that little walk through even with the crazy guy.

So Love it.

I wanted to ask you, and we're open for a few questions. I know everybody has to jump off here, but I wanted to ask you two questions.

One is, what do you feel would be since you've gone through this journey, what would be the first thing you would put into place starting tomorrow if you were able to kind of you you've tested everything. What would you tell everybody on the call? If you just wanna put one thing into action tomorrow, what would that be?

It would be finding a therapist for sure. I mean, that's that's that's the big thing, especially us as dentists. Like, we are so, you know, pushed to be perfect at everything and and always have an answer to everything and always be prepared for everything and whatnot. And it's just so nice to have a place where you don't have to have a answer for everything. And it's it's nice to to go to somebody else, for some for some questions and have someone else help you. And it's just so like, I think so many of us as dentists, we care so much that our boundaries have just gotten so fudged over the years and really become really poor boundaries.

And I I think that would be where I would start. I think that's number one. Then I think just doing some mindfulness breathing every day. So between therapist and my therapy and and mindfulness breathing every day, and then just doing something to move your body, like, three times a week.

I think those are, like, one, two, and three. And if you just do those three things, like, other things are are are gonna get way better. I would not install RoboKiller on my phone, because that is just a a recipe for, having some embarrassment that will will bite you one day. Just deal with the spam calls.

It's fine. It's fine. They're not hurting anybody.

That's good advice. And then I would ask you one more question about what is a tool in your practice? I know you've talked about Pearl, but what do you feel like, wow. I'm really glad I have this because it makes me really go through my day faster. And if I didn't have this, this would be a real problem for me.

Yeah. So I think I talked about all three of them. Pearl is number one. Like, just like I said, my my I say this all the time.

Like, any dentist can read an X-ray. Right? Like, if you give us if you put us in a quiet dark room, like, any dentist can read an X-ray, it's no big deal. But, like, I don't have a quiet dark room where I have five minutes to sit and look at an X-ray.

Like, it just doesn't happen that way. I am trying to do this. You know, it's I always say, like, any quarterback in the NFL can throw a twenty yard out route out route. Right?

The difference between, like, Dak Prescott and Pat Mahomes, who's, like, one bajillion Super Bowls versus Dak Prescott who hasn't, is, like, Patrick Mahomes can do it when he has five, three hundred pound guys, like, in his in his face. Right? And, like, you gotta read X rays, like, in ten seconds when you have five other things going on. And what's gonna happen is you're gonna miss stuff if you don't have Pearl.

So that's number one.

Number two is so second opinion is just like, boom. Like, that's it. We have the other stuff, the practice management stuff from my my front desk team that really helps them practice intelligence and insurance verification.

Number two is Weave. Like, Weave doesn't really make my life all that much easier, but it really makes my team's life way easier. And there's been a couple things that I've tried in my practice that my team has been like, if you stop using this, we're gonna leave.

Practice intelligence from Pearl was one, and Weave was two. And then the third thing is is my iTero. Like, if I didn't have an iTero to be able to scan patients and talk to them about stuff in the hygiene room and the new patient exam, Like, I I just don't think I could do dentistry anymore without it. I I just have to have it.

I love that. And one of the questions in the chat is how difficult is it to implement AI into your practice as far as the images?

I mean, like, not in at all.

Really, not in the least. It's really, such an easy thing. The hardest thing is just, like, getting the call set up where they can, like, get the IT stuff done. I mean, that's really it.

And you just like, I passed it on to my IT guy who took care of it. And there's, like, one day or something like that where you guys, like, download all the old X rays or whatever and do, like, a scan of all of those. That's the biggest thing is is just that. Other than that, it's really easy.

I I have a young associate in my practice. So Andrew is is one year out of residency.

He only would look at Pearl. That's all. He he would only look at second opinion.

I always looked at my other software first and then went to Pearl to catch anything that maybe I missed.

He never even looked at the other one. All he would look at was was second opinion. So it was interesting just the generational divide between the two. I will tell you the one great thing about second opinion is is that it is web based.

It's on a browser. So if I'm out of town and my hygiene is there seeing patients and they take an X-ray and someone has pain or whatever, they can text me and be like, hey. Can you look at this X-ray? In the past, I'd have to log in to, like, go to my PC or whatever to, like, get into my server and look at it was such a pain.

Now I just can go to the the Pearl website and go to the second opinion site, log in. Stupid thing saved in my phone, and she's like, I don't even to know the password. It just logs in, and I can see the X-ray, and I can tell them, like, oh, yeah. We need to get that in for a crown or whatever.

So the fact that it's available for me to look at anywhere, type in the patient's name, it'll show you all the X rays that you've ever taken for them. It's it's just such a a a cool resource to have to to to be able to see things and move quickly through your day.

Yeah. I love I love being able to have that second set of eyes. And, also, as far as, you know, mental health, were talking earlier.

We've heard from quite a few dentists that having the Pearl voice notes, being able to record the conversation I know we haven't tried that out yet in your practice, but being able Thank you.

It's on the microphones are on the way, so I'm excited to try it.

They did. Yeah. That is that is a game changer as far as giving yourself back some time here. We do have a QR code here. If you feel this might be a good match for your team, we'd love for you to scan that. Set up a team demo and walk through some of the products like the morning huddle, Pro Voice, and also AI for your X rays.

And we do have a question too, doctor Austin, about great question. Do you dismiss troubled patients, and how do you go about it?

So most of my career, I followed the avoidance plan for that. I'm just like, oh, let's just not book them for another appointment and see if they go away. And that's probably not the best way to do it. But, yeah, I mean, we we too do try to dismiss people.

I've always toyed with the idea of giving my team, like, as a Christmas present. They get to fire one patient, and then they they have to, like like, argue that to make make a case for for which patient they're gonna dismiss as a team. They gotta all agree on it. It's gotta be like a jury.

I wanna have them, like, present a case, like, with a PowerPoint of, like, why we want it, and then they have to vote at the end. Like, I want this to like the Academy Awards. And then, like, we have a Ernst and Young or where PricewaterhouseCooper or whatever do, like, a envelope, and we have tuxedos and gowns, we announce who who the patient we're gonna dismiss is at the end of the year. Think that sounds like a a fun idea.

But, yeah, I mean, you know, we all have the patient that we see on the schedule. We're just like, oh my god. They're brutal. And then just, like, drains you for the whole day.

You know? It's never as bad as you thought it was gonna be either, but, yeah, I don't know. It's it's yes. The answer is yes.

You should. And I should do it more, and I think we all could do it more because there's just people that aren't the right fit for us.

You know? And and that's true of everybody. You can't be everyone's dentist. Sheila, I have a question about the Pearl voice.

Yes.

So we listen to a lot of Taylor Swift in my practice. Am I gonna have, like, the the lyrics of karma in the middle of all my chart notes?

Absolutely.

No. I mean, I'm fine with that, actually. If the Texas State Board, you know, wants to know that, you know, Karma is is my breeze in the hair on the weekend, I'm fine with that. But does it does it know what it's still listening to as far as, like, back background and ambient stuff?

Yes. It is a really good question, though, because we wanna you and your patient, and be able to remove other areas, especially background noise, especially when it comes to perio charting. Right? You wanna be three two three, three two three, and not hear the hygienist in the next room.

So it has been gone it has gone through so many different practices. I've tried it in my practice where there's fifteen ops, and we have about seven hygienists going at once, and it's very fast. So it's nice to not have to worry too much about that, and it'll summarize your notes. You can even put them in a SOAP note.

You can add templates in. You can add what type of, you know, etch or bond or what, you know, what chord number you're using in each prep, so that you can really move through your notes faster. But it is a great question. It has to be fast.

It has to remove all of the, you know, extraneous noises and has to be accurate, and that's what we have seen from practitioners. So we're looking forward to back.

And, yeah, I think that, again, saving time to get out of the office, you know, sooner is key and moving through knowing that, you know, when you go to sleep at night, your notes are done, and you don't have to worry about medically, legally, all of that other great stuff that we're always keeping us up at night. So, yeah, really thankful you walking us through such an important topic.

And, for those of you looking for the CE, that will be mailed out to all of you on this call. So you will receive an email and also a recording of this video. We would love to have you back on some of our additional webinars. We usually do one to three per month at hello pearl dot com backslash webinar, and we look forward to seeing all of you in the future. And we will say goodnight.

And Thank you so much.

Go, Spurs. Go.

Alright. Thank you, doctor Austin.

Have a good one.

Bye bye.

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