it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions straightsmilesolutions.com and today we're
going to talk about orthodentists and don't get an orthodensis confused with an orthodontist
two different things now if you are marketing an orthodentist in your practice you need to be
very careful in how you market an ortho dentist it's not the same thing as an orthodontist and
orthodontist is the general dentist who does only ortho so you can't say practice limited to ortho
because that would be overstepping so talk to your attorney and how you phrase it because each state
is going to have their own dental practice act and their own laws and i do not want to
tell you how to phrase it i've seen how some people do it i'm not sure if it's legal or not
but yes you can totally be a general dentist who does only ortho you just need to make it crystal
clear that that's who you are and that you never did go to a residency that you are just preferring
to do orthodontics now a lot of gps and even sorry a lot of dsos and even a lot of orthodontists hire
orthodentis to help basically get things rolling in their practice now i don't recommend that the
orthodontist does the treatment plans i i know plenty orthodontists high-end orthodontists that
employ orthodentists to do their bread and butter you know they're basically there to supervise
they're doing a liner checks they're taking braces off they're cleaning up extra flash
they're cleaning up glue they're detailing but then they're also there you know a lot of times
orthodontists need uh have patients that need like bondings of veneers and their laterals
or restorative work and unless the patient was referred directly from a specific gp who
was asking for that cosmetic work you know it's okay if you have an orthodontist in your practice
who also likes to do restorative work you can also have the orthodontist be responsible for a
hygiene sub practice within the practice it can be a cash hygiene practice you can do a lot of things
because it is really convenient to have your patients teeth clean now of course i'm going to
warn you if you start dipping into gp world you're basically now a multidisciplinary practice you're
going to stop getting referrals from gps out there but you know a lot of orthodontists don't care so
you know they're like tired of marketing anyway so this helps defeat their practice so um tired
of fruit baskets and everything so you know it's really depends on what direction you want to go
for other dentists are going to be a heck of a lot more affordable than orthodontist
orthodontists are going to ask for you know 1400 to 2000 a day plus bonuses
um whereas an orthodontist might be fine with seven eight nine hundred dollars a day
you know about half the price maybe some bonuses if they help to sell some cases so i i think it's
a smart move and i work with ortho dentists all the time matter of fact i work with plenty
doctors who own their own practices maybe they're a little on the older side not old because i'm
in my 40s but you know old for dentistry where they've decided hey i really enjoy ortho i don't
want to do this bread and butter dentistry anymore i'm just going to do only the ortho or maybe ortho
and implants or something the lucrative high-end specialty work in my practice and
i'm gonna let the young whipper snappers do all the bread and butter work and the hygiene checks
so nothing wrong with that matter of fact it's a super brilliant idea if you own a practice
i highly recommend it you're going to retire much more comfortably than you ever would and do a lot
less work and you're going to enjoy things better so and that's something we can definitely train
you up on if you're interested in learning to be an orthodontist it's going to take a few years you
know of helping you with your cases and finishing basically it's basically residency you know it's
exactly what we do in orthodontics residency we're there for two and a half three years we start a
ton of cases and we finish a ton of our own cases as well as other people's cases and we learn from
the cases that we do and we learn as we go that's what we do in residency that's all the residency
is you know it's not just sitting in classes all day long it's just doing cases and learning about
the cases that we're doing and do a little bit doing a little bit of everything you know so
the more cases you do the more you're going to learn because there's only so many iterations
and variations of ortho out there eventually you're going to start seeing things repeat itself
and your mind is like oh it's like it's not like taking the sat you know like if you take the sat
practice test enough times and you have support or you're making sure you're making corrections
on the stuff you're doing eventually you've seen every single question that's there it
might be slightly different variation phrased a slightly different way slightly different words
um slightly different numbers but it's the same darn question so you just basically blast it it's
easy right same thing with ortho the more we do the more we've seen and done and you know what to
do you're like boom i've done this before this is this case is just like so-and-so's case last year
i remember exactly what to do i remember what the parts the tricky parts were i'm gonna do it the
same way you know and you basically just have your own little plan on each different type of case and
you know that's something we can definitely help you with we can tell you what we would
do and why we would do it but like i said any ortho mentor that you work with is gonna do
things slightly differently and you're going to notice that they have different ways they like to
do things whereas i'm super non-extraction airway friendly always focusing on forward growth making
things wider better airways facial profiles there's a lot of people out there that just
are out there to be sloppy and do things fast and take teeth out you know and they don't really see
the value in an airway so whereas i do so you know that's how we do things but very
rarely does a case completely stump me i mean if it's so difficult it's probably a surgical
case and i'm not gonna try to do it with regular braces or or aligners if it's a surgical case
you know it's a hard surgical case so anyways all right hopefully this was helpful and if
you're interested in learning more about being an orthodontist feel free to reach out to us thanks