Man 1: Alright guys got about five minutes with you, so my name is Jovan and I graduate in
eight months I'm here today to talk to you about something that we all
experienced but never really talked about. You wake up, take a shower get
ready, try your best to hide your road rage, go to class, probably not pay
attention, go to clinic do an amalgam, go home go to sleep and then get up and do
it all over again.
This is our routine, we get lost in it after a while you become
numb to it all it may start with subtle things you stop smiling when greeting
your patient you may not listen so closely to their stories anymore you go
to school you get your stuff done and you go about your way
you become less like a person and more like a machine
and then you become exhausted. All of a sudden realize you've been sitting in a
chair staring at a wall and you don't even know what you've been thinking
about for the past two and a half hours honestly it can get scary it's easy to
imagine that in the middle of all this mess you can make bad decisions but I'm
talking about now are the professional decisions ethical decisions and I know
what you're thinking we're all so confident that we know how to
act and we act how we're supposed to act we read the news stories about the
nightmares that give our profession a bad name and we shake our heads at how
ridiculous it all seems but there's much more going on here and what I'm talking
about are the gray areas what we wake up in every day as dental students and as
dentist's if you don't know what I'm talking about
you will soon. conversations on filling materials treatment plan recommendations
issues on whether to get out the high speed or just watch it a little bit
longer it's what we all experience but don't talk about it's the risk we have
of giving into the long tiring stressful life of a dentist the day in and day out
the risk of seeing your patient as something other than a living breathing
person with their own thoughts and feelings and wants
you'll look at what's sitting in your chair and you'll see a requirement a
grade a competency a paycheck anything other than what it really is but when
you face these situations these moments that claw at your core, I want you to
stop and I want you to remember. Remember that college kid stuck in the corner of
the library putting in hours of studying to get here. Remember the person you were
nervously sitting in the middle of the biggest interview of your life and then
that inevitable question comes up. Why do you want to be a dentist? To help
others. To help others. Imagine if this patient was someone else
your mother, yourself even, of course everything I'm saying to you right now
you've all heard before you've seen before you've read before it's something
we all know but don't talk about hold on to what's true and good
without you it's just a book it's just a bunch of pages and words without meaning
remember who you are and what's important and why you did all of this in
the first place.
Be the doctor you were always meant to be