A Patient Speaks to Dentists
We all have blind spots: for example, it can be difficult for us, dentists, to see things from our patients’ point of view which in turn impairs effective communication.
In August, I published a blog post titled “What are you Willing to Change to Help Your Patients’ Oral Health?” written by Dr Clive Friedman, Don Morrow and Jennifer Irwin. A piece that, I hope, has led you to approach prevention from a Motivational Interviewing perspective to elicit your patients’ own desire to change. I hope that you are also finding out that this approach builds trust and relationships.
Today I offer you excerpts from a book I just finished reading: “A Few Words From The Chair | A Patient Speaks to Dentists” by David Clow and available from AMAZON
David feels that dentists could be the most important health professionals patients know in the health care crisis we are experiencing now… if only we chose to spend more time building relationships. He also offers ideas on how to do so. David feels that we can inspire our patients by seeing ourselves, not as dentists, but as whole persons practicing dentistry and by making our hopes and dreams part of that practice.
The paragraph below, about half way through the book, caught my attention because it is often difficult to dissociate, in dentistry, the business aspect from the clinical aspect of our work. Now that I have read David Clow’s book, I feel that there may be no need for dissociation; that business and clinical can live in harmony with one another. Here is what he writes about the Hippocratic oath:
“All of the Hippocratic oath is a value proposition.” he writes in his book . “It talks about you and your business relationship with me, implying in each word and between every line that I, the patient, am real (if that sounds obvious, take my word, many patients do not feel real to their health care providers, and many providers don’t care); that I have challenges before me that you can remediate; that you have to hold yourself to high standards of conduct to do it; and that should you fail to keep those standards, you break the bond between us that you aspire to uphold, and therefore break the oath.”
“You revere the words of the oath for their long history and their sanctity in your vocation. From my angle, Hippocrates was a business writer. A great one in fact. Two thousand three hundred years after the initial version, after numerous translations and alterations, and the business practicality of that oath is still as hard and bright as a steel probe.”
“Everything else has changed, but the character of the practitioner is still front-and-center. The oath doesn’t just tell you just to have character. It tells you to use it.”