Why dentistry is a good career

Dentistry allows you to be your own boss. Dentists can balance their personal and professional lives to meet their individual needs and desires. Dentistry provides opportunities in a variety of private and public settings including private practice, teaching, research, public health and administration. The average income of a dentist is in the highest 8 percent of U. The demand for dental care will continue to grow.

The number of older adults who are keeping their teeth longer is increasing. People are more aware of the importance of regular dental care and therefore more dental services are required. Geriatric dental care and the greatly increased demand for newer services, such as implant cosmetic dentistry, will also contribute to this growth of the profession.

A career in dentistry is personally fulfilling. To serve the present and future oral health needs of their patients, dentists enjoy the challenge of a lifetime of learning. Dentistry offers minority students exceptional career opportunities. The need for dentists from minority groups is very strong.

Career opportunities for women in dentistry are also particularly prosperous at this time. I enjoy reading what my colleagues post and gain additional insight from different perspectives. CollegeXpress has helped me tremendously during my senior year of high school.

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Why dentistry is a great career choice Dentistry is a significant medical profession. Job satisfaction Dentistry is one of few careers that offer maximum job satisfaction. Related: 5 Tips High School Students Considering a Career in Medicine Being your own boss As a dentist, you can easily set up your own private clinic, which makes you the boss. Flexible schedules Health workers in other fields will tell you just how hectic it can be to practice medicine.

A good salary Another reason to become a dentist is that you can start earning a decent salary very early in your career. Job security If you're still not convinced about becoming a dentist, perhaps job security will help make up your mind.

Related: How to Evaluate a Health and Medicine Program Areas of specialization in dentistry Dentistry is a vast field with different areas of specialization. Orthodontics An orthodontist is a dental specialist who deals with the diagnosis and treatment of misaligned teeth and jaws.

Pedodontics Pedodontists are pediatric dentists who are trained specially to attend to the oral health of children and teens. Periodontics Periodontic dentists are gum specialists. Endodontics Endodontists are specialists trained to treat infections inside a tooth.

Related: Career Spotlight: Orthodontics Oral and maxillofacial surgery Oral and maxillofacial surgery focuses on the treatment of issues that have to do with the mouth, jaw, and facial tissues. Prosthodontics A prosthodontist is a replacement specialist trained to restore and replace damaged teeth.

How to become a dentist To become a dentist, you must be ready to invest in your education. Related: Great Health and Medicine Colleges in New England Choosing a career in dentistry can be one of the best life decisions you make. Join Now. Join our community of over 5 million students! Then you begin the job to learn first hand the issues with difficult patients, complaints, over regulation, rising costs, pay, stress, perpetually continuing years of training, the threat of being sued, high rate of depression and suicide and the physical demands chronic back pain, hypertension, carpal tunnel syndrome to name a few.

Adapting to the many types of people you see each day is mentally straining, along with its potentially repetitive nature. Just under half of all dentists surveyed in England and Wales disagreed that they were fairly paid, and these figures were greater in Scotland and greater still in Northern Ireland. Then there are the day to day things that go wrong, which can be stressful, such as that mouth that just won't open, the battle to run on time, the admin and paperwork which must be done contemporaneously and immaculately , broken endodontic files, failed treatment you have previously done, anxious patients, crowns not fitting, difficulty numbing a patient, repeating the same oral hygiene and diet advice, bad debts, staffing issues, broken equipment, revenue targets, UDA targets, satisfying the regulators, etc.

The good reason provides an explanation to others, the real reason gets you out of bed every day. Should the reasons be both 'good' and 'real' then one may say they have a great career. Given the breadth of minuses, there have to be some pretty good plus points to dentistry otherwise we would have long since hung up our drills and forceps to take up other careers! There have to be things that people enjoy taking away from the job, given all the hardships they have to put in to get into and stay in the career.

Quite frankly there are easier, better paid jobs with the same freedoms and controls. There are lots of good reasons below but on their own, each could be torn apart or better found in other careers. But together, the unique manner of dentistry truly shines through, as no career path offers quite the same blend of positives. Dental treatment really can help people. A successful root treatment or filling can help to remove pain; a denture may help people eat foods they may previously have struggled with.

Dentists help people's health through treating gum disease, dental caries and related pathology. This can in turn improve their quality of life.

As can the impact of changing the appearance of their teeth through teeth whitening or orthodontics. I feel that in most encounters we have with patients, we are helping them, to some extent. Even if it's simply to give them a clean bill of dental health at a routine dental visit. This goodwill can feel great. It can come immediately on the completion of treatment when you see a patient's reaction or when you see how good the bridge or filling you have done looks.

But the reason, 'I want to help people' can't be everything. It's such a short lived sensation, a few seconds at the end of a treatment — some treatments take hours to weeks to complete, which can be a lot of hard work for just a brief bit of satisfaction at the end. And not all treatment we do works, which can take a hit on morale if the end result is one's biggest motivator.

Tying your enjoyment of the job with a patient's experience and patient journey can be very satisfying for a brief moment at the end of a course of treatment — when it goes well. But it can be hugely detrimental. You end up riding that patient journey with them: you may feel their anxiety over the treatment or the pricing, you will feel their disappointment if the treatment has not gone well and you have ultimately failed to help them or their relief that it is all over. There have to be stronger reasons to go with the 'helping people' one for it to work in reality.

Looking at a well-obturated molar tooth or admiring a completed smile makeover you've done can be very satisfying and rewarding. We cannot pin all our enjoyment of the job on the end result. There has to be some enjoyment of the process.

Otherwise we'll feel every failure and every bit of disappointment the patient experiences. Compare it to a scientist researching a cure for cancer or a musician writing an album. The scientist probably cannot derive all their job satisfaction from the end result, as they may never get there. As a musician myself, I get immense pleasure from the process: the sound produced playing a sequence of notes and the harmonies upon hearing a chord or playing with other musicians. The joy does not necessarily come when I have completed a song or concert or reached whatever end goal I have set.

The long term impact of our treatment is questionable too. We may feel great doing these life-changing smile makeovers and feel like we are really improving a patient's quality of life or self well being. However, there is strong research to say our level of self-happiness returns to the same level after a life changing positive event. This is made more interesting when in contrast, life-changing negative events tend to have a greater negative effect on our base line level of happiness than positive events have on the base line level.

Think of all those patients who come in saying they 'hate dentists' and further conversation reveals this 'hate' stems from a bad experience. We don't as often get people coming in saying they 'love dentists' as a result of a positive experience. Happiness, its permanence and hedonism are complex topics that alone could provide one with a dissertation's worth of discussion but thankfully the likes of Brickman et al.

Dentistry wouldn't really be the same without the patients, so it's definitely a good career for those who like to meet new people and develop relationships with them. It's wonderful when you see people throughout different stages of their year: birthdays, Christmas, holidays and also through different stages of their lives: births, weddings, leaving school, new job etc.

If you enjoy talking and listening to people, you will get to do this a lot as a dentist. When you see a person or a family regularly enough, you end up becoming part of their lives and part of your community. One definition of dentistry is that it is, 'the art and science of oral health'. The British Dental Association BDA have used the motto that they are here to 'promote the art and science of dentistry'.

We often think of it as a science but there is definitely an artistic element, from shaping a white filling on an anterior tooth to realigning a whole arch. Admittedly, the artistic boundaries are limited to what is anatomically and ethically reasonable: a dentist is unlikely to unleash the full extent of their artistic side on a patient by turning their teeth into a surrealist sculpture. But some of the characteristics of sculpturing, for example the precision, the respect paid to symmetry and cosmetics, are shared with dentistry.

I am not sure I would do this job purely for the money. Well the money is good, it's very good. Medics certainly don't. Then work hard enough, invest in the right training, practice, give it some time and the earning potential goes even further. Therein lies the issue of the money being a great reason to choose dentistry.

It is not easy money — you have to work hard to meet your NHS targets, your revenue targets and your patients' wishes. You will struggle to get through each day if you do not find something positive to take from the job, barring money. It's a competitive career, particularly at university level.

You have to work hard to get onto and stay on the five to six year course. To get onto the course, you have to be fairly academic and get good grades. These same grades could land you on a shorter bachelors or masters degree that may lead to a job in law, banking, finance or the tech industry, all of which may lead to higher financial returns.

So the money is very good but there are jobs that offer higher incomes. What are the other financial benefits then, if any? In industries such as law, banking, finance and the tech industry, you will most likely be employed — especially in your early years.

Being self-employed gives you a lot of freedom on where you can work, how much you work a week or a year and the opportunity to take career breaks. Working with the NHS gives you a generous pension and, provided targets are met, a steady income each month.

You have a lot of control in how you wish to work, from the choice of equipment, material and dental lab to staff and premises. There will always be teeth so there will always be a need for dentists. The nature of our job may change and how we are paid but there will be employment.

It's unlikely that machines will be able to do our job and it would take a brave government to completely remove the provision of NHS dental care. Despite the ever increasing competition for jobs, it is still pretty difficult for UK graduates with a performer number to find themselves without a job. It may not be exactly where you want but there seems to be enough work out there for general dentists.

So it is a secure career — at least for now. This for me is the only reason that truly stands up on its own as a reason to do dentistry. No matter how bad things get with the administrative, business, stress or clinical side, you will always have dental science at the core of what you do. And if you like it you get to wake up every day with the knowledge that it will be at the heart of every treatment or bit of dental advice you impart that day.

Nothing can take that away.