Shadowing Experience: Oral Surgery
The week of Thanksgiving break gave me a great opportunity to spend some of my down time at home in the realm of medicine and dentistry. I shadowed an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon and had an absolute blast doing so. This really gave me an insight into an unfamiliar setting:
- The large group practice - The practice has two permanent general dentists, and 1 specialist, each in his or her own wing including: orthodontics, endodontics, pedodontics, and oral and maxillofacial surgery. A lot of stuff going on, to say the least.
- Oral Surgery/Specialization - The act of specializing is so far down the road for me, but as I talked with the oral surgeon, it really isn’t. The best advice I received was to act as if you are going to specialize the first day you enter dental school. If you decide in your 4th year that you’ve found your niche in say *blank specialty, but you were just getting by the past three years grade wise, it is going to take a lot more work and time to get there. The experiences my surgeon described to me from his residency training were unbelievable.
- City Setting - I loved being in the city setting, in a hybrid between the suburbs and the downtown environment. My surgeon’s interactions with his patients were amazing and the fact that during surgery we were looking through huge glass windows towards the busy city five stories below, was very unique.
The procedures I was able to watch were very, very cool. I saw many extractions (a lot of wisdom teeth) and some exposed bonds (exposing a tooth that never surfaced and attaching a bracket/chain so an orthodontist can pull the tooth up), while attending many surgical consults. About half the procedures just used local anesthetics (no anesthesia) and the other half the patient elected to go completely asleep (IV/anesthesia cocktails). I was also able to spend some time over in endodontics and see some root canals. I was very fortunate to be at such a great practice with such friendly and giving assistants and great dentists and specialists. Their chair-side manner is something that I will be working towards from now until my 5000th patient and beyond.
