In the specialty of prosthodontics, the single central crown and complex oral rehabs occupy the spotlight. At some point, public and professional interest in removable prosthetics fell out of favor.

Everyone in the dental community has experienced it, but few admit to it: FAILURE. It’s a dirty word weaved into the culture of our great profession and it is a painful reality that happens to us all.

Specialty training is both a blessing and a curse. We are thoroughly brainwashed to obsess over the nuances of tooth position, incisal edge morphology, shade analysis, and facial proportions.

Here’s a short story. It’s a Tuesday afternoon at the University of New England College of Dental Medicine in Portland, ME. I don’t carry many regrets with me, but I would eventually regret this day.

At 11:30 on the morning of May 29, 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary together with Tenzing Norgay summited Mt. Everest. At 33 years of age, Hillary had at last finally climbed the highest peak on Earth.

Viewed from the outside, beautiful before and after photos from top clinicians have great potential to portray prosthodontics as an appealing endeavor, but this specialty is not for everyone.

“It’s gotta get worse before it gets better...I will have to tear you down to build you back up.” My chairside assistant hears me say this all day, every single day – I realize that I must sound like a broken record.

In all my presentations, I make certain to give credit where credit is due. I honor the technicians , dental assistants, and my family with their unwavering patience and tremendous personal sacrifice.

A commonly held belief is that it takes 10,000 hours of dedication and practice to master a given skill. The math reveals that this roughly works out to around five years of intensive training.

As a private practice clinician, I’m a goal-oriented and motivated individual. As it turns out, daily enthusiasm is both a fickle and ephemeral emotion that can rapidly sublimate into indifference.

In the blink of an eye, an unseen novel coronavirus managed to turn our planet inside-out and upside-down. As the world-wide pandemic spread, our dental specialty in particular, was ground to a halt.

Metamorphosis is one of the most remarkable of all phenomena in nature. The creatures that undergo this biological expedition are unwitting participants in the inevitable cascade of future events.