Should you specialise? – PDP006

I am joined in this episode of Protrusive Dental Podcast by the likes of Harjot Bansal, Mahul Patel, Dhru Shah, Catherine Tannahill, Lourens Bester, Kiran Juj and Sunny Luthra. Yes, that’s an awful lot of guests! It HAD to be done to help answer such a monumental question that crosses every Dentists’ mind: Should you specialise? My main guest, Harjot Bansal, is studying his MClinDent in Prosthodontics at The Eastman (London). He is always happy to help and his instagram is @harjsb Need to Read it? Check out the Full Episode Transcript below! Protrusive Dental Pearl: Show your human side! This will help calm your patients down and create rapport. Here is the photo, as discussed in the podcast, I have in my surgery which has been eye-opening: Dental Elective April 2012, 1 hour from Da Nang Here is what we discuss in this episode: Why specialise?The true cost of specialising – think loss of earnings!Financial planning for specialisingHow to know which speciality is right for you? Endodontics? Perio? Prostho? Ortho?Can you be fulfilled and skilled as a General Dentist?Is it right for you? A massive thank you to all my guests on the show! Music credits: Life by KV https://soundcloud.com/kvmusicprod Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/jH8ryRw1cWgBedtime Stories by mezhdunami. https://soundcloud.com/mezhdunami Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/WCYCRged0r0Escape by Declan DP Music https://soundcloud.com/declandp Licensing Agreement 1.0 (READ) http://bit.ly/DeclanDP_MLA1 Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/PiQK_KYirio Click below for full episode transcript: Opening Snippet: Don't think you need to specialize to be good per se... Jaz's Introduction: Should you specialize? Do you ever regret that perhaps reach your full potential as a dentist because you didn't become a specialist. Or maybe you can't stand being a GDP and you yearn to limit your practice to specialize in something. Or maybe you love the variety and you don't think you could do the same kind of stuff day in day out. And the thought was puts you off. We interview today with Harjot Bansal, who's doing his MClinDent in prosthodontics at the Eastman. And it's great to have a perspective in terms of what it's like in terms of commitment, time, money, intensity, and all those things that so if you're thinking of specializing that, and that could be quite a helpful thing to consider. I've also got some gdps, and people with special interests, given their two pence about the subject, it is a bit like a debate, you know, I'm a little bit biased towards team GDP if you like, because you know, someone has to represent gdps, I will be sort of having a debate with Harjot and the guests to sort of gather different perspectives. The Protrusive Dental Pearl for this episode is to show your human side to your patients. Okay? So I sort of discovered this by accident where six months ago, I changed my surgeries, computer desktop background to a photo of me on my elective in Vietnam, it's a lovely photo op, I'll put it in my blog post. It's me with these Vietnamese children in a rural village and everyone's smiling, I think I'm handing out stickers or something, it was just a perfect shot captured. When new patients come in the addition of that photograph really creates a warming environment. If you can find a way to make an icebreaker with your patients, then that's always a great thing to do. So that has worked really well for me, I think when patients sit down, and directly in front of them, we have this big TV screen, it's got the photo of me as a desktop background. They really feel at ease, and I can see it in their body language since I put this photo up. So I mean,