We are in the news again it seems. 7 million people without an NHS dentist, and which newspaper you read will depend on who gets the blame for this. Most of the tabloids point the finger at the greedy dentists; most of the broadsheets point the finger at the government.

No matter what we do, we as a profession will never be popular. People need us, but they will never enjoy what we do. Oh, we may be liked as individuals, but there is always the worry that when they come to see us, they may need to have something done. This is because dentistry is not pleasant. Yes we can make the injections painless, put TV’s in the ceiling and have tea and coffee in the waiting room, but even if we don’t hurt them, they will always worry that we will.

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For some reason, we have to be whiter than white, we have to be pure. Why? We are just people, there is nothing special about us. Like normal people we are flawed. We make mistakes, do stupid things and make fools of ourselves, just like everyone else. We lose our tempers, we make errors of judgment in relationships and get drunk. We even sometimes get declared bankrupt, get arrested and get put in prison. One in twenty five of us are Sociopaths, just like the rest of the population. We are judgmental, bigoted, stubborn and stupid. We are addicts, we are depressed and we are suicidal. We suffer illnesses due to our lifestyles, we smoke, we don’t do enough exercise and we eat too much red meat. We are no different than anyone else. Ok, our IQ’s may be a little higher than the average, but that is meaningless. Just because we know how to do a molar endo doesn’t make us better than a bloke who sweeps the streets.

And yet we are seen to be different. This is partly because of what we do, but also partly because of how we act. You all remember the sombre faced consultant who taught you at the dental hospital, who treated everyone like a lower form of pond life. Fortunately this is becoming a dying breed. These arrogant “Sir Lancelot Spratt” characters have nearly left us, but there is still a problem within the profession that needs to be corrected. Just the fact that we call ourselves a profession puts up a barrier, a “them and us” that shouldn’t be there. Why do we always refer to the people who come to see us as “patients”? Why does the GDC “protect Patients”, instead of protecting people?

And this too will change as we slowly morph into being perceived as a more caring profession. The vast majority of us were always caring, and now we have customer service and language skills that we can employ to make this more obvious. We know now that we need to build up rapport, and to decline to treat the people we don’t like. We know that we need to spend time with people and do away with the five minute check up. And when we finally stop telling people what they need and engage in co-diagnosis to find out what the person wants, then we really will be into a golden age. Everyone will be better off…….. except for the lawyers who will see the number of people being sued decrease dramatically. People generally don’t sue people that they like, even when they make mistakes. When they know that we care for them, the whole equation changes.

And I would argue that this golden age is coming. There will be challenges, there will be set backs, but it will come. People will have respect for what we do, but will see that we are no different than them. We will only do things with the full consent of the person being treated, on people who we have rapport with and who like us. Our treatments will be relatively pain free (although never pleasant) and people will come to us in the knowledge that we are there for them. The memories of the past will be seen as a dark relic that no longer exists.