We’ll see our patients for exams. My goal, all our goal, is to catch things when they’re smaller, when they’re manageable. Try to catch things before they get ahead of us.
Act fast. Think preventative. Help a patient to stay on top of it rather than try to catch up with a runaway train is really sometimes how it feels when it’s been too long because of all those other things that I mentioned.
It gets stressful for patients. There’s somebody that lost their trust and it’s just hard to let go of that. When we deal with maintenance, coming in for cleanings, coming in for perio maintenance, whether it’s six months, three months, thinking ahead rather than playing the catch up.
That gets frustrating for our patients. That makes them feel like there’s no point in trying. That’s the last thing that we want our patients to feel.
Again, going back to that feeling of self-empowerment, we want to make sure that our patients feel like they can do this and they can do it with us and we’re going to help them. Cleanings, fluoride application, topical things that we can do at every recall, making sure that if there’s a problem we can ship fast and deal with it then rather than doing something invasive, which is only going to perpetuate that sense of fear or a higher cost of treatment. Again, going back to that feeling that maybe they should be getting something cheaper.
Isn’t there something cheaper? Feeling like, again, they just can’t keep up. Then again, worrying about pain with certain procedures and reinforcing that anxiety for an example or an experience of pain that they had had before, worrying about that. There’s that pain anxiety cycle where if we manage pain well, that’s great, but if they’re nervous, that’s going to amplify their pain.
Then if that pain isn’t managed well, then that’s going to re-amplify the anxiety and all these different things. We want to try and stay on top of things.