Dental/dental hygiene trainees discuss managing patient expectations, and bias. (2023)
When you rotate through admissions, and I even found myself starting to almost become more biased toward extraction by the end because your first couple of days, you’re like, “Okay. If you want to save this tooth that’s hurting: root, root canal, crown, whatever,” and then towards the end, because 90%, probably more than that, decide to extract the tooth. So then I felt myself just anticipating that they were going to want to extract it. And then if they did want to save the tooth, and we all want to save teeth. We’re dentists. So I found myself becoming more biased towards that, like, “Oh, did you want to try,” and just assuming they want extraction.