I have been a dentist since 1986. Please, do the math. I’ve had and still have plenty of dentist friends, as you can imagine. Let me tell you. We are quite a “special” crowd.
Have you heard about neuroplasticity? This is an ability that our brain must adapt to what happens outside, and most of it is related to repetitive events or actions. It is the same principle as AI, applied to neurons, so we could call it neural intelligence NI.
The level of stress the dentist (and the whole team, for that matter) is subject to can be hard to seize for someone outside the profession. It is related to multiple factors, which you can refer to in a different article in this same blog. The consequences are tremendous, the most dramatic being suicide, which runs very high in the profession.
But other consequences affect the dental market as a whole. The end-users in this market are 3.5 billion patients receiving dental treatment globally. That being said, the main drivers of the evolution of this market are two million dentists with their decisions and behavior.
Willpower depletion in the profession is such that dentists turn away from decision-making situations that do not directly affect their patients.
Then, who drives the evolution of the profession? Big corporations find strategies or paths to earning billions with technology that will not necessarily benefit the patient or the dentist, and they push it to market. The answer is laughable if you look at the products and the pains/problems they are supposed to solve.
I am here discussing the Cad-Cam evolution in the dental office. Cad-cam has existed in dental offices since 1986 with Cerec-Siemens. Then how and why now such a mass invasion of intraoral scanners and CAM technology? Initially, one unstoppable company decided on a change in strategy and started its roller as it has done many times already in the past. And that did it.
Do patients benefit from it? No.
Is the quality of the prostheses built better? No -Dr. Christensen June 2021-
Do dentists gain in quality of life? No.
Is there less stress in the dental office? No.
Is it easier to take a scan than a silicone impression? No!
Can the dentist charge more for this procedure? NO.
Is the dental office overhead increased? YES.
Is financial pressure on the dentist higher? YES.
Cad-Cam is a game-changer in dental labs, 100%. But scanning in dental offices is a nightmare
for offices that do not need the added stress. Like so many other technological advancements,
all those scanners will end up in the storage room. Yes, labs will be scanning stone models and
using cad-cam to produce dental prostheses, which is their profession, not ours.
Some salespeople in the dental field are masters at selling us things we don’t need, which will take us hours of an unpaid learning curve and has no benefit for the end-user, the patient!
Yes, many dentists are money-driven, agreed. Still, as you dive deeper into all aspects of the dental market services, representing globally $435 billion, you can see the giant raptors looking at how they can take a chunk of that.
I always say there is nothing more complicated than selling to a dentist. But for a good salesperson, there is nothing easier than selling to a willpower-depleted person.
At The CrownID® Company we aim to empower the dental team and build simple willpowerreplenishing solutions that can help the team work better, which also helps patients.