Patient Communication

The #1 Step to Improving Your Dental Practice

The following are questions and concerns from a dentist and Dr. Scott Finlay’s answers and insight. Question 1: Just because I see it (diagnosis it) doesn’t mean my patients will want to treat it (even acute, painful, or blatant problems they are aware of gets put on the back burner). Question 2: How much of […]
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Part 2- Why did I say that? It’s not what I meant

Read Part 1- Why Did I say that? It’s not what I meant. It’s not just words. The environment you are in contributes to your communication as well. The communication process rarely falls apart because of the words we use. Fortunately, using the right words isn’t a problem for most of us. When communication is […]
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How to Explain Bruxism to Patients

Explaining signs, symptoms, and treatments to patients can sometimes be challenging. It can become especially challenging when using dental terminology that your patients may not be familiar with. In our dentistry courses, our faculty often share that they use pictures and illustrations to explain conditions and treatments to their patients so that they not only […]
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3 Ways Technology Helps Dentists With Patient Communication

If you are anything like me (and most of our faculty), you like your gadgets and apps. I’ve got my smartphone, tablet, computer and an apple TV just to name a few. And of course, each of those devices have all kinds of apps on them. These devices and apps help make my life easier  […]
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Webinar: Dental Insurance Roundtable

Patients love having dental coverage and employers compete for employees by subsidizing these benefits; all the while insurance companies profit handsomely connecting everyone through networks. Every single dental practice is affected by 3rd party dental benefit plans on a daily basis and this subject is the focus of many questions The Dawson Academy faculty receive […]
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How to Get a Patient to Accept Dental Treatment

Sometimes it’s hard to get patients to understand and accept the need for treatment. The first thing to understand when it comes to patient acceptance is that patients won’t accept any course of treatment if they don’t understand that they have a problem. Particularly with equilibration it is important during the context of the examination […]
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Dawson Quick Tip: Has That Started Hurting YET?

Communicating to patients their issues and the ramifications of not treating those issues is essential not only to treatment acceptance, but to practicing ethical dentistry. Below you’ll find a Quick Tip on how to begin the conversation with a patient of record about an issue found.
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Dawson Quick Tip: Increasing Case Acceptance with Mindset Shift

The first step in increasing case acceptance is to think optimum oral health and to talk optimum oral health. All too often in our practices, we start listening to patient’s complaints and we get focused on a single, solitary, individual problem. And while that may be very important to the patient, we have to be […]
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Dawson Quick Tip: Elements of a Great Case Presentation

Hi. I’m Scott Finlay with a Dawson Quick Tip on case presentations. When you approach a case and try to educate your patients, there are a couple of things that you may want to consider. First, you need to find your own voice. You certainly can glean some pearls from other clinicians in how they present […]
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