Teaching sedation dentistry is almost second nature to me by now.  I have been training dentists and their team members on the techniques, pharmacology, psychology and safety protocols of oral sedation for a decade.

But recently I had the pleasure of leading a six-hour sedation dentistry overview for actual dental school students.  I found the experience, well, educational.   The 30 or so dentistry students joined me at the Micro Dental Laboratories classroom complex near Oakland, California.  Many of them were seniors completing their undergraduate studies at the Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry at the University of the Pacific and at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Dentistry.

What I discovered is that since my days nearly three decades ago at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine not much has changed – and so much has changed!

The students who voluntarily came to hear me lecture at Micro Dental Labs were – like my Penn class – bright, inquisitive, motivated and among the best-trained dental students in the world. 

Yet there were differences, too – both cosmetically and substantively. 

The most obvious difference on the face of it was the greater presence of women and minorities among the graduating class.  Today’s dental school students more proportionately represent the populations they will serve – a most positive evolution.

Academically, I believe, these students will graduate better prepared to attend to the oral health of their patients than we were thanks largely to advances in both the clinical and theoretic foundations of their education.

While dental schools remain years away from incorporating formal sedation dentistry training into their curriculums, today’s dental students are well aware of the availability of such protocols and how sedation dentistry enables dentists to best serve patients who otherwise avoid regular oral health care due to fear and anxiety.

The students who attended my lecture will, in all likelihood, eventually return to a classroom to receive the complete, continuing education courses they’ll require in order to offer their patients sedation dental care.  In my day, we had no such post-school choices.

But there is another major difference between the dental students of my era and these dental students: debt. 

The current costs of a dental education and the fiscal cavities almost all of these students will bear upon graduation will afflict them and influence their career path for years to come. 

Few of the students, if any, will have the financial wherewithal to open their own practices as early after graduation as we did.  Rather, they will have to align themselves initially with existing dental practices or community clinics and not always work in their preferred locations.

I’d like to believe that the main reason these graduating dental students came to hear me speak is that they understand that oral sedation protocols, such as those developed by DOCS Education, are a valuable addition to their formal education when it comes to serving patient needs.

But I strongly suspect that these students also have reasoned, like so many established dentists who take our continuing education courses, that providing popular oral sedation services to their patients in 2010 is not only a safe, effective and valued patient option, it is also a fiscal necessity.

This became abundantly clear to me upon the completion of my formal presentation to the dental school students.  It was 3 p.m. in the afternoon and my allotted time had come to an end after a terrific give and take on the clinical and academic foundations of sedation dentistry.

The students hung in with me the entire six hours – not a one of them kicked back and blew off the lecture – as is quite common and understandable among graduating seniors after years of such lectures.

So I was not expecting the final question.  Would I be willing, one of the students wondered, to stay on and discuss the financial aspects of successfully incorporating sedation dentistry into their future practices?

I did stay on, as did most of the students, and we talked about money and marketing and the inextricable link between profits and quality professional service.

As it turned out, although I was the lecturer and thought that I was donating my time, travel expenses and a catered lunch to the students, they repaid me many times over by reminding me of a valuable lesson.

Dentists who want to serve their patients and communities in an optimal way can’t do so wearing financial blinders.  To repay student loans, establish oneself in a practice, alert the community to what services are available, and remain dedicated to that community for a lifetime, dentists must understand and respect the economics of our profession.

In my dental school days, most of us didn’t think often about the profit motive of dentistry and those who did, didn’t typically say so aloud.

These dental students are no less dedicated and no more financially self interested than we were.  But they are pragmatists.  At an early stage in their professional careers they understand better than we ever did that to be their best as healthcare providers they must also learn to maximize their income potential.

It’s a lesson well worth remembering.