Why The Cosmetic Dentist Also Needs Good Counseling Skills

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The cosmetic dentist needs a number of skills. He or she, for one, has to be well grounded in general dentistry. They also need some rather specialized skills in some specific areas of dentistry. Here we are looking at the likes of orthodontics (seeing that a considerable percentage of their patients will be presenting with teeth alignment issues), as well as higher than average knowledge of dental pharmacology. The latter is the case because the other major category of problems they will be encountering, that of teeth coloring issues, mostly have chemical solutions: the various teeth whiteners. A good knowledge of prosthodontics might help too, as the other category of patients who seek the cosmetic dentist's help are those that are looking for teeth restoration solutions.

Now the fact that a dentist should have all the aforementioned skills is quite obvious. What may not be very obvious, though, is the fact that a cosmetic dentist also needs some good counseling skills.

In order to understand why the cosmetic dentist needs good counseling skills, it would be worth having insight as to why people seek the help of cosmetic dentistry, in the first place. And while things like the search for white teeth, the search for well aligned teeth, the search for teeth restoration solutions and so on may be mentioned, the ultimate motivation that drives people to cosmetic dentists' surgeries is the 'search for happiness.'

In today's world, few honest people would argue with the assertion that beauty, almost always, equals happiness. In fact, to a large extent too, beauty also equals success: with people who are perceived as being good looking generally ending up getting better economic opportunities than their aesthetically disadvantaged counterparts.

Yet in most cases, as psychologists will tell you, what matters in terms of how much happiness or success their inborn (or acquired) beauty brings to people is not as much as how much that beauty really is, but rather how the people in question feel about themselves. Generally, people who feel bad about themselves end up looking somewhat unattractive - whatever their physical endowments, with the people who feel good about themselves ending up looking rather appealing, again, quite irrespective of their physical endowments. Now the problem that those who feel that they don't look good face is when they start to imagine that it is their physical endowment that is behind their perceived bad looks - whereas, in most cases, the problem is how they feel about themselves.

Under that impression, the person in question will make an appointment with a professional like the cosmetic dentist, looking to have something like the misalignment of their teeth, or their less that perfect teeth coloring sorted, and hoping that doing this will instantly make them 'look good' and consequently make them be happy. Now, in a case like this, the cosmetic dentist is under the obligation to perform for them the procedure they are in need of. But she also has to make it known to them it is ultimately how they will feel about themselves, following the procedure (rather than the procedure per se), that will make them look good and therefore be happy. And it is in passing along messages like these that counseling skills become essential in a cosmetic dentist. This is of course, in addition to the fact that the cosmetic dentist - like all other dentists -will often have to reassure her patients about the procedures she has to perform on them and maybe about their looks in general. All this makes counseling skills, on top of good technical dentistry skills, quite indispensable to the cosmetic dentist.

by: James Maloney

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