The Continuum Approach

There are so many paths you can take for extending your dental education in today's world.

So much information is shared but who should you listen to and which path is right for you?

So thank you for your interest in the Continuum and I want to explain why I take the approach that I do.

Now this selection of courses this is put together to help you build confidence.

It's not just confidence with how to do something but confidence in the way you deal with people and how you deal with your patients.

What I want to see you do is I want to see you grow as a clinician.

I want to see you be more comprehensive. See more with your patient's. To be able to help your patients achieve better health, better outcomes.

Help grow your practice by being more comprehensive.

There's a lot of things in our practices which because we're not trained we just don't see them. Just like if you buy a car you see all the other people with that type of car but before you bought it you never saw them, so what I want to teach you in this series of courses is how to see.

• How to see the patients who need work that you missed before.
• How to have confidence so that when you present treatment they're more likely to go ahead with treatment because you come from a place of confidence.
• How to stay calm and enjoy your dentistry more?
• How to be more productive?
• How could be more efficient?
• Get more done in the same amount time with less stress.

So all of these things come from having a confidence in our skills.

To get to that point where dentistry goes smoothly and where it is efficient and where it's very profitable and where we can communicate it well to patients first we have to have a foundation of solid confident skill.

Not knowledge but skill and skill only comes from repetition.

So my courses are quite different from many. When you do one of my hands on courses you start in the morning and you do hands on all day until you're tired just like real practice.

When you do the same thing again and again and again, it develops this muscle memory and it develops this confidence and it gives you actual skill to take back to your practice and everything else in our practice is built on having confidence in our skill.

The series of courses goes posterior, anterior direct, anterior indirect and full arch.

Now, why is it in this order?

Posterior Dentistry

So we start with posterior. It's really the bedrock of dentistry, isn't it? Doing fillings on back teeth and doing crowns on the back, doing onlays on back teeth, it's the basic building block of restorative dentistry. It all starts here. The ability to bond. The ability to do core build-ups. The ability to do a crown prep that is accurate, precise, efficient.

So often the ways that we prep, the way we come out of dental school prepping, is not only very bad but it's very slow and we want to teach you how to be fast and good because good prepping is efficient, it's fast and it's also excellent.

So how do we do this? My courses are very heavy on hands on.

Yes, there's a theoretical component which is online but when you sit down at our course you sit there and you do hands on all day you do a lot of repetitions in a very short period of time again and again and again until you can prep all the way around a tooth very efficiently.

Anterior Dentistry and Veneer Mastery

So in posterior we're going to build these basic skills and then we're going to take you into anterior and the big difference with anterior dentistry is the shape. It's not colour, it's not all the other things, it's the shape of teeth and you can't get a technician to do great shapes for you if you don't know the shape of teeth yourself.

You can't make a patient, when a patient says I'm not quite happy and you don't know the shape of teeth, you don't know what to fix.

So in anterior dentistry we have two courses; direct and indirect. We are going to do mockups. We're going to do composite anteriors. We're going to do the shape again and again and then we're going to do preps on those shapes and we're going to do veneer prep so that we've really hit you with a lot of preps and crowns, veneers and just building the shape of teeth.

So now we've got the basic building blocks of restorative and then we've got the shape and now we're going to put it together and do a full arch of treatment.

Full Arch Dentistry

Now it's important to learn full arch dentistry because one it teaches you to see.

So sometimes we see people doing veneers or they're doing an anterior case and because they don't see the whole arch and they don't see the whole functional picture, they're going to get breakages and then you get unhappy patients and most of all you get the cost of doing stuff again.

One of the most unprofitable and unenjoyable things you can do is redoing your work after it broke quickly. So full arch is about teaching to see the risk factors and you see all those full mouth rehabilitation issues and to see problems that are not just an anterior or a posterior; they shouldn't be done in segments, they should be done all at once for the patient's sake. Otherwise, the patient's going to end up doing part of their dentistry again quite soon.

In full arch, we're going to teach you how to do full arch temporaries, full arch preps. Get that hand going round and round and round teeth so prepping again and again so you start to build that muscle memory and it really has a huge impact on your ability to do big cases but also small cases that only comes from doing lots and lots of repetitions.

In full arch, we are also going to teach you how to capture the bite because when you prep all the teeth you lose the bite and how to make big sets of temporaries.

Look forward to seeing you at the continuum.