Category: Opinion & Editorial

This is my second year as the director of the Practice Management curriculum for the College of Dentistry for OSU. I teach a year-long series of three courses for third- and fourth-year predoctoral dental students. I have 37 years of private practice experience upon which to draw and I hope to give them the benefit of my time as a dentist. As ... [continue reading]

I often give my columns to any one of my kids to review before I hand them in. I ask them to check for readability to some extent, but really I am checking for palatability. I often express strong opinions, rooted in experience but sometimes our own unique lens prevents us from being objective. The above is my disclaimer. Lately I have been ... [continue reading]

The ODA Leadership Institute is coming soon! Thinking about leadership is something I do often, and it is a recurring theme in my practice management class. I look for stories and examples for the students to understand what good leadership looks like! Here are a couple of models for you to consider. Spring is also coming, though you would have ... [continue reading]

My children recently had an unexpected snow day from school, and it was like Christmas day all over again. In contrast to my childhood winters in rural Fort Loramie, Ohio, delays and cancellations are infrequent in our metropolitan school district. This special announcement was met with a morning frenzy peppered with the age-old question “What ... [continue reading]

The ODA has been blessed with strong leaders over the years. We lost another paragon in December with the passing of Dr. Denny Burns. I met Denny while I was a student delegate and his character loomed large in my initial impressions of the dental association. The current ODA leadership learned of his passing via email from Executive Director Dave ... [continue reading]

The recent COVID-19 pandemic made “vaccine hesitancy,” relative to reluctance about receiving vaccination against the culprit virus, a household word. That term had been around a while, but less known and previously related to the international discussion about all childhood vaccinations and their implication in the spike of autism spectrum ... [continue reading]

Before I was ever in leadership with organized dentistry, before I was a dentist, and before I even knew what my life’s work would look like, I was part of a community – a group of individuals existing together through residential, familial and relational proximity. They were there when I was born; they were in my school and in my church. No ... [continue reading]

As we approach the end of the year, I always become reflective and spend time being thankful for the joys of being a dentist and a member of the ODA. One thing that I feel we don’t appreciate as much as we should is peer support. We need to treasure the support of our peers and offer it wherever we can! As an author, one of the great ... [continue reading]

As I write this today, I look up at the airplane flight monitor and I am somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean almost at the tip of Greenland. I am on my way back home just in time for Thanksgiving after going on an amazing 15 day trip to Pakistan. Initially we built our trip around my husband’s invitation to speak and conduct a surgical workshop ... [continue reading]

When asked what his favorite composition was, bandleader Duke Ellington said, “the next one!” That’s the nature of the artistic process. We’re fully alive and engaged in the space between now and what’s about to come. We’re hearing so much about burnout in the profession. While there are many causes of individual burnout, it’s ... [continue reading]