This week on the Dental Up podcast Shaun Keating (founder of Keating Dental Lab) and Dr. Jack Ringer talk AACD accreditation, top 2 facial qualities people find most attractive and final thoughts on the fantasy football season coming to an end.
Find the Podcast Notes: https://keatingdentallab.com/podcast
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Full Transcription
Shaun Keating: Hey, everybody. Shaun Keating here, we’re at this week’s Dental Up podcast. I’d like to welcome Dr. Jack Ringer here, a good friend of mine. We’re really excited about bringing him on board and having him just teach us a lot of different things when it comes to dentistry. He practices just up the street here in Laguna, or Anaheim Hills.
Jack Ringer DDS: Anaheim Hills.
Shaun Keating: Real close to us, we’re excited. You’ve actually been here before lecturing, I think with 3M here.
Jack Ringer DDS: Correct. Correct.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, I remember when I met you back then. I’m like, “God, this guy is awesome,” and then here we are, you’re going to be working with us on our podcast this year, real excited. We’re going to be doing this every week, so if you miss anything, you can find it at keatingdentallab.com/podcast, and also if you want to know our latest promos, you can go to keatingdentallab.com/promo. Again, I want to thank you all for coming on in, listening to us. We’re excited. The year’s about to end. What have we got? About a week before Christmas coming up. I’m real excited because this is the time of year that football’s coming to an end, playoffs and all that, and I’m really into football. I think you got a little fantasy going too. How are you doing in your fantasy this year?
Jack Ringer DDS: I love fantasy, but this year, nope, in the cellar, kind of frustrated. Always looking forward to Sunday, to play and get my team going, but everyone’s injured or out, so I’m now just more of a spectator than a player, but it’s still fun.
Shaun Keating: It really is. You know, I hated it. I’m in two leagues and the first league, my three top players were injured, just like [everyone else 00:01:33]: Adrian Peterson, and it was just frustrating. I’m on my B league team, on the second league, so the top two guys of the B league get to go to the A league. I’ve always done good in the A league, but I’m in last place there, so the bottom two get out, so I’m out, but I’m in the championship game anyway, so we’re very lucky.
Jack Ringer DDS: You sound very hooked, very hooked.
Shaun Keating: I like it because football, my team’s always been the Rams and they moved away and they came back and they’re horrible now, but I’ve liked the Rams. Yet it’s something that with fantasy, we’ve got players on all different teams, so it’s really neat where I can watch Seattle because I got a player there, and I can watch Green Bay, I got a player there, so you’re more involved with the whole NFL.
Jack Ringer DDS: 100%.
Shaun Keating: It’s like you’re looking at everything instead of your just one team, so I really like it. I’ve never won it in all the years playing, and I haven’t won it this year yet, so we’re going to just …
Jack Ringer DDS: Keep your fingers crossed.
Shaun Keating: Keep our fingers crossed. I want to reach out real quick. A good friend of mine, Jason Negro, is the head coach at a school called St. John Bosco. They’re in Orange County/LA County. I used to coach football against this guy in youth football back when my boys were like eight and ten years old, so he just went on to different high schools. He went to Trabuco Hills, he went to Bellflower, and then he’s been at St. John Bosco for the last few years and he’s won two state championships. He won it again over the weekend against Concord De La Salle, and they just handed it to him. Hats off to Jason Negro, man. I always told him someday if I could ever own an NFL team, I would make him my coach. Well, that ship’s sailed because the damn teams went from a couple hundred million to a couple billion now.
Jack Ringer DDS: Well, you have that, you have a good life.
Shaun Keating: If I can be a couple billion dollar lab, maybe I can get me a team. I’d probably have to go out to Cleveland or somewhere. No, just kidding, nothing against Cleveland, even though Cleveland is-
Jack Ringer DDS: Win-less.
Shaun Keating: They’re fricking win-less, dude. They’re going to go 0 and 17, I think, and that’s just not something good.
Jack Ringer DDS: It’s sad.
Shaun Keating: That is sad. Where’s Johnny Manziel when you need him?
Jack Ringer DDS: In a bar.
Shaun Keating: In a bar, fricking hanging out with them Kardashians or something. Anyways, also I just want to thank you really for coming on board.
Jack Ringer DDS: My pleasure.
Shaun Keating: I’m excited about it, and I know my dentists that we talk with all the time, they’re always looking for things to practice better, to practice smarter. I always say work smarter, not harder, so whatever we can do and whatever topics we come up with, I know that it’s going to be appreciated, not only from our current accounts, but just for doctors out there that really don’t use my lab. That’s the whole thing here. Our thing is to try to help doctors practice better and to make their job easier, so we have nothing in this. No sponsors are doing this for us really. I’m doing this, putting this on just to help out there.
Jack Ringer DDS: To give back.
Shaun Keating: To give back, and I can’t think of another guy as good to come in and help us out than you. If you could, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your career, where you went to college, your family. Just tell me a little bit about yourself there, Jack.
Jack Ringer DDS: It’s a long interesting story. I was actually born in South Africa. My grandparents had immigrated to South Africa when it was a British colony. Way back in the day, a million years ago when I was a kid, my father was into computers when it was just the infancy of computer science. He realized that in order to have a career out of that and learn it, he had to go to the United States, so we immigrated to the United States when I was about four. I grew up in Boston and then in San Diego. Then I was at my first year of undergrad school at UC San Diego, and my parents decided to go back to South Africa for a few years. I was 17, 18, and they say, “We’re going to South Africa,” and obviously my first response was goodbye. I’m not going, I’m living on the beach in La Jolla, having a good time.
My family, meaning my mom, my dad, my brother and my sister, went to South Africa and I stayed on. Like I said, this was my first year, and about three months after they left, I get a telegram … if any of you remember what telegrams are … saying you’re accepted to dental school in South Africa. I was puzzled by this because number one, I never applied, and number two, I didn’t know I wanted to be a dentist. My dad did it for me because he knew better, and in the British system of education, you go straight from high school into medical or dental. They cut out the first couple of years of general education, so it’s a six year program, rather than two four year programs like we do here in the States.
I locked myself in a room for a couple of days trying to figure out what I should do, and my dad made a deal: Come out for a year. If you like it, great. If not, you can go back to the States, so I went to South Africa. I didn’t really like it that much, but I met a girl, and she talked me into staying.
Shaun Keating: Beautiful.
Jack Ringer DDS: Then after I’m committed to staying, she dumped me, which wasn’t fun, but that was okay. Then eventually I met my beautiful wife, Lauren, who I married down there. I did my dental degree in South Africa, came back to the United States. I went to UCLA and did my boards and eventually about after a year, got my license and my wife and I moved down to Orange County, and what do they say? Everything is history from there. I bought a little condo, worked at a few different practices until I found my little practice that I’m in now, some 35 years ago. I’ve been in the same place in Anaheim Hills. Yeah, so back in those days, dentistry was a different game than it is today.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Jack Ringer DDS: We didn’t have nearly the technology and the treatment options that we do today, as you know.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Jack Ringer DDS: I’m sure back in the day with your lab, the majority of your work were gold crowns and some PFMs, right?
Shaun Keating: We had some ugly PFMs back in the day, you know?
Jack Ringer DDS: In our world, it was drill and fill, a lot of silver fillings, PFMs, bridges, very routine, but when I started, it was just on the cutting edge of cosmetic dentistry coming into play. I’ll never forget, I went to the California Dental Association in Anaheim. This was in 1982 or something like that, first one I’d ever gone to, and I walk up to this booth and it was a company called DenMat, and the came out with a thing called Rembrandt.
Shaun Keating: Rembrandt.
Jack Ringer DDS: It was this box with a light and this liquid stuff, and they said paint it on these teeth and let it zap it with a light and you’d have this beautiful smile, and I got sucked in, boy. Bought the whole kit, came home, worked on it and found out it doesn’t really work.
Shaun Keating: [crosstalk 00:09:15] work as much as they said it does, but the whitening worked a little bit.
Jack Ringer DDS: I was so excited about all of this stuff. I wanted to get into making people prettier. Not just fixing their need, but also their want. People come to a dentist most of the time because they have to, and they hate you. You watch TV shows, you never see any medical shows that have George Clooneys about dentists. Dentists are always like heavy duty dudes, you know, you go to the dentist. Anyways, I got really excited about this stuff and started aligning myself with different dentists in LA who knew more about the new stuff coming out, like the Mark Friedmans up at USC and people like that. I started trying to learn and learn and learn and learn, because I was getting really excited about this stuff. We weren’t married to insurance companies in those days.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, it was like fee for service [crosstalk 00:10:16].
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, relatively, but people had good insurance. You could have a small boutique practice and do really well. I started doing that for a few years, but still you’re working in your own little bubble and you don’t know really what’s going on out there too much. One year I went to meeting at the American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry, the AAED, very prestigious academy. Again, it was the early days of that academy. It had only been around … I don’t know, maybe about five years at that time maybe; maybe a little longer. There was a dentist there, his name was Bruce Crispin. He was actually one of the … I call it like the founders of contemporary esthetic dentistry. He ran the restorative department at UCLA.
Shaun Keating: Okay. Was that before McLaren?
Jack Ringer DDS: Yep.
Shaun Keating: Obviously, yeah.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yep, before Ed. Ed took over Bruce’s program.
Shaun Keating: Right after, okay.
Jack Ringer DDS: Right, so Bruce had a program there that taught dentists the current state of contemporary esthetic dentistry. I was really keen because number one, I’d get to learn, but number two, I’d get to use it as a barometer of where do I stand? Do I have a ton that I’ve been doing really badly, or hey, I’ve been doing pretty good with this or whatever. I got really into it and I called him up and I said, “Can I take the course?” He says, “Of course,” so I went and did that for about a year, every other Monday or something like that, I don’t remember.
When I was done, he asked me to stay on as a faculty, and that started my journey into education and being like an educator and teacher. From there, certain manufacturers like 3M and Ultradent and some other companies saw me and would ask me to do a little program here and there. Now I was really feeling like I’m on my way a bit here. I felt I really had a good presence in the esthetic world, or to provide for my patients, and I got now an opportunity to give back and start teaching dentists, but I was still hungry and I wasn’t quite satisfied.
Then I got involved with the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, the AACD, which is the largest organization in the world that focuses on contemporary esthetic dentistry. One of the interesting things that the public should understand is in dentistry, we don’t have a board specialty in cosmetic dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, it’s true.
Jack Ringer DDS: Like we do for orthodontics.
Shaun Keating: Endodontics.
Jack Ringer DDS: Exactly, right.
Shaun Keating: [crosstalk 00:13:09] non-specialties.
Jack Ringer DDS: A lot of dentists, when it comes to cosmetics, and you’ve certainly seen this, a patient comes in and they say they have an ugly smile or whatever and they want it fixed up, the dentist knows how to prep the teeth, take the impressions. They know how to deal with the need, but the want, they’re a little bit in the dark. I’m sure you’ve seen a ton that they leave it up to you, and you’re in the dark a little bit because you don’t even see the patient. You don’t know, so where do you go, right?
Shaun Keating: Kind of like the wild, wild west a little bit.
Jack Ringer DDS: Sure.
Shaun Keating: Back then it was prosthodontics. Oh, if you’re a prosthodontist, they knew all the nuts and bolts, but I know a lot of prosthodontists that I wouldn’t send my lawn guy to.
Jack Ringer DDS: If you remember back in 1983 about, porcelain veneers came about, and it took many years before the [prostho 00:14:05] groups accepted them as being viable. They thought it was bogus therapy, and today it is one of the most bullet proof, beautiful therapies we can do on patients.
Back to the AACD, they developed many years ago a credentialing process, which is really the only legitimate credential out there that will give both dentists and the public a reference or a guide that this dentist at that caliber of providing cosmetic dentistry.
Shaun Keating: It really is tough. How many is there? Just a couple hundred dentists I heard or a couple thousand?
Jack Ringer DDS: The AACD’s been around for 32 years now, and the credentialing process started say 30 years ago. In that whole 30 years, there’s only been about 450 dentists in the world that have been given accreditation.
Shaun Keating: Can you believe that?
Jack Ringer DDS: It’s not because the process is that daunting, it’s because it’s not a recognized specialty by the ADA. A lot of dentists say, “Well, why should I do it?” But what they don’t understand is that people are becoming more savvy now, and they’re looking for dentists that have some type of credential, so they’re going online now and they’re going to the AACD website, which is the most popular website in the world for people searching cosmetic dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Oh, is it really?
Jack Ringer DDS: Oh, yeah.
Shaun Keating: I didn’t know that.
Jack Ringer DDS: Number one hit site, and they have on their website a section for patients to search for dentists.
Shaun Keating: For your area: Put in your zip code and it will say if there’s somebody in your area.
Jack Ringer DDS: And for you guys, labs.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Jack Ringer DDS: They started from the highest credential down, so they have even a level above accreditation, called Fellowship.
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay. How many Fellowship dudes are there?
Jack Ringer DDS: There have only been, including labs, and the most recent one is me.
Shaun Keating: Yay, you’re a Fellow?
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, I just got mine last month.
Shaun Keating: I’m sitting here with a Fellow at the AACD.
Jack Ringer DDS: I think I’m the 72nd maybe.
Shaun Keating: Can you believe that?
Jack Ringer DDS: Including labs, and there’s only eight labs I think in the world that have done it.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, and we’re doing through the process with a little bit of help.
Jack Ringer DDS: I know you are, that’s great.
Shaun Keating: We’ve got a couple of our senior technicians that are going to try to get this, and it’s going to be work for us, but I’m confident that-
Jack Ringer DDS: Totally worth it.
Shaun Keating: It’s a lot of commitment. Weren’t you also the president of the AACD too, weren’t you?
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, so that’s also an interesting story. The last couple of years, yeah. When I was doing all my education and teaching and talking for different companies and working at UCLA, and then I did a program at Loma Linda. I was teaching at [inaudible 00:17:08] at Spear Education in Scottsdale.
Shaun Keating: Awesome.
Jack Ringer DDS: When I got involved at AACD, they looked for volunteers. They have different boards. They have a board of directors, and they also have a board called the ABCD, the American Board of Cosmetic Dentistry, which deals with the credential. I thought, “This is exactly where I want to be,” so I volunteered for that. At the time I volunteered, they had too many people who were in that position, and they needed somebody on the board of directors. I said, “Okay, I’ll go anywhere,” so I got on the board of directors and I stayed on that for a couple of years; I did my term.
Then when my term was up, I then said, “Okay, now I want to go back to that original place I wanted to be,” which was the American Board of Cosmetic Dentistry, so they put me on that, but after a few months, they came to me and they said, “Have you ever thought of running for vice-president, being the president?” I said, “Well, you know, I’d be more than happy to serve wherever I can,” and to make the story shorter, if I can, anyways, I got off of that ABCD board and ran for vice-president and I became vice-president. It’s a three year ascension process. You’re vice-president, and then you’re president-elect, and then you become president.
Everything was weird with me though, because again, coming off of one board short, prematurely, and when I became vice-president a few months after that, the guy who was ahead of me, the president-elect, for personal reasons he had to resign, so I went straight from vice-president to president. I only had two years of experience, in a sense, so it was a little bit more challenging, but it was a phenomenal experience to be president of that organization.
Shaun Keating: Oh, that’s huge.
Jack Ringer DDS: I’m still involved with them. In fact, I’m going to try to get back onto that board I wanted to be on.
Shaun Keating: The ABCD board.
Jack Ringer DDS: I’m going to be going to Chicago in February and go for my interview, and hopefully I’ll be back on that board again. Yeah, I’ve been trying to put my little paws in all different areas. Then when you contacted me, I thought wow, this is very cool. It’s always great to be around somebody who wants to educate and give back. Like you said in the beginning, you’re just doing this. No one’s paying you to do it, and that’s phenomenal, and that will give a lot of credibility to people who are listening.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, it’s just whatever we can do to make their job easier, it makes our job easier. It’s just common sense, in a way, for me, but just finding the right guy to get that across … You come across real well and you’ve been in the trenches for so long.
Jack Ringer DDS: A long time.
Shaun Keating: That’s what important. There’s a lot of guys that sit on the old soap box and they really haven’t practiced a lot of dentistry in their career, and I think that’s okay and that’s fine; a lot of people are into the speaking, but [you’re real 00:20:20]. I’ve seen your practice, I’ve seen your work, and you’re just really in there.
I’ve actually worked at our lab with a couple of other past presidents of AACD, and it’s a different level. It’s just something that all the people in that are doing that just out of their heart, to be a better person. You’re not really getting … I mean, the people will find it and they’ll find where the cream rises to the top on this, and you guys are just practicing really good dentistry and real thought-out dentistry. I think it’s just a neat thing, you know? I’m really excited to have you on board because you come across real nice. I know we’re going to get into a lot of different things in coming up episodes and stuff, so I’m really excited about it, and it couldn’t come from a better person, too. It’s really a neat thing, and you’re so close to us here, and I’m excited.
I’m a big 3M guy too. Ever since I got in, Impregum has made my life fricking … I should be on their stock or whatever, I have sold so much Impregum through the years. Doctors ask me all the time, “Shaun, what’s the best impression material?” Blah, blah, blah, and they’ll say, “I can get this polyvinyl from three different companies and make it all in the world and they color code it differently, but there’s only one Impregum.”
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, polyether.
Shaun Keating: Polyether, man, and still likes to pull teeth out and the taste is terrible, but when it comes to impressions, man, I pour that thing twice, I can get within 30 microns of each pour, where I can go polyvinyl twice and it’s night and day.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah.
Shaun Keating: It’s just weird. It’s all in the hands of the practitioner too, but 3M is such a big company in so many different areas, and it always seems first class. I know with your system that you’re doing, with taking impressions and stuff like that-
Jack Ringer DDS: True Def.
Shaun Keating: True Def, it’s a 3M-
Jack Ringer DDS: Product.
Shaun Keating: Product, and I’m all for it, I love it. It’s one of the cheaper ones, but we’ll get on to different things like that.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, we’ll talk about that, sure.
Shaun Keating: Going ahead and going forward, so the AACD president and you’re going to be still involved with it.
Jack Ringer DDS: I’m still involved all the time. I even started an affiliate for the AACD in Orange County called the Orange County Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay.
Jack Ringer DDS: In an organization like the AACD, we have an annual meeting and it usually alternates East Coast/West Coast. It gives the opportunity for any dentist to learn firsthand … not just didactic, but hands-on programs on the latest and greatest in contemporary esthetic dentistry. It’s pretty hard for guys to get that education year-round, so they go to an annual meeting. The organization set up an affiliate network so guys can go in their local communities if there’s one there.
Shaun Keating: Perfect.
Jack Ringer DDS: About, I guess it was eight, ten years ago, there was an affiliate in LA and there’s one in San Diego, but there wasn’t one in Orange County, so myself and another colleague of yours, a lab guy and I, we started the Orange County Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, and it’s just up the road in Yorba Linda.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Jack Ringer DDS: We hold our meetings at the Nobel facility.
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay, Nobel Biocare, right up there.
Jack Ringer DDS: Exactly.
Shaun Keating: That’s a great … I did a tour there, and what a setup they got there.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, they just remodeled it now, and it’s even more amazing.
Shaun Keating: It’s just [crosstalk 00:23:47] buildings and just … It’s like-
Jack Ringer DDS: Beautiful educational center up there. We always encourage any dentist who is in earshot of what I’m saying right now, give us a call. Go to ocacd.com, become a member. We put on quarterly meetings. In fact, in March we’re doing a big charitable function. You and I are very fortunate, we’re in a career that gives us a great life, and it’s always nice to give back. The AACD has a wing, a charitable foundation, and their charitable name, if you want to call it, is Give Back a Smile. What happens is volunteers in the AACD will restore mouths for free for women who are survivors of domestic abuse.
Shaun Keating: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, we do something, the last 12 years I think. It’s the Women Abused … I forgot the name of it. It’s pretty neat. You give back, and dentists throughout the United States, if they sign up for this program, they’ll come and say, “Shaun, can you do this denture?” or [crosstalk 00:25:01] or do this.
Jack Ringer DDS: Right, exactly.
Shaun Keating: We’ve done that, yeah. I think it’s similar, if not the same.
Jack Ringer DDS: Right.
Shaun Keating: That’s a neat thing, I like doing that. I love it to where, especially to have a AACD guy do that kind of dentistry. I mean, it’s something that … I know some guys can charge $30,000 for a grill, some guys a hundred grand. It’s [just happening 00:25:23] certain areas, but for these people to not have much when it comes to teeth, and to be able to restore them, if it’s a 4 on 1, or if it’s just full fix restorations, I love that more than anything.
We do a lot of that here, where a lot of our technicians here have got so many nice front grills. We do a lot of [4 00:25:44], the 13’s and 22 through 27’s with some [ERAs 00:25:48]. It just depends on the age and the patient, but there’s nothing better than … I love, especially my friends too, to, “Dude, your mouth, we got to do something about it.” A lot of people just need to eat, so it’s not so much for the esthetics. Posteriorly: “Well, I haven’t chewed over on the right side for two years, so until I blow this one out on the left side, then I’ll get this fixed.”
Jack Ringer DDS: [Quilt work 00:26:12] dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, and I love doing it where I fix them up for function, but then I love even more when it’s just esthetics of … Like you were saying, I was sitting here reading a fricking paper yesterday, dude. Los Angeles Times, me and my wife read … She reads the Register every morning, I read the Times.
Jack Ringer DDS: You better explain to your audience what paper is now, because everybody is doing digital, so they get, “I saw this on my iPad,” not on paper.
Shaun Keating: I’m a paper guy, and when I get to work I read the Wall Street Journal, so I read three papers. I’m sitting there yesterday and I go, “Image,” and I only say image because it was that dude, the tennis player back in the day. Yeah, Andre Agassi.
Jack Ringer DDS: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Shaun Keating: Image is everything, and I remember always hearing that, the Rebel camera or something, so I always had that in my head. Whenever I see image, I always tell Shannon, “Image is everything,” and she looks at me, rolls her eyes, like, “God, is he ever going to come up with something new?” Anyways, I’m sitting here looking, and then it says, “Smiling like an A-lister,” and it’s got a little thing here, and I’m like, “Oh, dude, that’s pretty cool.”
I sit there and I open it up and I’m sitting there reading and it’s Miley Cyrus and how the stars get a red carpet smile. It has the different doctors talking about on the weeks of the Hollywood red carpet thing, people are always coming and getting chips fixed, and at least brightened and whitened teeth, and this and that, and on and on, and it says, “Dr. Jack Ringer,” and it’s all you. I tell my wife, I go, “I got this dude coming in tomorrow. We’re going to do a podcast, and we’re going to be doing work.” She goes, “Really?” and I go, “Yeah.” It just goes through and you’re talking about a little thing with … There was a study done I guess with how …
Jack Ringer DDS: Physical attractiveness.
Shaun Keating: Physical attractiveness. Why don’t you tell me a little bit? I’ve always said that weight, whatever … Some of us get a little more heavy in time, but if I got a good grill … I got natural teeth there, but it’s just like it’s hard to look at certain people sometimes for me, and that’s just because I make teeth, but teeth do make a difference, man.
Jack Ringer DDS: Oh, sure.
Shaun Keating: You could be an ugly duckling, the goose that the swan … not the swan on the lake, but if you have a good grill, it makes a difference.
Jack Ringer DDS: It sure does.
Shaun Keating: You were saying it’s like a little science thing they did or something.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, there’s been a lot of research done in the physical attractiveness phenomena. It’s been done for decades, and like you were saying, a person could be overweight or whatever.
Shaun Keating: Have a big goiter over here on your chin or whatever. That doesn’t matter, but you got a good grill …
Jack Ringer DDS: They wanted to understand that, when you’re saying that, so the researchers went and analyzed people from all over the world, different races, creeds, colors, sex, whatever, and wanted to define what is it on the human form that people find most important when they are determining physical attractiveness? They did this research and they found out that it was the head, okay?
Because you look at our culture today, all of a sudden women with large butts or whatever are attractive, but 10 years ago, no one liked that or whatever. They found universally the head was number one. Then they said, “Okay, let’s break that down now. What about the head that people find is most important when looking at physical attractiveness?” Eyes, and the oral region, lips and teeth, tied for first. Sometimes some studies would show the mouth first, some would say the eyes a little bit first, but when we look at that, it’s the mouth, right?
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Jack Ringer DDS: Here we go. We know that if people have a great smile, that’s on the top of the list, or great eyes, but what can you really do to change eyes? Not much. Maybe some colored contact lenses or some makeup. I know, Shaun, you don’t wear too much makeup; a little bit.
Shaun Keating: Oh, night time sometimes.
Jack Ringer DDS: Sometimes you have that beautiful mascara on or whatever, but anyway, if you’re going to have any other type of plastic surgery, like nose or whatever, not that predictable. You don’t necessarily get what you anticipated, but we do know with teeth, if you make it a millimeter longer, it will be a millimeter longer. If it’s going to be X color, it will be X color, so it can be very predictable. With technology we have today and if the dentist goes though the proper protocol of designing a smile … and there’s really easy ways for every dentist to be able to design beautiful smiles … you change lives, dude. You work with a great lab like yours and you give them the information like we were talking earlier, like how a lot of dentists would send something to you, and you made the esthetic decisions, well, if the dentist works in partnership with you-
Shaun Keating: It’s just so much better.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, so if he sends you good pictures and designs and simulations and templates of what this patient envisions, now you know, and you can start creating this. That’s that whole situation, because when we are fixing smiles today, it’s not just about function. In dental school, dentists learn how to fix the need, and in those four years … Here’s a little interesting tidbit. What do you think the number one objective of a dental school is?
Shaun Keating: To just wear down that student with enough theory that they’re going … No, I don’t know. Teach a lot of theory, I’m not sure.
Jack Ringer DDS: The number one thing is when they graduate, they’re not going to hurt somebody.
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay.
Jack Ringer DDS: Everything else after that is like gravy.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Jack Ringer DDS: In four years, [inaudible 00:32:21] … I mean, I went through it. Everyone goes through it that goes to dental school. You have a ton of information; you only have a short limited time to practice stuff, right?
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Jack Ringer DDS: You come out of school and you’re green and stuff. They don’t have time to start teaching you about all esthetic designs and things like that; it’s hard. Every dentist out there, and we’re required, need to have continuing education to keep our license, but the esthetic world was never really a main player way back in the day because we didn’t really have the skillset. Now we’ve learned, and I guess one of the biggest players in dentistry today is Dr. Frank Spear. He’s out in, like I said, the Scottsdale center, where I help mentor there. He teaches a program, which if every dentist would just follow this, it would make their life so much simpler. It’s called Facially Generated Treatment Planning. When I was in dental school, what was the first thing that we learned to do in a sense clinically? We did dentures, because it taught us where teeth go, and occlusion.
Shaun Keating: Midline.
Jack Ringer DDS: Midline, all of this [inaudible 00:33:42] stuff, right?
Shaun Keating: All that stuff.
Jack Ringer DDS: When we built them, where do you start setting up a denture? Where does it start? When you start putting those teeth, where do the … ?
Shaun Keating: Front tooth.
Jack Ringer DDS: Front two teeth, right?
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Jack Ringer DDS: Why don’t dentists treat the mouth the same way?
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Jack Ringer DDS: If you have a patient come in and they’ve got this beat up mouth, a lot of dentists are going, “Oh my God, where do I start? What do I do?” and it’s so simple.
Shaun Keating: [inaudible 00:34:09] usually send in two front teeth and have them skew it, and set it up.
Jack Ringer DDS: Exactly. Just design from the front, back.
Shaun Keating: The same thing on fixed work. You’d be so surprised that … Give us the study about what they had before. You’ve got to give us, especially in the anterior segment, give us what they had at least so we could go off of that. Then do your face bow type, your facial analyze, right? [inaudible 00:34:38], but it’s just the little things, if you could just do that for us, it would just give us so much more tools to work with to get it right, to get the smile on right, to go off of the nose, the eyes. There’s just little things, and the doctors don’t get it sometimes.
Jack Ringer DDS: No, they don’t because they’re overwhelmed, and they were taught in school to do quadrant dentistry, like tooth by tooth, so then after 20, 30 years, that patient comes to you and their mouth looks like a quilt.
Shaun Keating: [crosstalk 00:35:09].
Jack Ringer DDS: Different curves and angles and everything, because they were just patching it their whole time. Today … and it’s something that I try to teach all the time, and I’m thankful for the Spear people who really entrench this in my brain too … if you design it from the front back, you get the global design. It doesn’t mean you have to do it all in one go.
Shaun Keating: No.
Jack Ringer DDS: You can phase that patient’s therapy, but at least you have a plan, so you can build something here and you can always go to something later, but if you just keep patching, you’re screwed.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, and you’re going to build up this left quad and then you’re going to have …
Jack Ringer DDS: Then it’s uneven, exactly.
Shaun Keating: It’s just such a can of worms, and it’s like that’s why I say let’s just do the whole upper and let’s collapse them. If you work backwards on it, there’s certain ways to get to the final result as good as we can if we’re not doing it by the book from the beginning.
Jack Ringer DDS: Then you get caught up also in the situation when there’s failures.
Shaun Keating: You do it for free and no charge, so that’s why we’re pretty picky when we get a case, that with new accounts, it’s like you know what? I’ve got to guarantee this, and if I start this case, if you go to the mouth with this 14 units and they don’t do what you need them to do and what the patient’s going to sign off on, we’ve got to do it over and no charge. I know the dentist doesn’t want to redo it as bad as we don’t, but sometimes dentists will push it to where they know they should be doing this and this, and they’re not. Then that’s when we have to come together and say you know what? You might have to pay half on this or something for labor. It’s just at the end of the day, I always try to look at it like we work for the patient. The patient is paying our bills.
Jack Ringer DDS: We’re doing them a favor.
Shaun Keating: We’re doing them a favor. They’re going to pay you-
Jack Ringer DDS: No, no, they’re doing us a favor.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, they’re doing us a favor. You need to get paid, and I need to get paid from you, so at the end of the day if we look like every case we’re working on is I’m working on a relative or working on a family member, because … Pretend that it’s going into your own mouth. We always try to feel that way because there’s a person behind this model, so it’s worked well for us with our people. They know that we don’t want a remake of the time in the chair, the time that you have to take for not even having … Someone in the chair is probably $300 to $500 an hour in that chair or not, and back and forth, but it’s just something that we try to do it right the first time.
Jack Ringer DDS: Yeah, and you said something very interesting, and I think if every dentist would adopt this one thing that you said their lives would be better, their results would be better, everyone would be happier, is treat that patient as if that person in that chair was your dear loved one.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Jack Ringer DDS: Or if what you want in your mouth.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Jack Ringer DDS: Now we’re all human and we make mistakes, but if we plan things properly, we have less chance for that. That’s another thing where technology’s coming into play: It’s getting a lot of human error out of the mix now.
Shaun Keating: Oh, it’s really coming into the next level.
Jack Ringer DDS: I don’t envy you, with the amount of equipment you have to stock your facility.
Shaun Keating: It’s expensive, but you know what? You’ve just got to keep going with it and just keep getting the right systems in place, but you are eliminating so many of the variables that we work with in dental technology now with all the integration of digital [demonstration 00:38:48].
Jack Ringer DDS: Sure.
Shaun Keating: We’re going to be talking a lot more in future podcasts. We’re going to wrap this up today; we’re a little bit over on our usual setup. I just want to thank everyone for watching our Dental Up podcast today. Remember to go to keatingdentallab.com/promo for all our offers out there. Again, we want to thank you, and really look forward to you guys coming back and listening to our next podcast. Thanks again.
