Our guest this week Dr. David Furnari, DDS and Shaun Keating sit down and discuss the importance of investing in yourself and in your practice. From taking CE courses, upgrading to new technology, and seeing how these small improvements help your overall success and financial outcome. We dive into Dr. Furnari’s initial experience in the US Navy as a dentist and what sparked his interest to continue his never-ending journey in Continuing Education. Finally, Dr. Furnari shares some advice on what to look for and what to avoid when opening a new practice in a new location. You will hear all this and more on this week’s episode of The Dental Up Podcast.
In this episode you will hear about:
-Dr. Furnari’s experience while in the US Navy as a Dentist.
-How the Panky Institute inspired his journey into CE.
-Why It’s important to always keep learning and investing in yourself.
-The Importance of analyzing and studying your demographics before opening a practice in any location.
For more information on Dr.Furnari and his practice feel free to check out their website and follow them on social media by clicking the links down below!
Facebook Link: https://www.facebook.com/ScarsdaleDentalGroup/
Website Link: www.ScarsdaleDentalGroup.com
Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/scarsdaledentalcenter/
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Host: Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Dental Up Podcast, brought to you by Keating Dental Lab, a full-service, award-winning dental laboratory. Each week, you’ll learn tips and techniques from real-world dentists, bringing you in-depth interviews, motivating stories, current events, and sports.
Host: Here’s your host, Shaun Keating.
Shaun Keating: Hey, everyone, Shaun here. Welcome to another episode of The Dental Up Podcast. Our guest this week received his Doctorate in Dentistry from Georgetown University in 1986, specializing in custom, cosmetic, restorative, and implant dentistry. Currently practicing from Scarsdale, New York, please welcome Dr. David Furnari, DDS. How’s it going, Dr. Furnari?
Dr. Furnari: Oh, it’s going great. Nice spring day here.
Shaun Keating: Beautiful, man. I can’t thank you enough. I know how busy you are. We’re sitting here waiting, you got a patient in the chair and it says, “Hey, you got to take care of those patients.” I can’t thank you enough. I always start off talking a little bit about sports. You into any sports out there in New York? Are you a football guy? Baseball, basketball, you like anything?
Dr. Furnari: Well, I like to watch a little tennis, Rafael Nadal, Federer, and these guys. Cilic, there’s some new up-and-coming young guys coming on. I’m a runner myself, so I run and play some tennis.
Shaun Keating: Beautiful. Oh, that’s awesome. What about running? Just like you jog a couple of miles here and there? Or what kind of running are you into?
Dr. Furnari: Generally, I go about six miles four or five times a week.
Shaun Keating: You’re kidding? Oh, that’s so cool. Do you do that in the morning? Or when you get up? Or after work? How do you do that?
Dr. Furnari: Usually I do it after work. Usually after work because sometimes I stay up sort of late, so I get to work in the morning, have a good day, and if I get out at, whatever, 5:30, 6 o’clock, I just do it in the afternoon.
Shaun Keating: That’s so cool. Good for you, and that’s good. I need to get my fat butt off the chair and go at least… walk a little bit more. It’s something… the big thing with me and the sports is I always like to start off talking a little bit about it. Right now, we got the NBA Finals coming up, we got the Golden State Warriors going to be in the Finals again for the fifth year in a row and they’re going for a third-year repeat, so it’s kind of crazy. The Milwaukee Bucks that hasn’t been in forever, and they actually got tied up with… who we got tied up with there? The Toronto Raptors, of all things. From the North is their big slogan because they’re from Canada, but Toronto, they tied it back up last night, so they’re tied 2-2, but Golden State is waiting to play them in the Championship again.
Shaun Keating: That’s kind of the only thing really going on. We got a little bit of horse racing, but I’m not really into that lately, either. They seem to be dying left and right out here at Santa Anita in California. It’s like we have 25 horses that have passed in the last four or five months I think it is. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Dr. Furnari: Yeah, I heard something about that. What’s going on with that?
Shaun Keating: I have no idea, man. It’s like bad juju or something, but it’s kind of sad. These horses are just beautiful specimens. They’re just beautiful beasts and they got all this weight on these little legs and these little ankles, and it’s just kind of sad to see them put down like that because there’s not a lot you can do once they mess a leg up or something like that. It’s kind of tough, especially, too, on that… I’m not a big gambler at all, but the Kentucky Derby, the horse I bet on, it got disqualified, man. I had a big ol’ winning ticket and they said, “No, you’re disqualified.” I guess one of the horses that he knocked out of the way went on to win last week. The War of Wills was the name of the horse that won and that’s one that got blocked out from the Kentucky Derby, so they’re saying, “Well, everything happens for a reason.” I didn’t even watch it. It’s just kind of like…
Shaun Keating: Enough sports, man. Let’s go ahead and Dental Up. Tell me, Dr. Furnari, why did you get into dentistry? At what point did you think, “I want to be a dentist”?
Dr. Furnari: Way back about 30, 33… actually, I’ve been a dentist for 33 years, so that’s a few years back, but the reason why I decided that I wanted to be a dentist is I was very interested… I liked working with people and my father was a dentist. I considered medicine for a while as well, but I also felt that I liked biology, study of the human body and function, and when I was at… By the way, you said certainly the Milwaukee Bucks, I went to Marquette in Milwaukee.
Shaun Keating: Beautiful [crosstalk 00:05:06]-
Dr. Furnari: I know a little bit about Milwaukee. Anyway, I was at Marquette University in Milwaukee and I decided that I wanted to be in the health fields, it just seemed like my father had loved it and had such a good experience as a dentist, making his own hours and having his own business, that I felt like that was a good path as opposed to medicine, which I would have been maybe more involved with longer residencies and maybe it would be another three to four years. At that point, after college, you can go to four years of dental school and maybe a year or two in the military for experience, and then you’re really good for private practice.
Dr. Furnari: That was the path I chose. I was a Navy dentist for a couple of years after I went to Georgetown Dental School. I went to Georgetown from 1982 to 1986 where I graduated. I spent two years in the U.S. Navy Dental Corps, subdivision of Bethesda Naval Dental Command, then I came to New York to practice.
Shaun Keating: Unbelievable. I see that, man, and my brother kind of did the same route. He stayed a little longer in the Navy because they gave him a scholarship to go to college. Did they pay your way for college? Or is that just a separate thing, you went into the Navy afterwards on your own?
Dr. Furnari: That was a separate thing. At that time, they felt they had enough dentists, so the military didn’t need to pay dentists to… or pay people to go to dental school. They had enough people that wanted to get the experience out of school, so they did offer a little bit of time and grade, what they gave me. They paid me a little bit higher since I signed on when I was a freshman in dental school. They said, “When you graduate we guarantee you a position and we’ll pay you as if you’ve been working already four years.”
Shaun Keating: Well, that’s cool.
Dr. Furnari: That was the only incentive at the time.
Shaun Keating: I think my brother… let’s see, my brother graduated from USC in ’81, and then he went into the Navy. They paid for it all, but I think he was saying it was like one of the last years that they did that.
Dr. Furnari: That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly right because when I graduated from Marquette in 1982, President Reagan had been elected around that time, and one of the first things President Reagan did is stop the scholarships for dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Can you believe that? That’s a trip because in 1980, I was 18 and I was able to vote for the first time and I voted for Reagan, and they actually gave me a scholarship because we didn’t make any money. My Mom, we had like five kids and single mom and they paid for my dental technology because of Reagan. I loved that guy as a President. He was a really good President, but it was good for me for dental technology, but not good for dentistry at that time. No, that’s neat, and then I see that you went to Bethesda, Maryland, and worked off of their… my brother did the same thing. After I think his eighth year, he wanted to get out and they said, “Well, dude, give us two more years and we’ll send you to endo school or whatever”, so he did a two-year gig in Bethesda for his endo training. Now, it’s limited to endodontics for him, but it’s a neat thing.
Shaun Keating: I’m a Navy brat myself. My Dad was in the Navy 31 years and so we bounced all over. I was born in Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico, man. I think they named it-
Dr. Furnari: Wow.
Shaun Keating: After… Roosey Roads they called it. It’s no longer. We went there last year to check it out and they closed down that big ol’ Navy base several years back and that’s kind of a ghost town there, but we were all over. Norfolk, Virginia; Bethesda, Maryland; Jacksonville, Florida; Pensacola, Florida; Rota, Spain, on and on, man. Navy brat.
Dr. Furnari: Wow, wow. That’s cool. Well, I was lucky to be stationed… it was a branch of Bethesda, but I was actually stationed at Patuxent River Naval Air Station-
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay.
Dr. Furnari: And the Patuxent River is right on the Chesapeake Bay south of Annapolis-
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: And quite close to the original capital of Maryland, which was Saint Marys City.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: In fact, once a year they have a sailing race from Annapolis, down the Chesapeake to Saint Marys City, like an overnight race. They all leave Friday night and arrive on Saturday sometime.
Shaun Keating: How neat is [crosstalk 00:09:33] that?
Dr. Furnari: That’s another hobby I do, a little sailing when I can.
Shaun Keating: You’re kidding? We have a big one from Newport Beach to Ensenada, Mexico, they do each year here where I live in Orange County, and it’s pretty crazy in Mexico now, once you get into Mexico. It used to be like hundreds of boats, and now there’s not so many because it’s getting a little crazy out in Mexico. I won’t even get into that. It’s just tough, but I love to see those boats going by. I’m more into the motor boats. I got a ’54 Bertram [crosstalk 00:10:02]-
Dr. Furnari: You’re born in 1962, then?
Shaun Keating: Yes sir.
Dr. Furnari: I’m just a couple of years older, so-
Shaun Keating: There you go.
Dr. Furnari: We’re about the same age. The last few years, I’ve had a very nice experience working with periodontists from… Harvard-trained periodontists, Dr. Samuel Lee. You know Sam lee?
Shaun Keating: Sam Lee sounds very familiar. I got a lot of guys from Tufts and a lot of guys from Harvard that we work with, but yeah, it sounds pretty darn familiar. Is he sinking implants for you? Tell me a little about that.
Dr. Furnari: Sam is, like I said, a Harvard-trained periodontist and he was a general dentist and then went back to perio school and now he has moved to San Diego, California-
Shaun Keating: Oh, okay.
Dr. Furnari: Well, north of San Diego, near La Jolla, and he has built a training institute there.
Shaun Keating: Dude, do you [crosstalk 00:10:59] ever go there? You got to come by the lab. We’re about [crosstalk 00:11:01]-
Dr. Furnari: Yes.
Shaun Keating: 45 minutes from there. We got a Dr. [crosstalk 00:11:04]-
Dr. Furnari: Really?
Shaun Keating: Taddey that’s right there in La Jolla, right on the water. Her and her Dad, we do all of their work and they’re just a great practice. La Jolla, man, that is just… that’s God’s country. It’s so beautiful right there on the ocean. They’ve got these big cliffs and it’s just… Torrey Pines, one of the big golf course tournaments is always there [crosstalk 00:11:22]-
Dr. Furnari: Right, right, right. His office is near Qualcomm Arena, not Qualcomm… is it Qualcomm?
Shaun Keating: Yeah, Stadium. It’s where the Chargers used to play. Now, they’re down here in L.A., or they’re going to be in the new stadium.
Dr. Furnari: I think there’s a Qualcomm Conference Center he had a place and he had some meetings.
Shaun Keating: I think I’d seen Guns N’ Roses there last year.
Dr. Furnari: I’m anxious to see. I may come out if he invites me again to teach because I actually recently achieved a California Dental License.
Shaun Keating: That’s so neat. We’d love to have you do a little show down here. We’ve been doing your work for a long time. I know you work with Crown and Bridge Manager, Jeff, a lot. He says, “Man, Shaun, this guy is very specific on his designs.” You know what you want and you demand excellence and we love giving it to you. No, you’re a really good dentist and we can’t thank you enough, man. We appreciate it for sure. Heck, you got like 4,000 hours of formal CE. You’re a CE junkie I take it. Tell me a little bit about your CE journey. What you like and what you do. Tell me a little bit about that if you could.
Dr. Furnari: Well, years ago when I was at Georgetown… after I graduated from Georgetown Dental School, I met a dentist that was teaching there. His name was Bill Lady, L-A-D-Y. He had a practice in Washington, D.C. He was one of the guest lecturers that we would have at Georgetown. When he lectured, he would show a couple of things that were special to him. One thing he would show was his dogs, because he had show dogs that he and his wife groomed and [crosstalk 00:13:11] took care of-
Shaun Keating: What kind of dogs may I ask? Where they-
Dr. Furnari: Gosh, now [crosstalk 00:13:16] too specific here.
Shaun Keating: French Bulldogs? No.
Dr. Furnari: They were large, like Irish Setter-type dogs. They were big dogs that they took care of, and maybe even a Great Dane. He had very big, large dogs.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: Anyway, and then he would… Bill Lady was a Pankey dentist. He had studied with L.D. Pankey at The L.D. Pankey Institute in Florida. I had heard a little bit about The Pankey Institute, so when… You know my Dad was a dentist, practicing in Scarsdale, New York, and so when I graduated in school I was in the Navy as I told you in Maryland. My Dad said, “We could go down to The Pankey Institute. Would you like that?”
Dr. Furnari: When you work in the Navy, you get like five, almost six weeks off a year, so I took a week and my Dad and I went down to The L.D. Pankey Institute. I believe it was Continuum 1 that we took, and I’d have to check, but I believe that would have been in 1980… sorry. Yeah, 1987. Maybe February or March or so of 1987. We went to The L.D. Pankey Institute and at that time the experience would be for 24 dentists and they would take 24 dentists at a time and have a one-week experience-
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: And they would go over complete comprehensive exams and using study models and records and [crosstalk 00:14:51] go over the philosophy of L.D Pankey about knowing yourself and knowing your patient. There was a Pankey cross, it was part of their logo, and the Pankey cross as I recall was if you had love in the middle, it would be balanced by work and play. Work on the left, play on the right maybe, and… Well, actually, maybe it was success in the middle. It would be work, play, and then love and worship.
Shaun Keating: There you go. I was going to say [crosstalk 00:15:34] you got to have The Lord in there somewhere I’m thinking.
Dr. Furnari: L.D. Pankey, he had different philosophies, so he would make other crosses for understanding. He’d say for excellence in dentistry, for instance, if you want in excellence in dentistry in the middle, you’d have a balance of… Let me see. Know yourself, know your patient, have knowledge of your work, and then apply your knowledge.
Dr. Furnari: Anyway, we went to The L.D. Pankey Institute and it was a really wonderful experience because these are really master clinicians. There was a man there named Irwin Becker who had studied in Boston, and he was the leader or the permanent fixture down at the institute. They would invite another dentist like this Bill Lady or somebody else that was a master dentist that practiced the philosophy. Then, they would have hands on and presentations. Hands-on learning and didactic learning presentations.
Dr. Furnari: It was really a great experience and they had a Continuum. There were actually six full weeks that they would have that built on each other, and the goal was to teach how to do comprehensive dentistry and to design it and how to design. One course may have been all about the anterior guidance and aesthetics. Another week would be a whole week… Once you have the anterior guidance and aesthetics would be about how to set up the posterior occlusion and how to do that properly. That was what they did.
Dr. Furnari: Anyway, The Pankey Institute was a lovely place to start and part of my journey. Once we finished… once I did that, I did about three or four of those while I was in the Navy, maybe three, and then I said, “Well, let me wait a year until I get the private practice”, because there a number… a little bit of what they share is how to educate and motivate private patients to want to have the best of care and because some people, they need to understand. Everybody can appreciate a Ferrari or a fancy Mercedes Benz or that type of thing, but not everybody can appreciate what the difference is between the best dentistry and average dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Okay, good [crosstalk 00:18:16]-
Dr. Furnari: If people have stuff in their mouth, as long as they can chew and bite, they don’t always know if their gums are bleeding or if there’s overhangs or if there’s issues.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Furnari: Until things… usually those issues do come back and get them, but they don’t realize until later on. You want to know how to help patients appreciate finer dentistry, and that was something that was best done once I left the Navy and came up to work with my father in private practice. Then, we came to Scarsdale in 1989 and worked in private practice here with him for 24 years. Over those years, we went to many continuing education courses. Often, The Greater New York Academy of Prosthodontics Meeting, which is always in New York around the week after-
Shaun Keating: Thanksgiving?
Dr. Furnari: December 7th, December 6th, every winter… every fall just after Thanksgiving. That New York dental meeting is a two-day meeting where you have prosthodontists from all over the United States and guest speakers come from all over the world to speak about what’s foremost and frontmost in dentistry, which in the last 20 years has been a lot about implantology, digital design, aesthetic design, these type of things.
Dr. Furnari: These are continued education courses being so close to New York City, it was always easy to get to those type of things.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Furnari: I began to do… Even though I’d only been out of school four years, back by ’91, ’92, I started doing bone grafts every time I did an extractions because I realized that we were going to be doing less bridges and we wanted to have people have the opportunity to have implants that were freestanding that wouldn’t have to destroy other teeth to support the missing tooth.
Shaun Keating: Good for you. That’s good, man.
Dr. Furnari: We started doing more surgery, extractions and bone grafts, and then by ’97, I took a course with Richard Kraut. Richard Kraut is an Army dentist who’s an oral surgeon, and he was the Head of Oral Surgery at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. He had a course where did like a mini residency. He would take four dentists for two, three, four days and do an intensive course in placing implants.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: You’d go and he’d literally had planned the cases and you’d go and place 10, 15 implants in a day with him and you would [crosstalk 00:21:05] become proficient.
Shaun Keating: He’d do any sinus lifts at all? Or no?
Dr. Furnari: Well, yeah. Once… well, not in that first course, but from there on I took other courses and began to do sinus lifts. I learned how to do sinus lifts following some New York dentists. There’s a dentist named Alan Pollack, and Alan Winter. They gave a course in ridge expansion, and then Alan invited me to watch sinus lifts because I referred a couple of my patients to him for sinus lifts so we could place implants.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: Alan Pollack, who’s a member of The Academy of Osseointegration, he was actually the President of that academy, he’s one of my mentors as well.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: Then, took other classes with other oral surgeons and periodontists. There’s a guy named Joel Rosenlicht, and he’s an oral surgeon, and Brian Chadroff, he’s a periodontist, so I took courses with them. That was all in the late ’90s and by early 2000, and then I actually did oral surgery two days a week starting 2006. I actually went down to Southern New Jersey and worked for a practice that was pretty busy. They had four offices and I did all of their oral surgery and implant placement-
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: For about four and a half years. I would drive down Tuesday night and come back on Thursday evening.
Shaun Keating: That’s a trip.
Dr. Furnari: I’d spend Wednesday and Thursday there, and for a while I actually went on Tuesday. I spent two nights, two days a week there and then come back to work in Scarsdale on Friday and Saturday.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: That was a busy, busy four years, but it was good [crosstalk 00:23:02]-
Shaun Keating: Lot of experience, man, for sure I bet. Broken jaws, I got a couple of oral surgeons, they actually work on putting jaws together that are broken, making sure the occlusion is right and everything like that. You ever do any of those?
Dr. Furnari: Well, no. I’m a general dentist with a strong restorative and periodontal background and you could say I’m an implantologist, but I haven’t been trained to fix broken jaws, so I don’t do that.
Shaun Keating: Sorry about that. I just [crosstalk 00:23:28]-
Dr. Furnari: That’s something I leave for the oral surgeons, but I do comfortably remove wisdom teeth for young people and do that type of surgery. I went also to some courses and I joined this group, which I have to mention as part of my journey. I’ve been a member since about 2009. I went to a course given by Michael Pikos, an oral surgeon from Florida, and Maurice Salama, and Maurice Salama is a periodontist from Atlanta, Georgia. Maurice is part of a group called Team Atlanta.
Dr. Furnari: The original five dentists of Team Atlanta is Ronald Goldstein, who is an aesthetic dentist, one of the first guys to do veneers in the ’80s, Ronald Goldstein. David Garber came from Boston, I think Harvard trained as well. Ron Goldstein, David Garber, Henry Salama, Maurice Salama, and… Who’s the other one? Sorry, I’m probably missing one, but there’s five guys down in Atlanta that are a part of that group. They all moved from the Northeast down to Atlanta back in the early ’90s and they have a group now.
Dr. Furnari: In 2011, Maurice Salama had this vision of starting a group called Dental XP, and that stands for Dental Experts, and they have online learning. They have videos of many types of implant surgeries, sinus lifts, ridge expansions, block bone grafts, anything you could imagine they have it on the Dental XP website.
Shaun Keating: We’ll put that on our [crosstalk 00:25:26]… we’ll put that on our show notes because we have a lot of younger dentists looking for different CE, and this is some new stuff that we haven’t heard here on the West Coast, or maybe people have heard about it, but I haven’t really heard of it. You’re a master, you’re doing really good, so whoever you learned from, you learned good because you really are crushing it and you do practice great dentistry and you know what you want. You’re very particular and specific on designs when it comes to metal work and everything else. We appreciate that, but no, that’s neat.
Shaun Keating: Keep going, baby. What else you got? What else did you do? I know that you’re a big guy utilizing 3-D scanning technology. Tell me a little bit about where you learned about that and what your thought process is with the 3-D imaging.
Dr. Furnari: Well, at this point we’re using the CAT scan for all our evaluations of third molars and wisdom teeth and for treatment planning for implants. As of yet, we do not have an intraoral scanner in the office for scanning within the mouth, but we can digitize any well-made silicon impression. We often make custom trays for those impressions so that we have good accuracy. There are intraoral scanners where the labs can scan and even 3-D print models from those fine impressions.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Furnari: Certainly, having the Instrumentarium OP300, it’s a full 8X15 scanner, has allowed us to really see ahead of time, most of the time, exactly what size implants we’re going to need, where we need bone, where we don’t have bone, and certainly a good way to evaluate the success of our sinus lifts afterward.
Shaun Keating: Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Furnari: In fact, one of the things that has been very interesting that I learn with Dr. Sam Lee, we were teaching in Chile and China, and one of the things he started to do was some tunnel grafting. Now, I’ve done some… we would call it subepithelial connected tissue grafts through a tunnel, and that means it’s a minimally invasive technique where we just make a tiny some people call it a pinhole technique, we make a tiny opening in the mucosa and we use very specialized instruments to lift the tissue and to graft under the tissue. Most of the time… One of the people that pioneered this technique is named Edward Pat Allen. He’s in Texas and you may have heard his name. He’s also on Dental XP as well. Edward Pat Allen is someone that I learned to do the tunnel grafting from-
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Furnari: And when you’re doing a tunnel graft, you need to do a special release technique to releasing the periosteum. The interesting thing about this is that traditionally you would take tissue from the roof of the mouth and use that, but there’s only a limited number of tissue you can get from the roof of the mouth, limited volume. Edward Pat Allen has used AlloDerm, which is made by BioHorizons, and that’s human tissue that’s been deemed denucleated and washed and freeze dried. We can take that tissue and we can use that in the tunnel to bring gum tissue. Just like you pull a window shade down, you can bring the gum tissue back down to cover roots and things.
Shaun Keating: That’s so awesome, man.
Dr. Furnari: Now, we’ve taken that a step further and we can actually do bone grafts through the tunnel, and that’s really been quite an interesting technique that we’ve learned and I learned that with Dr. Lee. We’re able to go through the tunnel, slide a small membrane into the tunnel, and place bone, like a Raptos mineralized bone into the area. In some situations, you’re able to bone graft around teeth under a bridge before the bridge is replaced. In one situation most recently, that allowed us to remove a six-unit interior bridge that was from six to 11, and we recreated bone under there before we removed the bridge so that when we did remove the bridge, we were able to place five immediate implants and an immediate provisional for that patient.
Shaun Keating: That’s so huge. That’s awesome, dude. I really love hearing that. That’s some technical stuff and you just think sinking an implant, it’s just that’s real easy peasy, but nom there’s a lot to it. Even just your basic grafts to be able to accept an implant, but to go above and beyond or really do things beyond just a simple graft, you got it down.
Shaun Keating: I know you got a surgery coming up. I know you got to get off, but what kind of advice can you give some of our newer dentists starting off? Maybe some dos or don’ts and some advice you could give us real quick.
Dr. Furnari: Wow. That’s tough. Real quick, realize that when you’re just graduating, keep your eyes open. Find something you like to do that interests you. Whether it’s orthodontics or surgery or implants, find something you like to do and really, really realize that it’s just the beginning of your journey because it’s a lifelong learning experience. I’ve been a dentist for 33 years and you just never stop learning because once you think you’ve arrived, then it’s over. You’ve got to [crosstalk 00:31:13]-
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Furnari: Keep learning and keep moving forward. The other thing is that I would advise them the really key thing is they need to look at the demographics of any area they wish to practice in because, unfortunately, I don’t like to end on a negative note at all, but unfortunately there are areas that have been densely populated with-
Shaun Keating: A thousand dentists on every [crosstalk 00:31:40] corner.
Dr. Furnari: Schools. Too many schools or too many dentists in one place, and that with the combination of the private equity trying to make big companies turn into… make these dental mills, these are things that are not good for dentistry. Unfortunately, they’ve created an oversupply and then the dentists aren’t appreciated as much as they should be.
Shaun Keating: Oh, dude.
Dr. Furnari: They need to check demographics and look for an area where you’re going to have people that need you. You’re better off living in an area where there’s like… People need dentists, but they don’t need a lot of dentists in the middle of Manhattan.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Furnari: You want to start in a place where people need you, even if it’s possibly another country.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Furnari: You ought to consider that.
Shaun Keating: We [crosstalk 00:32:33]-
Dr. Furnari: That was my two things. Never stop learning and always check out your demographics before you invest in an area.
Shaun Keating: Words of wisdom, baby. Hey, thank you so much. How’s my lab doing for you? Are we doing okay work for you?
Dr. Furnari: Your lab is doing fantastic work for me, and I love working with Jeff Sugimura and Steve Tappy. You guys are very responsive and send me pictures, and so I can check the details and the progress on cases. You guys are fantastic. I look forward to being able to come out to California and meeting you in person and certainly going to look you up and speak to you the next time I get there.
Shaun Keating: Thank you so much, Dr. Furnari. I can’t think you enough. God bless you and your family, and man, if there’s anything I can ever do, please let me know. Again, thanks again for coming on The Dental Up Podcast and we’ll talk to you real soon. All right, buddy.
Dr. Furnari: Thank you.
Shaun Keating: All right, man, bye-bye [crosstalk 00:33:29]-
Dr. Furnari: Bye, Shaun.
Host: Thanks for joining us on The Dental Up Podcast Show this week. Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or search The Dental Up Podcast on iTunes for our weekly feed. Don’t forget to visit keatingdentallab.com/promo for exclusive offers.
Host: Keating Dental Lab is a full-service dental laboratory and we’re nationwide. We’d love for you to send us a case so we can show you the Keating difference. If you dig what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes, and we’ll be back next week.
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