Week 9: Closing in on the home stretch

As I near the end of my senior project, I want to look back on the third trimester. Over these weeks, while I have been researching at home, I’ve spent much of my weekdays at the dental practice where I intern. There, I’ve learned much about not just the physical procedures, but also about the significance of bedside manners and small-talk in the industry. Patient satisfaction is heavily intertwined with a good social experience at a dental practice. Many patients reluctantly come for treatment and are in a tense mood on arrival. However, I’ve seen countless times how the dentist I shadow has effortlessly broken the ice with people. Dentistry is, after all, a service where the client is quite literally face-to-face with you. While the main focus is, of course, healthy teeth, leaving the office with a positive mood definitely is the second priority. Humans are wired in such a way that the final memory of something plays an abnormally large part of one’s perception of the event. For example, if I went to the dentist and was distressed by the mouth injections and drilling, but ended up having great-looking teeth and a wonderful conversation with the dentist, my brain would disproportionally weigh that appointment as positive, despite the distress I earlier had. If you think about this phenomenon from a business perspective, it becomes clear why the last impression is just as important as the first in dentistry.