Our Service Trip to Acapulco

Jerome Smith recently invited me to join him along with 9 LSU dental students to work in a charity clinic in Acapulco. Jerry had heard of my plans to teach an endo course in Haiti; a poor country that is favored by Greg Stanley for similar charity work.

I accepted. The charity clinic began with mostly extractions. It has been there long enough to reduce much of the extraction “volume” and now restorative work is performed at an increasing rate.

Our purpose was multi-faceted. LSU’s dental college offers endo education to its dental students by elective during the senior year. There are only 15 slots available for the elective and approximately 60 students. As a result, many LSU dental grads have no endo experience.

Our goal was to teach these students how to perform endo in an efficient way. I regularly hold workshops here in Houston but had never before had the opportunity to teach dental students.

Jerry is a first class educator and efficiency expert and almost certainly has superceded myself in terms of clinical application of clinical efficiencies, particularly in the area of case presentation, practice management and implants. I cook up all the wild hair brain schemes and Jerry implements them.

There were only 6 chairs so I brought an additional Military style dental chair and a “camp” style lounge chair that allowed us to perform exams in order to diagnose and “triage” the patients. I also brought along portable compressors and units and other supplies and equipment that I ordinarily use for my workshop so that we could increase the amount of dentistry performed.

We provided training the day before we see patients and every evening we reviewed cases and provided additional didactics.

Actually, the course was not all that different than the one I give regularly in Houston. It is very modular and very repetitive. Kind of like Kumon math. I designed the workshop to go on the road so all my equipment is portable.

In designing my course, I practiced teaching novices by teaching some of my staff to perform endo. In fact, in my workshops we teach the assistants to do endo and we teach the dentists how to be assistants. My technique is driven by my assistant. Ordinarily the assistant’s brain is "off" during endo (that's why they tend to doze off). We flip the switch in their brain to the "on" postition.

I think it's crucial that the doctor understands the assistant's perspective and vice versa; only then do they have the potential to achieve maximum synergy.

The doctor's time and effort during the procedure is reduced and the assistant's time and effort in increased. Assistant's prefer this, by the way (so do the doctors).

Efficient endo is a team effort.

I brought along my 2 oldest boys who assisted and performed photography. They have helped me in my dental office over the years and some of the photography that has appeared in my articles was actually performed by Riley who just turned 13. My son Michael, who is 17 has also been a valuable asset. Michael seems to be able to tackle just about any problem.

Life has gone by so fast, and I really enjoyed being with them in such an environment.

Both the boys had visions of surfing in Acapulco. Little did they know that we would be working our butts off the whole time (Jerry assured me of that).

2 junior Rice University students who worked with me last summer were also involved. Tim Josef is a bio-engineering major and Alex Jainchill is a journalism major. Tim helped me with R&D and Alex wrote beautiful copy.

I wanted to expose bright, motivated, ambitious young engineering students to dentistry so that they could help me develop new products and communications. So far I have been very impressed with their work. In addition to Tim and Alex, I hired an Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Physics students all from the same class.

The third world needs help. Jerry and I have a dream that we can bring clinical efficiencies to the third world and provide good hands on training to dentists from the U.S. as well in an environment where they will get plenty of practice and, simultaneously, provide dental healthcare to those who would otherwise almost certainly do without.

If the current dental force in the third world could perform twice as much dentistry through simple efficiency principles, dental healthcare could become available to a wider population. It seems like a noble goal.

Spending time with my good friend Jerome Smith, the students, the patients and my college boys and sons insured a great experience for everyone involved. I'd like to go to Haiti as well, along with Greg Stanley. I have yet to plan the Haiti trip but will do so before long. One things for sure, we won't have to worry about a patient shortage.