An interview with Dr. Howard Farran

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 Dea all,

We continue with the questions and I am sure that Dr. Howard Farrans insights will change the outlook of many a dentist:

So read on:

Your favorite lecturer on the dental lecture circuit.
I would definitely say Dr. Mike DiTolla. He is the dental director of the largest dental lab in the world called Glidewell Dental Labs and he is sitting on more knowledge and more data than anyone I know at this time. They did a quarter of a billion dollars of dentistry last year and Dr. DiTolla has the data to back up everything he says. There’s no reason to go with porcelain-infused gold when you can do BruxZir. It has the same fracture failure rate as gold. His knowledge is unbelievable. If you ever get a chance to listen or see Mike DiTolla, go for it. He does have a continuing education course on Dentaltown.com.

In how many cities of the globe have you lectured?
I have lectured between 30 to 45 times a year, every year since 1990.  I’ve lectured in probably 40 countries, many of them several times.

Do you refer patients to a specialist or you call specialists in your clinic?
I do not bring any specialists into my dental office. We refer to the specialists all the time. My rule for practicing specialties is, if you absolutely love to do the procedure, it’s fun and exciting and makes you get a speeding ticket on the way to work, then do it yourself. But if you absolutely hate doing a procedure, you’ll actually lose money if you don’t refer it out. If you don’t like it you won’t learn more about it so it’ll take you longer. It’ll take the smile off your face, and lead to burnout and depression. I had a dentist say to me one time that he’d rather be beaten with a belt than do a root canal. I told him that’s what endodontists are for, so refer to them. Refer out everything you don’t like and don’t ever do a procedure just for the money. Keep a smile on your face. Remember life is a marathon, not a sprint, and the happy dentists who have fun keep going and going and going until they’re in their 70s and 80s, so don’t burn out.

Is dentistry comprehensive enough to challenge you?
People know what they know, but they don’t know what they don’t know. I think dentistry is completely impossible to entirely understand. The smartest dentists in the world know that they only understand the tip of the iceberg. Doing this for 25 years, I would say every year I practice, I learn a little bit more on the learn list but the list of questions of what I don’t know grows twice as fast.

Most practices report that professional receipts stagnate after a few years of practice.
What can be done?
It all comes down to one simple rule. Once a patient calls you on the phone and says, “I have a dental problem and I want to come down and give you money” and you say, “No, you can’t come down and give me money; you have to stand in line and wait a day or two to give me money,” that’s the instant you have a plateau and you’ll have it the rest of your professional life. So you have two choices. You can either hit the gas (expand your capacity by adding more chairs. There’s 168 hours in a week, most dentists work 40 hours a week, so they’re only open one out of every four hours. They could use their facility the other three out of four hours with another dentist, extended hours, weekends, or you could get more associates.) Or you can hit the brake and raise your prices. If you go to the market and every item there sells for a dollar and there’s a long line outside your door, then you raise your prices to two dollars – now you’re collecting twice as much money, but most of your line disappeared and the people who do show up and wait in line are giving you twice as much money.

Why don’t you also speak & conduct hands on courses on clinical topics like endo, adhesive dentistry etc.?
There is so much information in dentistry that you have to be an expert to speak on anything. An endodontist knows endodontics. All he thinks about, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for decades and decades is endo. A general dentist like myself who might do one root canal then go to the next procedure and place a crown, and then do a filling on a child, cannot intellectually compete with someone like Dr. Steve Buchanan, an endodontist, who’s only done one thing his entire career. We see this in economics going back hundreds of years with specialization. I have a master’s in business administration from Arizona State University. I have spent the last 25 years of my life focusing on one aspect and that is the business of dentistry. There’s no way I could compete with all the other aspects of dentistry.

        

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