Today in India, dentists in all spheres be it practice, new graduates, post graduates interns or educators seem to be an unhappy community. Leaving aside a few ‘senior’ individuals who have established their operations, this has been the opinion of a large majority that we have come accross.
About 15 years ago, there started what was a parallel industry for dentists. Up until this time, the charted career for anyone aspiriing to be a dentist was relatively straightforward. Get a bachelors degree (and masters if you wish) and start your clinic. But it all began to change 15 years ago. Suddenly you could be involved in academics, a field that up until then had been reserved for the those truly of academic bent, and those who spent entire careers as educators in colleges. But now you could sail with your feet in two boats. Have your practice and be a part time (although this was never officially acknowledged and officially there was no such thing) faculty in any of the mushrooming colleges all over India.
Today, that has also become less lucrative and those of us in the know are getting actively involved in continuing education programs. It is the new boom and the charted career for a new dentist now is to get your masters degree, start your practice, attain sufficient seniority, make a relative name for yourself and start conducting CDE programs. And today, you can sail with your feet in three boats, if it is even possible to envision that.
This is a very complicated and tricky situation for new graduates and also those still grappling with their lacklustre clinical practices. To add to this threat, there are now corporate practices that are setting up in every city making clinical practice that much harder for those with single chair or even multiple chair single clinics. There is a very real need to answer an important question: Is this a rational existence for someone who just started out to be a doctor and treat patients, and is everything now secondary to an elusive financial security? This is something that is getting harder for everyone and what opinions and suggestions do doctors really have about their situation, that seems to be spinning out of control? Are we looking at large scale joblessness for dentists?
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