Is that Before and After Photo REAL?

Stock photography is EVERYWHERE. In photo frames, all over magazine advertisements, websites, brochures, anywhere you can think of. There are many websites, like iStockPhoto.com, that are dedicated to selling thousands of professional pictures taken with models and professional photographers in whatever pose and situation you could ever imagine. Most of the time stock photos are a great thing. A nice looking photo can really add to a piece of advertising, and it's a lot easier and cost effective to go onto a stock photography website and buy a great looking picture for $20 than to hire a photographer and a model and pay a couple hundred dollars for a photo-shoot. 

In dentistry using stock photos can be really useful. A nice picture of a girl smiling or a family brushing their teeth can improve the look of a brochure or a website. However, "Before and After" and "Smile Galleries" aren't the place for stock photography. Before and after photos are meant to be a portfolio of a dentist's work, actual cases of the dentist's capabilities and talents. Dental work, especially cosmetic dental work, is very personal to those who are considering having some completed. Patients and prospective patients look through these before and after photos as true samples of what their smile could be improved to look like from their specific dentist. Before and after stock photography isn't fair to those flipping through an online Smile Gallery who trust that the cases have actually been completed by that dentist. I feel like this is false advertising. 

I like to take before and after pictures for cases that are especially good examples of either common cosmetic dental work, like veneers or dentures, or especially extensive cosmetic dental work, like dental implants. I respectfully never take photos of the patients' faces, only their teeth or smiles. Here are what natural before and after photos look like:

Look through your dentist's Smile Gallery, do the before and after pictures look believable? Do the people in them look real? Do the pictures look set up? After perusing the internet I found a few great examples of Before and After stock pictures: 

This is kind of a silly one for a dental office, obviously a full 

makeover and you can hardly even see her teeth!

Both of these were found on Shutterstock, a stock photography website.

A Family Dental Care Center: Dr. Seth Rosen

www.drsethrosen.com

2030 West Main St.

Norristown, PA 19403

610.631.3400

The Meaning of Pho

When I entered dental school at Temple University, pretty much right off the Connecticut farm, I noticed that Philadelphians stay to their neighborhoods. Here was a beautiful city with so many different cultural areas and nationalities with ill-defined boarders and boundaries that were nary crossed by true Philadelphians. They were born, raised, went to school, returned, and then raised their families in the same neighborhood. This intrigued me, mostly because I knew that there had to be some great food gems that weren’t being utilized. This was well before the dawn of the internet, GPS, and food blogging.

Vietnamese Pho, beef noodle soup.
Courtesy Pho Tai Nam in East Norriton, PA

One day I noticed a group of Vietnamese students coming back from lunch. They all had toothpicks protruding from their lips and had an odd smell about them. I asked what they had for lunch and they said something along the lines of “fuh”. They thought that I wouldn’t like it, but they would take me anyway the next time they went. Two days later they told me that they were going. We drove less than a mile from the school and entered what looked like an empty storefront in a strip mall. It was a huge room with little décor, large rectangular tables, plastic chairs, and people of all ages (all Vietnamese) bent over these tremendous bowls of what looked like noodle soup. I let them order for me, and before I could blink there was a huge steaming bowl of Pho, beef noodle soup put in front of me. This stuff is brought to the table so hot that the raw beef is cooked in the broth as it sits. There was a small dish of condiments including basil, jalapeños, lime, and bean sprouts. You can adjust the flavor of the broth by adding pepper sauce or plum sauce. Then you slurp away. Besides being the most delicious lunch ever it was also the cheapest at $3.95. By going a little bit out of my comfort zone I was able to score a fantastic lunch at a great price.

The same happens in my dental office. We are getting inquiries from as far away as New York because of the internet. Patients are finally realizing that if they travel a little bit further they can get great dentistry at great prices. To put this in perspective: we recently placed a dental implant in a patient who was quoted $6000 by her New York City dentist, we were able to complete the same procedure for $1800. At first she was hesitant because an implant requires at least two visits to complete, which would mean two trips of 100 miles each way. When I figured out that the six hours of her time was worth $4200, or $700 per hour, she jumped at the chance. Locally we get the same scenario, but patients only need to travel minutes, not hours, to get the best dentistry at the best prices. Dental pricing is based on the local market, which varies from town to town. Right up the street we have a higher average income area that forces the prices of dentistry to be 50% -150% higher than our office three miles down the road.

www.drsethrosen.com

A Family Dental Care Center: Dr. Seth Rosen

2030 West Main St. 

Norristown, PA 19403

This Ain't Your Grandfather's Novocaine Anymore

Before the introduction of Novocaine in the very early 1900's, cocaine was the original dental anesthetic. Obviously, cocaine had to be replaced due to its euphoric and addictive qualities and along came novocaine! For years novocaine was the most widely used and popular anesthetic in dentistry and today any local anesthetic injected into you is referred to as "novocaine". But novocaine isn't actually used anymore. 


Novocaine was replaced by safer anesthetics, the most popular of these being lidocaine. The majority of people who go to the dentist to have cavities filled will be injected with lidocaine. Lidocaine is more effective, more hypoallergenic, and can be better controlled to determine how long it lasts and how numb the area is meant to be. 


While there are a countless amount of local anesthetics available on the market, we use five different types of anesthetics in our office. We choose depending on how long we want the patient numb for, how numb we want them, and according to the patient's health and medical history. All types of anesthetics are processed in the body differently, some are processed in the liver whereas others are processed in the bloodstream. 


If you just can't stand waiting for the numbness to pass there is a drug available called OraVerse. After the procedure is completed, OraVerse is injected into the same area and reverses the effects of the anesthetic. All feeling is returned to the previously numbed area pretty much immediately. However, OraVerse has it's side effects which include possible cardiac disturbances, and the good doesn't really outweigh the bad. Why take a drug to speed up regaining feeling in an area that, if left alone, would probably lose the numbness within the hour anyway? 

www.drsethrosen.com

A Family Dental Care Center: Dr. Seth Rosen

2030 West Main St. 

Norristown, PA 19403

610.631.3400

Vote for Dr. Rosen as TOP DENTIST!