![]() ![]() However, the mentor who has had the biggest influence on me over the years is Dr. David Sarver, John Kois, Frank Spear, Gregg Kinzer, Won Moon, Stanley Yiu, Jeff Rouse and Audrey Yoon. Other great teachers I have learned from include Drs. Kokich’s series of articles published that year in Seminars in Orthodontics was seminal work in the field of adult orthodontics, and I was so blessed to have read those articles as well as spent so much time with him early in my career. and had a unique opportunity to spend a week with him in Fiji at the New Zealand Society of Orthodontists meeting. Two choices: door open or door closed (and wire fully engaged). PSL brackets made sense to me from a systems approach. All of these variables influenced the manner in which a tooth would respond and introduced inconsistencies into orthodontic results. With my background in mechanical engineering, it made sense to me to engage an orthodontic wire with four rigid walls and eliminate the variability of different sizes and strengths of O-rings, as well as different assistants tying in wires in various manners, leaving the pigtail of a steel ligature tie mesially or distally, occlusally or gingivally, tight or loose. Dwight Damon and became an early adopter of the Damon PSL system. 018-inch slot system simply didn’t have quite enough force to overcome these challenging malocclusions.ġ997 was a pivotal year for me. 017-by-.025-inch wire for most of my working and finishing stages of treatment, but as an orthodontist in the military, I was tasked with treating only the most challenging cases: surgical cases, interdisciplinary cases and impinging deep bites.įor some of these adult cases, I felt that the. I enjoyed excellent torque control, using a. Air Force orthodontist in Misawa, Japan, I began using an. When I completed my orthodontic residency and began working as a U.S. 022-inch slot bracket system had just been passed down from generation to generation with no one considering updating it or changing it to accommodate today’s modern wire materials. My orthodontist employer didn’t have an answer, nor did any of my professors in my dental school or in my orthodontic residency. ![]() OK, then-next question: “Why don’t they just make a bracket that fits the. 021-by-.025-inch wire is just too heavy it breaks brackets and hurts patients. 022-inch brackets with a full-sized wire?” Of course, the answer was that a. So I had the audacity to ask the question: “Why don’t we fully engage the slot of these. 019-by-.025-inch one, it bothered me to me, that was the equivalent of grabbing a 22-millimeter wrench to tighten a 19mm nut. So, when I learned that the largest wire in the. Whether it was repairing lens edging equipment in my father’s optometry lab or fences, gates, bicycles, cars or anything mechanical around our property, I learned to use the correct tool for the job. ![]() The following summer, I started working as an orthodontic assistant, and although I barely knew my mesial from my distal, there was something about the mechanics of orthodontics that really bothered me. Studying was no longer a chore it was now a labor of love. I’m in!Įighteen months later, I started dental school in San Antonio with the hopes of being an orthodontist, and I knew right away I’d made the right decision. This doctor gets to set his own hours, own his business, hire who he wants, three-day weekends, and gets to do mechanical engineering … in the mouth. I quickly did the math, multiplying my monthly payment times two patients per hour per chair, times six chairs, and a smile spread across my face. So as I sat in the orthodontist’s chair, I had an epiphany: This doctor has a really cool job! He works with forces, movements, vectors … and people. Yet, for the first time in my life, I had a real job with decent pay and dental insurance, and I’d always wanted orthodontic treatment. ![]() As a University of Texas mechanical engineering student, I spent one semester doing a research internship in Austin, and I hated it-I was so bored that I often fell asleep on the job. ![]()
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