Featured Podcasts

Featured on Dentistry Uncensored

Episode #1730: 1,000 Teeth in 1 Day
Guest: Dr. Tommy Murph
Howard records live from a clinic floor in Mixco, Guatemala, where Dr. Tommy Murph is working between patients. Murph, a general dentist near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and author of more than 45,000 Dentaltown posts, runs these trips four times a year with Dr. Gayle Fletcher as a hybrid of charity dentistry and continuing education—54 hours of it. This session brought 46 dentists from four countries into 20 operatories, treating 250 to 300 patients a day. The day before the podcast, they extracted 997 teeth, roughly 45% of them wisdom teeth. Murph’s premise is blunt: Dental schools no longer reliably teach extraction, some graduates arrive having performed none, and supervised volume is the only way to close the gap.

Murph’s standard is that any general dentist should be able to remove a tooth the receptionist can see in 10 minutes or less, and he blames the 40- and 50-minute cases on technique: dentists who elevate instead of luxating and reach for forceps until the crown snaps off. A few well-understood instruments beat a drawer of 25 forceps, he argues, because the knowledge of how a tooth comes out sits with the operator. He also puts extraction skill before implant training, since a dentist who cannot remove a tooth atraumatically or lay a flap has no business placing one. His proof that the skill is learnable at any stage is a 72-year-old attendee who had referred every extraction for 34 years, took the course three times, then went four years without sending one out.


Episode #1735: What’s in Your Lab
Guest: Dr. Arthur Volker
Dr. Arthur Volker joins Howard to argue that good restorative outcomes rest on three things dentists treat as optional: magnification, illumination, and isolation. Volker practices in Sunnyside, New York, and owns a dental laboratory, which lets him trace what arrives at the bench back to the operatory. Dental school teaches the rubber dam and the real world discards it, he says, on the assumption that skipping isolation saves time, when it usually costs time and quality. His caution is that a badly placed rubber dam is worse than none at all, particularly on cervical restorations, where he often sees a gap between dam and composite. Asked what share of dentists, given their isolation technique, would be better off placing posterior amalgams than composites, he puts it above 90%.


Episode #1729: Should You Go Rural?
Guest: Dr. Peeyush Ranjan
Dr. Peeyush Ranjan, a pediatric dentist board-certified in the United States and Canada and owner of Tooth Pals in Airdrie, Alberta, joins Howard to argue that rural practice is an opportunity young dentists overlook. Ranjan spent his early career in Chehalis, Washington, a town of about 5,000 with one Walmart, and reduces the case to arithmetic: 10 patients and five dentists means two apiece, while 10 patients and one dentist means all 10. Rural work also makes a dentist more capable, he argues, because the nearest endodontist is two hours away and the alternative to attempting a curved canal is pulling the tooth. He puts the cost of building a comparable office at 30% to 40% less, and says what holds a practice together is relationships, not cutting a perfect MOD.

Featured Townie Podcasts
Check out your fellow Townies’ podcasts!

The Navigating Dental Insurance Podcast with Jordon Comstock
Episode: How to drop all PPO contracts in one day
Jordon Comstock talks with Dr. Eric Chatterley, a former solo practitioner turned consultant, about dropping every PPO contract in a single day instead of phasing them out gradually, which is what most consultants advise. Chatterley argues the thing holding most dentists back is fear of losing patients, and that the trust and loyalty a practice has already built matter more than network status. He credits a membership plan with keeping patients who still wanted some form of coverage, and says getting the team on board before the change mattered as much as the decision itself. He also describes reinvesting in the practice afterward, in better chairs and a better environment, and calls it the business decision he wishes he had made sooner.


Everyday Practices Dental Podcast with Regan Robertson and Sara Hansen
Episode 334: Build a practice that markets itself
Dr. Devin Giron, founder of VIDA Dental Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, joins Regan Robertson and Sara Hansen to explain why excellent clinical work was not enough to fill his schedule. After buying his first practice in 2017 he was losing money and questioning whether ownership was worth it, and he argues the turn came when he stopped waiting for patients to recognize the quality of his dentistry and started communicating what made the practice different. He treats marketing as a permanent business function rather than a promotion to switch on and off, and says it works only when the team can answer the phone, schedule quickly, and explain why the practice is worth choosing. Giron now runs a fee-for-service practice with nine operatories and four doctors.

Find your new favorite podcast on Dentaltown!
New episodes are released every month at dentaltown.com/channels, which can be viewed on an iPad, Android, and other mobile devices as well as standard desktop and laptop computers. If you want to join Howard’s show as a guest, send a request to podcasts@farranmedia.com!