The votes have been cast. The ballots have been carefully tabulated. The candidates have been nervously waiting in the wings for the results. For months, everyone’s been dying to know who won. Hold your breath no longer as Dentaltown Magazine is pleased to present the most valuable poll results in the dental profession – the 2006 Townie Choice Awards.

Every day, you are bombarded by thousands of advertisements, presenting you with good reasons to buy a product or subscribe to a service. It makes your purchasing decisions all that much harder. It’s hard to choose when everything is touted as, “the best.” Especially in dentistry, you want to know you can count on the products you are using. When it comes to these purchases, the most valuable opinion comes from a fellow dentist. This is the essence of the Townie Choice Awards. So instead of walking down the street and asking your neighbors about their product preferences, the Townie Choice Awards have made it easier on you. You can merely flip through this book to find out what many others in this profession prefer.

The Townie Choice Awards are voted on by true dental professionals who use these products several times a day, on a day-to-day basis. You can be assured that the winners in each category deserve to be there, since no 12-person-panel nor tiny magazine editorial staff had anything to do with deciding the outcomes. That’s what makes these awards so special. A simple democratic process – One Townie, One Vote – determines the most honest of outcomes.

For those of you who took the time to vote and give your honest opinions about the profession’s best products, thank you. Each year, voters of the Townie Choice Awards are automatically entered in a drawing to win $1,000. Congratulations to this year’s winner, Eric Shantzer, DDS, from Richboro, Pennsylvania. If you didn’t vote this year, you’ll get your chance in 2007 (and who knows, you might even win the $1,000 drawing).

The ballot changes every year, and your comments help steer it to be as thorough as can be. Let us know what you thought this year. Tell us what you’d like to see next year. Send us an e-mail with the subject line “TCA Comments” to: tom@farranmedia.com. Thank you for helping make this community such a success!

>> Click here to view the results of the 2006 Dental Townie Choice Awards