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Professional Courtesy: New Patients with Baggage by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

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New Patients with Baggage
by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine
There are many different ways new patients will find your dental practice. Some of the more obvious modes of discovery include a recommendation from an existing patient, driving by the practice if it's in a visible location or seeing an ad/mailer. The Internet has become a deeper category for referral as prospective patients may visit your website after your name is suggested by a coworker, discover your online ad or read great reviews about your office on one of the myriad websites dedicated to crowdsourced content. This month I would like to discuss the patient that comes to your practice after an unpleasant experience with their previous dentist.

Many times these new patients will arrive needing a second opinion, assuming this is something you do in your office. My staff has always been instructed to offer a second opinion to a patient who calls with a fear of commitment or confusion about recommended treatment. The patient with fear of commitment has recently had a bad experience, thinks they need to change dentists and are scared they will make a bad choice again. The confused patients are generally more fun because it can be an opportunity to confirm a treatment plan from another dentist or provide another opinion. The patients who come to these appointments with the intention of changing dentists most often have had one of the following experiences: amalgams replaced, warranty issue or unpleasant staff.

There is nothing more frustrating than hearing a patient say the following words: "My tooth didn't hurt before you worked on it, doc." The patients who had a dentist recommend that they replace all of their amalgams just because they are old or because they are allegedly poisonous or because they are just plain ugly are the patients most likely to utter that painful phrase. By the time they are in my office, the dentist has adjusted the bite once or twice and told them to give it time. The days of having extreme sensitivity after placing a composite should be over. Modern bonding agents and composite filling have improved significantly in the last 15 years and if your patient has sensitivity for more than a few days there is likely something wrong (yes, there are rare exceptions). If the bite adjustment fails, I suggest you remove the sensitive filling and place an interim filling to rule that out as the cause. I do this with every one of these patients and it always seems to work. I will add that most of these patients give a strange look when I place the rubber dam to work on these teeth as they had never experienced it in the past.

The next most likely new patient comes to the office with something that the previous dentist would not warranty. Some of you are thinking, what warranty? Let me explain. We have an obligation to provide care that restores our patients to proper function and aesthetics. If the treatment is not successful, then it may need to be redone. This concept is very unsettling to many dentists, but if you embrace it, not only will patients appreciate your desire to "get it right," it will be the best incentive for quality control that you can have in the practice.

Now back to that dissatisfied patient. When someone comes in saying, "I never liked this crown from the beginning...," you know there is another side to this story. In these cases the best advice will always be to listen and provide honest feedback but also strongly encourage the patient to return to their previous dentist so they will have an opportunity to evaluate the problem.

The final group leaves their previous dentist due to unpleasant staff. This is the issue you have the most control over in your practice and one that is best illustrated by a short story from my accountant. During a recent meeting, we got on the topic of things people were doing that made positive changes to their dental practices and he told me of one of his clients who had a double-digit uptick over the previous year. When I asked him why the big improvement, he said the dentist fired his front office person and hired someone new. That says it all.

We all lose patients from our practices and sometimes that's the best thing that happened all week. My message this month is not intended to point fingers, but rather to ensure you know exactly why and how that person selected you to be their new dentist. Their answer matters.

Please join the lively discussion of this topic online via the digital version of Dentaltown Magazine. If you have a question or suggestion for future topics, send me an e-mail: tom@dentaltown.com.

Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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