You may know POS Instructor Dr. Glenn Takenaga because of the active role he plays on the POS Forum. Get to know him and hear his advice for new and current POS students in this interview.
Click below to play the video or scroll down to read the full transcript.
Video Transcript
GABY CASTILLO: We're here today with Dr. Takenaga. So tell us a little bit about your practice. What kind of patients do you see and what's the volume?
DR. TAKENAGA: My practice is in Modesto, California. It's a rural community so we see mostly blue-collar, but a little touch of white-collar as well. In my ortho practice, I work almost full-time in four or five rooms. My office is quite big. I have a 17 operatory practice. I have four or five doctors per day working and about four hygienists who source the ortho patients.
GABY: How many ortho patients do you treat a month?
DR. TAKENAGA: I practice about four days a week and see about somewhere between 30 to 40 patients a day. So probably about 700 a month.
GABY: So you just do ortho primarily?
DR. TAKENAGA: Yeah, a little touch of general but not too much.
GABY: How did orthodontics help during the economic downturn?
DR. TAKENAGA: During that time I was half ortho and half general, and I actually expanded my practice. A lot of the docs in my areas were contracting. If they were working 5 days a week, they were now working 4. And most of them were already working 4, so they were going down to 3 or 3.5 days. In my practice we went from 5 days to 6 days with extended hours. We were open as late as 9:00 in the evening. Ortho wise that's when I actually started growing. I went from part-time and transitioned into a full-time. At that time, my practice was only 12 operatories and I extended it because I got busy with the ortho. I was actually competing with the other docs and they were always throwing me out of my room space, even though it's my practice. So I actually extended the office and added 5 more operatories and that's where I operate now with my ortho. There was a lot of increasing of the practice, basically. It was interesting because like I said the rest of the docs in the community were contracting, but the patients were still there. They still needed a dentist, so we were able to fill a need. They just didn't want to leave work and go to a dental appointment. So for us to expand into Saturday's as well as into the evenings, late evenings, we were able to fulfill their need. So we found a niche that worked for us to be able to actually expand during the downturn.
GABY: Tell us more about your role in the POS forum.
DR.TAKENAGA: I've been involved with the POS forum almost from the beginning, maybe one year shy of that. I believe it was 2007, so it's almost about 10 years now that I've been with the forum. What's kept me going on the forum is that it's become my teaching playground. I've been so busy in my own office that I don't have time to be an active instructor. Maybe one day. It's one of my hopes, but for the time being, to help me stay current with the POS teachings and being able to develop my presentation to the students, I use the forum as my classroom to be able to maintain my skills. And so I have a philosophy: see one, do one, teach one. It's one thing to come to seminars and see the orthodontics how it’s to be done, it's another to do it, which yes I'm doing now today very much so, but to really solidify that knowledge is to be able to teach it and so hence the forum. It's been the vehicle for me to be able to take that third step and be able to really own that orthodontic knowledge.
GABY: So what's your advice to current students?
DR. TAKENAGA: Well for the beginning students it's just starting cases. I cannot more emphasize that point right there. It's just start cases. You don't have to start the hard cases. There's plenty of simple cases out there. Whether it's class 1 or slight class 2 and a little bit of crowding or a little bit of spaces. There's plenty of those cases out there and to be able to find those cases all you have to do is ask a simple question. Ask the patient, "Have you ever thought about straightening your teeth?” or “Is there anything about your smile that concerns you?" Or anything like that. Get the patient talking about it and you'll be surprised how many of them will respond positively that they would like to improve their smile and that's your segue into being able to introduce the idea for them to consider orthodontics. I know it's sometimes difficult for a new student. They're looking at all the expenses and all that. When I first started I had a wish list of all things I needed for ortho. I didn't try to have all the money at once to buy everything. What I did was every time I sold a case I looked at the list of things I needed and I would buy that one thing. And then I’d sell another case and buy another thing like a plier. Every case I sold I bought a plier or I bought an end cutter, whatever it took. And my inventory of armamentarium grew as I sold cases. You only need eight or ten cases to basically fund your whole education as well as all the equipment that you need to operate with your orthodontic practice. And if you do more than that, in my case I probably started one or two hundred cases in those first two years. Sky's the limit really with what you can do. So that's the first thing especially for the beginners.
For the beginners as well as maybe the more advanced or even the alumni, one of the things I always suggest is to take photos. I take photos of every single ortho patient at every single appointment and especially for the beginning students, it actually becomes a way of learning or reinforcing your learning. You go to chair side, you look at the patient, and when you're a beginner the knowledge might be here. It's slow because you're not experienced and so you take more time trying to figure out what to do, and you figure it out but hopefully the next patient gets better and faster. But what helps speed that process up is having those photos and at the end of the night you do a chart review. You look at those photos and you go hmm did I do the right thing, or what could I have done even better? You know you see that rotation, you see this tooth out of place, maybe I should have done this with that. And what I would do is I would make notes so that the next time the patient came in, I look at those notes and know to look for these things. And now I'm presenting myself even more confidently and a patient will pick up on that because I already have a game plan, or at least a partial game plan and it just gets better and better every single patient. So I always recommend photos.
GABY: Well thanks Dr. Takenaga that was very insightful.
DR. TAKENAGA: Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure.