During my time as a dentist in a multispecialty dental hospital, I come across patients walking in with a lot of preconceived notions, expectations, and sometimes preset ideas about a treatment procedure. What I observed recently was that everyone has easy access to information from the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence platforms. Social media has set unrealistic beauty standards with respect to facial aesthetics and smile corrections. Everyone wants something called the “perfect smile,” infamously called the “Hollywood smile.” They show us photographs of celebrities asking, “Doctor, I want my smile to look like this heroine.” However, what they fail to realize is that dentistry is never “one size fits all.”
How to deal with such patients?
- First and foremost, we need to counsel them and explain to such patients how teeth are different for different individuals based on their:
- Golden proportions
- Facial profiles
- Lip contours
- Skin complexion
- Age and gender
- Bone and gingival factors
- After convincing them, it’s always advised to never directly give them final restorations or prosthesis but to give them temporary prostheses for a few months so that they can get accustomed to their teeth during function and for aesthetic concerns as well.
As dentists, it’s our responsibility to guide our patients towards the sort of smile design that will balance their occlusion, facial harmony, and guide the TMJ and muscles into the most relaxed position, which is the centric relation. It has to be advised that what they see on social media is not always true because each person’s anatomy is different and treatment should be planned in a customized manner.
What do you think about unrealistic expectations of patients? How will you deal with such patients? Share your experiences.
MBH/PS