If I had to pick one posting that shaped who I am becoming. It would be Public Health Dentistry. And it was my very first posting of final year. I didn’t walk in as a blank slate.
My first ever patient was in the chair. Me nervous, careful, trying to remember everything at once. Recording findings. Observing patterns. Seeing for the first time what disease actually looks like outside a textbook. But what struck me wasn’t just the clinical part. It was the stories behind the patients. People who had never seen a dentist. People who didn’t know they had a problem. People for whom access to care was never a given.
That gap between need and access. I had read about it in research papers. Here, I was seeing it in real faces.
Public Health Dentistry doesn’t just teach you to examine. It teaches you to ask why. Why aren’t people coming in earlier? Why don’t they know about the services available to them? Why does geography, income, and awareness determine who gets care? These weren’t new questions for me. But for the first time they had faces attached to them. And that changes everything.
Months later, I found myself with Questionnaire in hand for a posting. The research curiosity came first. But this posting made it personal. It took something academic and made it human. That’s what the right clinical exposure does. It doesn’t create your direction. It deepens it. It confirms it. It makes you more certain than ever that you’re on the right path.
What are your thoughts ?
MBH/PS