One of my favorite in-school rotations at UTSD is our Urgent Care rotation. We’re assigned to this multiple times a month but if my patient no-shows, it’s typically my 1st choice to ensure I spend my clinic time wisely. There’s always room for more students in Urgent Care. Dr. C.D. Johnson runs our urgent care clinic. Unlike the typical stories you hear of dentists working 4 days a week, with fridays for golf or waterskiing, Dr. Johnson ran a clinic working 7 days a week. A good amount of his time was spent seeing walk-in urgent care patients. Needless to say, Dr. Johnson has seen it all.
If you bring Dr. Johnson a Diet Dr. Pepper, you’re likely to have a more educational experience in Urgent Care. He always points out interesting anomalies on radiographs. He also makes it a point to show you perfect WREB lesions to help train your eyes. Because of Dr. Johnson, I’ve also seen my fair share of abnormal pathology. I one time had a patient in awe that so many professors and students were incredibly excited to see his radiograph.
It’s incredible how excited we are to see something out of the ordinary. The July 2014 story of the Indian boy with 232 teeth was the big hit amongst my dental student friends on Facebook. If you don’t recall, an Indian Boy was seen at a hospital in Mumbai for a mandibular swelling. It turns out the boy suffered from a complex composite odontoma. 232 teeth were extracted from the site. Not only were all of my Facebook friends interested in this topic, plenty of tweeters out there seemed to be wow’ed by the situation.
Let’s face it, we’ve all had experiences in clinic like mine in urgent care involving excitement over something “weird.” As dental students, we quest for knowledge. We learn about dental anomalies in our didactic classes, but we really don’t understand it’s real until we see it for ourselves.
Think about a YouTube video you’ve seen recently because a friend posted in on Facebook. Why do videos go viral? Why do we like to watch a baby getting emotional at the sound of his mother’s voice? The simple answer is because it’s something we’ve never seen before. The long answer, according to a TED talk by Kevin Alloca, is there is an algorithm for sharing on multiple sites. Now think about the craziest thing you’ve seen at school on a radiograph. How many times did you tell all of your classmates about it? Probably a lot. Maybe you endodontically treated a molar with DB-2 and bragged about the final fill radiograph to your classmates. All of your friends instantly ask you about your experience. We all desire a challenge and want to experience something “cool”. Just like a viral video, we’re drawn to weird dentistry because it’s new and exciting.
Have your experienced anything out of the norm in clinic and did it help you apply your didactic knowledge?
~Katie Sowa, Houston ’15, 2013-2014 editor-in-chief