by Christopher Piehler

With this year’s AAO Annual Session being held in Washington, DC, now would be the logical time for me to add my voice to the din of opinion about the intersection of government and health care—but I’m not going to. Unless you’ve been living under several rocks for the past year, you’ve heard enough on this topic, and my Mom taught me that it’s impolite to discuss politics or religion in public.
I do want to talk about politics, though, just not the electoral type. As we convene in the nation’s capital, I am more interested in the checks and balances that guide orthodontists’ everyday interactions with their patients and staff.
In most orthodontic practices I know, the orthodontist is most analagous to a president. His primary and most public responsibility is to his consituents (the patients), who pay his salary. The challenge for both a president and an orthodontist is that doing what’s best for the constituents in the long term might not be the same thing as keeping them happy in the short term. This relationship has been radically altered by the masses of information and misinformation available on the Internet. An informed patient is often a happier, more conscientous patient; but a loudly misinformed one can be a nuisance who slows down the functioning of the practice. Never before has there been a greater gap between what the general public really knows and what they think they know.
Also like a president, an orthodontist cannot possibly do every job at hand and still keep a vigilant eye on the big picture. This means that he must rely on his cabinet (the staff) to be experts in various areas and give him the best guidance possible. The president/orthodontist’s challenge here is that he sometimes disagrees with the counsel he gets from his adviser, so he has to figure out a way to implement his own ideas while still maintaining a cordial relationship with those whose advice he has asked for and not taken.
The complications of juggling all these professional alliances may lead you to long for the simplicity of a dictatorship, but as Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”
Christopher Piehler
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