There is a question that follows early-career clinicians like a shadow: "How long have you been doing this?" It arrives with a smile, but it carries real weight. The patient is not asking for a number. They are asking whether it is safe to trust you.
01The Question Behind the QuestionWhat Patients Are Really Asking
Years of experience are a proxy — a shorthand patients reach for because they have no other instrument to measure competence in the room. When a clinician answers "a few years, but this is most of what I do every day," the answer is honest, even admirable. But it lands in a gap. The patient wanted reassurance, and a résumé — however accurate — rarely closes that gap on its own.
What does close it, reliably, is something more immediate: the sense that the person across from them understands their specific situation and is willing to explain it. Not in the abstract. Not with a laminated brochure. In plain language, about their tooth, their bone level, their options.
02The Educator ModelTeaching First, Treating Second
The shift that changes the dynamic is a small one in practice but significant in philosophy: arriving at the consultation as a teacher before arriving as a provider. When a clinician takes five minutes to explain what is actually happening in a patient's mouth — the mechanism of the disease, why it progressed, what the options genuinely involve — something changes in the room.
The patient stops being a passive recipient of a treatment plan and becomes a participant in understanding their own condition. And here is the part that is easy to overlook: even if they walk away and decline treatment, they leave with something real. Knowledge about their own health. That is not a consolation prize. It is, in itself, a clinical act.
Research on shared decision-making in healthcare consistently identifies information transfer as the prerequisite to any meaningful treatment agreement. Patients cannot participate in decisions about their care if they do not first understand what they are deciding. The consultation is not just the gateway to treatment — it is, for many patients, the first time anyone has explained their condition to them at all.
The healthcare provider must provide the patient the information they need to know and understand in order to even consider and participate in the shared decision-making process.
Truglio-Londrigan et al. · JBI Library of Systematic Reviews, 2012
03What This Looks Like in PracticeThe Consultation as a Teaching Moment
It does not require a lecture or a slide deck. It requires a deliberate pause before the treatment plan — a moment where the clinician says, in effect: let me show you what I'm seeing, and why it matters.
For a patient presenting with early-stage periodontal disease, that might mean walking them through a single periapical radiograph and explaining what bone loss actually looks like. For a patient with a failing restoration, it might mean describing why the margin failed and what the tooth needs now. The clinical content is secondary to the posture: I am here to help you understand, not just to tell you what to do.
This approach does not slow the consultation down in any meaningful way. What it does is shift the patient's experience from being assessed to being informed. That shift is where trust begins.
04The Longer GameWhy This Compounds Over Time
Clinicians who build their practice on this model tend to find that the "how long have you been doing this?" question fades. Not because patients stop caring about experience — they do not — but because the question becomes less urgent when the patient already feels understood.
There is also a subtler benefit. Patients who understand their condition make better long-term partners in their own care. They are more likely to return for maintenance, more likely to follow through on recommendations, and more likely to refer others — not because the dentistry was technically flawless, but because the experience felt collaborative.
The credential on the wall answers one question. The quality of the conversation answers the one that actually matters.
We would like to hear from you. Do you have a specific approach you use at the start of consultations to build patient understanding? Share your experience with the Cicero community.
Professor of Dentistry at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and Chair of the Department of Dental Specialties at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. Director of the American Board of Prosthodontics and a board-certified prosthodontist.
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