I am happy to see you guys liked the Dr. Paul Homoly interview in the last issue as much as I did! I received more voicemails, emails and comments at lectures from that article than any other we have ever published. I will be doing an interview with him later this year where he will incorporate profitability numbers into that same discussion. The preliminary phone conversation we had about it was fascinating.

We have another great interview in this issue from another clinician I have looked up to for a long time, Dr. Brock Rondeau. Like the Homoly interview, you need to stick with this one as all of the loose ends get tied up into one package that may be a revelation for some of you as it was for me years ago when Brock trained me. I began treating the children in my practice with two-phase orthodonic treatment as Brock has been doing for decades, and the results were as nice as Brock said they would be.

The most amazing thing to me about doing ortho in my practice was that the same parents who didn’t have the money to replace the 35-year-old crowns in their mouth could afford to start both of their kids in ortho treatment with me! Their children’s ortho was a much higher priority than replacing their own crowns.

I never really enjoyed working on kids until I had children of my own. Even then, once I knew how to talk to kids, I still didn’t really like doing operative on them. My least favorite thing was how the orthodontist charging the patient $5,000 for ortho would send the kid back to my office for $400 worth of extractions to remove the first bicuspids! Brock’s flier came in the mail the next day, and seven months later I started my first ortho case. Whether or not you ever decide to provide two-phase ortho to your patients, Brock’s interview is a fascinating look into the interconnectedness of orthopedics, orthodontics, TMD and sleep apnea.

The bottom line: I would rather do two-phase ortho on my daughter when she was 10, than do 10 veneers on her when she is 20.