gotta be good with hands?

[victor14]

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do they teach you hand skills in d-school or do you just have to be good with them to begin with?

 

[Hardbody]

do they teach you hand skills in d-school or do you just have to be good with them to begin with?

Where I come from having hand skills means that you can put a quick a$$ whippin on someone, possibly giving someone a street extraction ! Couldn't help myself with my first comment, sorry.

I think the only school that tests your "hand skills" before you get accepted is ASDOH. Although I do admit it would probably suck if your have really shaky/unsteady hands for your patients. I wouldn't worry too much about it though.

 

[victor14]

where do you come from?

 

[Hardbody]

where do you come from?

New York

 

[INFNITE]

if you repeat the same procedure over and over every single day, eventually everything will feel natural to you. It's like learning to play music. When you start out, it's very difficult to play the right notes, and it just feels very unnatural if you're a beginner. The more you practice, the better you get at it and eventually you won't even have to think when you use your hands in dentistry.

 

[Driller23]

Yeah, this whole having super steady hands and being very competent manually has always been as issue that has worried me about dentistry. Altho I dont suck at manual dexterity, its definitely not an area I am gifted in or have natural aptitude with. I am kind of hoping that I will be able to learn how to use my hands in a delicate and steady fashion once i get in.
Does/Did anyone have any problems in this area???

 

[mahya]

Yeah, this whole having super steady hands and being very competent manually has always been as issue that has worried me about dentistry. Altho I dont suck at manual dexterity, its definitely not an area I am gifted in or have natural aptitude with. I am kind of hoping that I will be able to learn how to use my hands in a delicate and steady fashion once i get in.
Does/Did anyone have any problems in this area???

I feel the same way..right now I do surgeries on rats under micrsocope and sometimes my hands are not steady and that makes me scared whether I would be a great dentist or not..I just hope that i would be great with my hands..In ASDOH I took their manual dexterity test and I did ok with my hands but as others have said, it all comes back to how much you practice at D-school.. 😉

 

[ItsGavinC]

In ASDOH I took their manual dexterity test and I did ok with my hands but as others have said, it all comes back to how much you practice at D-school.. 😉

That has nothing to do with dentistry. Don't sweat it. Some of your classmate will be amazing with their dexterity, and others will be far worse than you. "Hand skills" are only part of the picture. With repetition even the worst can become very competent. The other part of the picture is patient management, patient communication, how you treat your staff, etc.

In other words, the patients really won't know how good your hand skills are in most cases. What they will be worried about are injections, fees, etc.

 

[fightingspirit]

With repetition even the worst can become very competent. .

sure, but if one has below par handskills--whatever par is--then this person would spend more time honing them in the lab, as compared to the classmates. will this not be at the expense of didactics? just wondering.....

 

[JavadiCavity]

sure, but if one has below par handskills--whatever par is--then this person would spend more time honing them in the lab, as compared to the classmates. will this not be at the expense of didactics? just wondering.....

Alright, this needs to be better defined. What do you mean when you say 'good' handskills? Because, honestly, as of right now, I'd say 90% of my class is good with their hand skills. Sure, we don't all get the same grade on practicals. In fact, two students equally talented with the handpiece will earn different grades--one will get an A and the other will fail. Why? Because we have 34 graduated dentists who are all looking at our projects under a microscope. And, the nature of grading our work is completely subjective. It's like Adcoms trying to look objectively at prospective applicants only these would be Adcoms on crack and steroids. It's nearly impossible to be objective. People in my class fail for the most ******ed reasons. For example, yesterday we had a practical that required us to prepare a maxillary molar (#3) for a 3/4 gold crown with a temporary. My friend and I cut almost identical preps. He failed because one of his walls was too close to parallel. That's it!!! Everything else about his prep was ideal. But he earned an F and I got an A. And when I say he was too close to parallel, I mean he was at 3 degrees from parrallel and I was at 7 degrees. Remember those angles from the DAT? This stuff is just as ridiculously hard to evaluate. Granted, a prep that has undercuts would be very difficult if not impossible to properly restore.

Anyway, my point is that he and I have very similar hand skills, yet our grades don't reflect that. So, if you are concerned about whether your hand skills will get good, then you can go to sleep and not worry about it anymore grasshopper, because with practice, you'll be just fine. However, for some reason or another, there are a VERY small few (perhaps 10 or so in our class of 140)who just can't seem to get it. I'm not sure why. They horde all of the instructor's time and spend a lot of time in lab, but it just doesn't click. I'm sure they'll figure it out, but it'll just take a little longer.

I used to worry about it when I started back in July, but now I'm more concerned with what Gavin stated: patient management and communication. I mean honestly, learning to deliver what your patient wants and being able to communicate correctly what you can do are important skills, and no one can really teach you that until you start working with patients.

On an aside, do you know how difficult it is to place a rubberdam on a live patient all by yourself? I can just imagine it now: patient comes in at 1pm for a routine amalgam filling. I administer anesthesia (20 minutes). I apply rubberdam (2 hours). I need to readminister anesthesia (20 minutes). It's now been nearly 3 hours, and the appointment ends in 20 minutes. I have to clean up the patient and reschedule him to come in for another attempt at the rubberdam. Laugh? Sure, but that poor patient just wasted 3 hours and now he has to come back, go through all of the injections (their favorite part), and then maybe we'll actually get to that filling. So, a total of 6 hours for one filling. That's what keeps me up at night.