Yes, specialists do get paid more for each of the procedures they perform. A perio earns $1500-2000 for spending 15-30 minutes to place an implant. An OS earns $2000 for spending $20-30 minutes to take out 4 wisdom teeth. An endo earns $2k for spending an hour to do a molar endo. An ortho earns $150-200 per patient, per month for doing nothing (he/she simply looks at the teeth and the staff do all the manual labor). To earn similar amount, $2000-3000, a general dentist would have to do at least 10-15 fillings and spend much longer time to do them. General dentists do have to work harder to earn similar amount....unless he/she hires an associate to do the work for them.....passive income.
It's not too bad if you live in a more populated area, where there are a lot of corp and general dental offices. With more offices that are looking to hire in-house specialists, you have more choices and don't have to drive very far to work. Last month, my corp fired one of the orthodontists in our group. This orthodontist got another job offer a few days later at another corp office down the street. He's in his mid to late 60s.
When I was still at Western Dental, I met an orthodontis who lived in Utah and flew to Arizona every month to work at one of the Western Dental offices. He had a private practice in Utah but he wanted to make more. That was more than 15 years ago when there weren't as many ortho programs as there are today.
Are you suggesting there is more to life than this abstraction we call money?
Talking as a tenure track at this point. graduate years are fortunately passed.
This won’t even give you CE credits for watching. I can YouTube tutorials and not receive CE in that manner.
You need to work harder on your marketing technique.
You're absolutely correct in asking why? Why someone would want to do just one thing in dentistry is mind boggling to me, but to each their own. I am a GP out of dental school 2.5 years with 2 practices doing well. Everybody has their own niche though, so I get why someone would want to specialize.
It depends on how hard a perio/endo is willing to work and the number of offices he/she is willing to travel to. Specialists get paid by the number of days they work per month and the number of cases they they treat per day. The more offices they travel to, the more cases they will get, and the more money they will make. There is a wide range of incomes. Some work as little as 3-4 days/month and make less than a GP and some work as many as 6 days/week and make more than $1 million. Unlike general dentists, they usually don't work full time 5 days/week at 1 location because there are usually not enough patients....unless they are practicing in a town that has lot of referring GP offices and zero competing specialist.
People specialize because they don't like to do things that they hate. For me, I hate extractions, doing endo on a patient with limited mouth opening, packing cord and taking PVS impression, and doing fillings on crying kids with overprotective parents etc. I like doing the same easy thing every day....more predictable, fewer headaches, lower overhead, lower physical stress on my body, fewer complaints from patients and less chance of getting a lawsuit etc. And of course, $$$ is the number 1 reason.....for me...not sure about others.
All the periodontists I know do both: work part time at their own private offices and travel to work at GP offices or at corp offices. This is not the new trend. Most of these periodontists graduated 15-20 years ago. I am an orthodontist and I too have to travel. It only takes 20-30 minutes to place an implant, 30-45 minutes to do 1 quardant osseous surgery, 30-45 minutes to do a connective tissue graft etc. They can easily book 8-9 of these cases in one 8-hour day and produce the same as what an average GP can produce in 1 week. The overhead to keep their offices opened only 1-2 days/wk is also much less than if they have to open their offices 5 days/wk. And for the other free days in the week, they travel to work at other offices to make more money. The GP owners and the corp offices usually save for them at least 5-6 cases to keep them happy.
