Dental Career

Once a dentist becomes established, they can generally count on working around forty hours a week. Their hours may be somewhat different from the conventional nine to five job in order to accommodate their patients and their working schedules. Some dentists choose to see patients for longer days Monday through Thursday and then take Friday off. As mentioned earlier, most dentists work with a support staff to help allow their office to run smoothly.

On a typical day, there are many things a dentist may do. Some of these jobs include filling cavities, examining x-rays, pulling teeth, administering anesthetics, giving advice, prescribing medication, performing surgery, straightening teeth, and making impressions of teeth to help create dentures or retainers for a patient.

The majority of dentists are dental practitioners, or just basic dentists without necessarily having a specialty. Almost all dentists work in a private practice, and about one-third are self-employed. The need for dentists tends to follow the pattern of the economy. During harder economic times, dentists find themselves seeing less patients than usual. It seems some of the general public wrongly feel dental health is an area where they can cut costs by not seeing a dentist regularly. Also, some people are unfortunately not offered dental insurance through their jobs, which can make seeing a dentist hard as well.

The average annual salary of a dentist is around $150,000. However, those that are specialists in areas may have a higher annual salary than that of dental practitioners.