Dr. W - I thank you for the vote of confidence in my dental knowledge. It all comes from many years a lab tech and a chance to do may things myself. (In the service, there are only so many dentists to go around especially in remote areas). I have been around it for decades. When I came back from Nam they let me attend any school that I wanted, and dental prosthetics was very remote from the previous training that had me the first responder to sucking chest wounds and tensionpneumothorax with my finger stuck up to the hilt into someone's chest, or traumatic amputations and worse. My wife always jokes that if you are in a bad car accident, I'm the guy you want to have around with you...

While waiting for the next class in prosthetics to start, I chairside assisted in an oral surgery department for 8 months, and have also chairsided in some of the world's most boring things ( endo comes immediatly to mind). All the while doctors would patiently answer my incessant questions. Like why has that reamer started cutting a little ledge in the bend in the root canal and now you can't get it to go past that point and further into the root? ( As he pulls yet another reamer out and throws it across the operatory)

Dentistry has been good to me and over the years, I have been mentored by some of the best. I have lectured on implant prosthetics at more than 22 medical and dental schools, and hundreds of symposia. I am a contributing author to an implant text from WB Saunders, John Beumer at UCLA and I designed the UCLA abutment that revolutionized implant esthetics (and put my implant company's products on the map world wide), back in the day. I was the first technician asked to speak at an annual meeting of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. I have breathed enough porcelain dust to choke a horse fabricating thousands of crowns, and I have even sat as a chairside assistant, during friend's boards here in CA where, believe it or not, they still make you do a gold foil. I can pass gold foil with the best of them, though the need these days is obsolete. But I still look for all those lower class 5's on cuspids for new friends that are taking their boards. How ironic is it that someone who has spent his life in dentistry would end up as a poster boy for oral cancer and a foundation...