Welcome And Guest Introduction

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:00

Welcome to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the podcast where we explore how clinicians are really navigating the complexity of modern practice, both clinically and operationally. This isn't a public-facing show, it's a conversation for practitioners, clinic owners, and people deeply involved in patient care who are trying to move beyond symptom management and think more systematically. Today I'm joined by Dr. Curtis Westersund. Curtis has been in dentistry for over 46 years, with the last 25 years focused on a more functional, systems-based approach, particularly around complex TMJ and structural issues. What stood out for me from our earlier conversation is your very clear philosophy that pain is actually a poor metric for health, and that the real goal is increasing a patient's adaptive capacity, not just eliminating symptoms. And with that, Curtis, I'd like to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Curtis Westersund 0:48

Oh, hey, I think you're doing a wonderful thing with this podcast, and I'm happy to be here to help.

From Farm Airway To Migraines

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:54

Wonderful. Well, thank you. Um, maybe you could start with a little bit about your background and journey. So, how have you um ended up doing what you currently do? Just give us a little bit of a walkthrough as to how you ended up here from a career perspective.

The Orthotic That Changed Everything

Dr Curtis Westersund 1:06

Well, I'll try and make a long story short here. I grew up in a farm um and uh the the problem with growing up in a farm is lots of dust and there's lots of mold and everything else. And as a young kid, I had airway issues. They had my tonsils out because my tonsils were almost kissing tonsils at the back of my throat. Um my teeth were kind of crooked, and so a dentist said, Well, let's pull some teeth out. That'll make you look handsome and uh well, you know, what he had to work with, whatever. But anyway, the point being is that um I developed in a way that created a bunch of structural strain to um my body, and I was having migraines and headaches and jaw pain and neck pain and uh flat feet. I mean, it was teeth to toes, it was everything. Um and I suffered with migraines, migraines that would would make me nauseous, make me want to um leave work. I was pumping in about 2,400 milligrams of ibuprofen a day just to get through my tension headaches and my migraines. Not good for your liver. I wouldn't advise it. Um, and then I found out uh this little thing that we call neuromuscular dentistry, or I like to term a more biomechanical approach to dentistry. And um I remember this very well. I was woke up on a uh Saturday morning. I had a migraine started. And when you've had migraines and you know that you can take some amaltypine and and and maybe you can stop it when you get it early when it's already full blown. No, there's nothing stopping it. And I had just made myself my first dental orthotic. Uh, I'm wearing one right now. And this dental orthotic, um, I hadn't tried it in yet. Uh so I I live about half an hour from my from my office, and I get in the car and I drive down to my office, and I'm just feeling horrible. Um, get to the office, put in this orthotic, didn't adjust, I didn't know what to do. It's my first one, and just put it in and uh went back in the car and left. And I I remember this so clearly because I was directly across from my office window at a light in my car, and I vomited all over myself from the nausea. That's kind of a I've had better days. So end up driving home half hours in the morning. It was a hot, sunny day and uh feeling kind of miserable for myself. Um, I get home and throw the clothes and laundry, jump in the shower, get back into bed, and I realize I didn't have a migraine. I'm laying there going, you know, poor me, poor me. I'm a male, poor me, poor me, um sympathy, blah, blah. And then I realized I didn't have a I didn't have a headache. And being curious, I popped my orthotic out and just kind of sat there staring at the ceiling and going like I could feel the migraine come back on. So I popped the orthotic back in. That was the last migraine I had, and that was 2002. So um early spring 2002. So it's it's been 24 years of migraines when you've had them once a week or once another week, and you've had headaches every day. Not having that kind of makes you have a passion about what you do. And I had so many patients in my practice like that, that that's kind of the path that I started on 25 years ago.

Dr Andrew Greenland 4:51

Thank you. When we chatted before, you mentioned something really interesting that pain is actually a poor indicator of health. Can you expand a little bit on that for our audience and listeners?

Dr Curtis Westersund 5:02

Well, a lot of times we get focused as healthcare providers on patients are coming in, and what makes them want to come in? They want to come in because they have pain and they want us as healthcare providers to help them. And depending on your profession, is sort of depending on what your toolbox is, what you can do to help them. And typically, um, the simplest and the cheapest tool is a prescription pad. And so you offer them some uh anti-inflammatories or whatever it is you're gonna have. And unfortunately, that may mask a problem, but it doesn't solve a problem. So I always say to patients, if if if you had a malignant melanoma right there, and you know that thing's probably going to metastasize and cause you all types of healthcare issues. And I said, uh, you know what? We're just gonna mask that melanoma. I'm gonna put a band-aid right over top of that melanoma. And there, you can't see the melanoma, you're cured. Well, that's kind of what we do when we are treating just the pain. Um, if you had a painless, um, partially blocked heart artery, would you want to wait for the drama? Or would you want to get at that before there becomes a drama? So it's looking more for the root cause of what's causing the pain, as opposed to saying something's idiopathic, figure it out and allow that to be your focus as far as your treatment. And what I found is that um when we look at the structure of people and we start unraveling some of their structural strain, people tend to get better and not have the pain. They don't have to mask it, they don't have to Botox. So my metric for health is health. If you have to get a massage every week, if you're popping pain pills all day, if you have to go get Botox, that's not healthy.

Dr Andrew Greenland 7:02

Got it. So tell us a little bit about your practice at the moment and your role and how your role fits into the bigger picture of what you do clinically.

Dr Curtis Westersund 7:10

So my role of practice is to two to twofold. It's become twofold. One is to treat patients with these issues, treat patients with have um, oh, maybe worn down teeth or cracked teeth, uh, gum recession um due to the grinding of teeth. Treat patients that have you know muscle pain, temporalis pain, pain around the joint, neck pain, um, pain on the forehead, those types of issues. People that have limitations on opening, they can't open and close wide, and so they have some limitations of function, or they can't turn their head, they have to turn their body to be able to turn their head. Those types of patients are the type of patients that that we're looking at. We also see a lot of pain or of sleep patients, so people that have sleep-related issues, they tend to all fall in the same category. And so what we're looking at is how we can take those patients that are seeking help and actually look at a way to structurally make them so they're not under strain all the time. My second role is I try and be an educator. I'm trying to teach other dentists to understand this, to do what you're doing, Andrew, by spreading the word about things and making healthcare providers curious. Curious about what may happen if they actually have a larger toolbox or a larger referral source, and being able to help look at these patients with that curious mindset of what is causing. I don't want to just mask the issue. What's the cause of the issue? And so I work with dentists and um people like yourself, medical doctors and uh chiropractors, etc., to try and help them take that look at a patient that's going to be a little bit more encompassing.

Dr Andrew Greenland 9:26

Thank you. And what is a I know there's probably no such thing as a typical day, but what does a typical day look like in practice for you at the moment, with with all the balancing of the educating and the different things that you do? What does your week look like?

Why Pain Misleads Clinicians

Dr Curtis Westersund 9:40

Um, well, I'm a remember I said I was a farm boy? Um I get up early, so I get at 4 a.m. in the morning, get to work about five, and start working between my first patients are at seven, so I work for two hours on on things that I need to get things going. Typically we're seeing new patients, um, TMJ-related issues um that have been sent to me or sought me out. Um, we do typically two or three a day. It takes about an hour and a half for me to go through my examination discussion with the patient. Then it's a bunch of trying to provide procedures that are going to help these patients be in less strain, help their bite be more even, help their jaw posture to be better, help their head and neck to be better. Um, I don't treat necks and heads, alignment, very important. I don't treat them. I don't treat shoulders or hips. I'm just a dentist. I'm a great dentist, but I'm just a dentist. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to do whatever procedure is going to make that patient breathe better, function better, be more structurally or biomechanically balanced. So it's a bunch of different procedures that go along with that.

Dr Andrew Greenland 11:02

Thank you. And you also talk about increasing adaptive capacity as one of your philosophies. And what does that actually look like for in practice, day-to-day with patients, just for our benefit of our listeners?

Dr Curtis Westersund 11:14

So um I have two rules in my office. The first rule is that the patient has to come in with their teeth in their jaws, their jaws attached to their head, their head attached to their neck, their neck attached to their torso, and some assortment of limbs. Andrew, I do not discriminate in how many limbs you have. You could lose a limb, still be my patient. But if your head comes off your neck, we're going to dismiss you from the practice. And obviously that's a joke. But what I'm trying to get across the patient is that we're connected from teeth to toes. What happens here can actually affect how your hips are level and how your feet point out and uh create issues literally from teeth to toes. Um the other rule that I have is that I only treat breathers. If you become a non-breather, we'll dismiss you from the practice. Um, non-breathers, no show for appointments, they don't pay their bills. I got a practice to run, I got a business to run. So what I and again, that's a joke, but the take-home is that the most important thing in your life is your next breath. If you don't get your next breath, um, you got two minutes of flopping around on the floor, and that's it. So taking your next breath is the most important thing in your life, and your body will do anything to be able to get you into that position where breathing is more easy, which includes forward head posture and a whole bunch of other types of body strain issues from teeth to toes. So, what we're looking at is how can we divide this patient up between my greater team, which includes upper cervical chiropractors, biomechanical therapists, um uh concussion specialists, optometrists that look at at uh um binocular vision. How can we develop these these referrals to be able to get that patient on that journey to get better? Now, I'm not sure if I answered your question because I forgot you specifically what you asked, but was I close on that?

Dr Andrew Greenland 13:29

You were I was just talking about this um concept of adaptive capacity that you talked to me about before, and I was just trying to bring that out for a better.

What TMJ Patients Really Present With

Dr Curtis Westersund 13:37

The adaptive okay, I got I got sidetracked. The adaptive capacity, the adaptive capacity is that um we need to do three things in life. We need to survive. So we need to take our next breath, we need to hydrate, we need to take in sustenance, we need to thrive, we need to go to our daily activities, we need to handle podcasts and treat patients and do all these types of things to thrive. And the third thing we need to do is we need to adapt. I think you and I would agree that we don't know any perfect people. There's no perfect people out there. What's great about humans is that we're able to adapt. So we have a compromise, and then we're going to have a compensation to that compromise to allow us to survive and thrive. And at some point in time, patients just can no longer adapt. Or that adaptation that they have is creating other strains and stresses. So if you have a high spot on a tooth over here, you'll tip your head that way and rotate your chin that way to avoid that hard spot. So you have patients coming in like this, and I can simply go in and using digital measuring equipment, I can uh see on the computer screen how they're biting together, uh, little tool called the T-scan. And it shows me that, oh, okay, you've got a high spot in there that's an interference. I can go in and adjust that tooth painlessly without freezing, without anything, because we're only adjusting microns, thousandths of a millimeter. And we can adjust that, and the patient will slowly bring their head up as we adjust that tooth and get it to neutral to this side, then all of a sudden their head's nice and straight. That's their adaptation, and that's me providing a greater adaptative capacity or adaptive capacity.

Dr Andrew Greenland 15:36

Thank you for clarifying. Um, so how does that change the way you diagnose and feet compared to a more traditional dental model?

Adaptive Capacity And The Breathing Priority

Dr Curtis Westersund 15:45

The problem with my profession is that when a dental school takes a young person in, um they have to train them about the language of dentistry, the tools, the hand procedures. And there's not a lot of time that's available to talk about biomechanical function. That's one problem. Second problem is there's not a lot of people to talk about it. Because I have something um when I lecture, I talk about dog learning. And dog learning is um, I go up on a blackboard when I'm lecturing, I'll draw a dog, a balloon dog, just ears, nose, tail, just little circles. And I'll go the first person in the first row of my lecture, and I'll hold out the piece of chalk and I'll go, dog. And that person looks at me, what? What do you want? I just go, dog. And eventually, after a few moments, um, we get convinced that you know, dog, chalk, and and maybe they go up and write D-O-G and I rub that away, and I know dog, and they draw a dog like mine. So then I go to the first person in the second row and I go, dog. And that person saw the interaction between the first person and me. They get up and draw a dog, and I go to the first person in the third row, and I don't say a thing, I just hand them the chalk. And that person gets up and draws a dog. And what we're seeing is that we see what was learnt before us, and then we repeat it over and over and over again. And in my profession, we didn't have digital equipment, um, you know, back in the 1900s. When I graduated down the street in 79, we didn't even have computers, so there was no ability for people to understand what's actually going. We took these guesss, these wild guesses about how things actually work. And it turns out that when we see this, we are able to now understand more about what's happening. In dental school, the dentists that are graduating, they don't get any of this. The people they're instructing them are simply repeating what they've been taught, what they've been learned. And when they get out into the big wide world and there's education, a lot of the education platforms are still kind of focusing the game on that older concept of how all of this works. But it's not reality, it's not the truth, because humans are way more complex than that. And so for my profession to kind of adapt and to change requires that they get educated or understanding about this. And um basically it allows my profession to grow from what we used to do when I graduated dentistry long, long ago, to what we can do now. And it's simply the advent of digital equipment that allows us to see and diagnose better.

Dr Andrew Greenland 18:57

Thank you. So I guess you have a slightly um non-traditional philosophy compared to perhaps other colleagues in your um industry. Do you ever find tension between what you think is clinically right and what patients initially come in expecting based on their experiences of other dentists?

Dr Curtis Westersund 19:14

Um yeah. Um I've been I was told, oh, I'd want to learn about TMJ work because there's too much controversy. There's no controversy, it's just poorly taught in Dell school. So when dentists have to run a business. You run a business, I run a business. We have to run a business, we have to make a profit. If we didn't make a profit, we couldn't pay the rent, couldn't pay salaries. That's the whole purpose of us doing what we do. We love our patients, but we still have to pay the bills. So dentists focus on what's going to help them pay the bills. And typically they want to have people save their teeth. Well, there's three ways you lose teeth.

Dr Andrew Greenland 19:58

Okay.

Dr Curtis Westersund 19:58

One way is decay. You have a tooth decay, you have an infection of the tooth. The other is gum disease, infection of the gum tissue. And the third way is the way teeth work and the way they function against each other. Now, the first two ways are infections. The third way, the way this works, is not something that dentists are strong about. They're really strong about infections and replacing teeth, but they're not strong about the biomechanical workings, as I said. So when it comes to a dentist that wants to become profitable, uh, they're going to go to those things that they know how to do. And they're going to kind of avoid the things that may they may see as being controversial, but really just poorly taught.

Dr Andrew Greenland 20:46

Got it. So I love your root cause approach. And as a functional medicine person myself, that's really my philosophy and my guiding principle for the work that I do. Do you think healthcare is moving more in the direction of a root cause approach? Are we still fixated and focused on symptom management?

Dr Curtis Westersund 21:05

I think if patients allow us to be, we'll be more focused on symptom um removal and dealing with their pain symptoms. I think when patients become a little bit more educated, they realize that they are not just a tooth. They're not just their ear canal, they're not just their head and neck alignment. They're more than that. And for our profession and our your being a functional uh medical doctor is is fantastic. I love the functional, you have many functional medicine doctors on our overall team here in Calgary. And they're wonderful because they're adding, they're curious and they're adding to the conversation. In my profession, that is unfortunately not as common. Patients need to ask for it. I think before dentists are changing, and before in any business, Andrew, in any business, for there to be a change in the protocol or the approach, there needs to be a change in the monetary uh interactions, either positive or negative. Um, a positive, I'm gonna make more money, and negative, I'm gonna get sued for doing the wrong thing. And that makes people change their protocols in every business in all around the world. So that becomes what these dentists have to solve. And until they realize that this type of dentistry can actually add things on their shelf that they sell to patients every day. They may sell implants, they may sell crowns, they may sell beautiful cosmetic veneers. But if those things fall apart because their biomechanical adaptation is being lost due to their work, when they see that, when they see that that's something that can make a difference in their life, that's when they're gonna start making changes. They're gonna be forced to make those changes at that point. And so for us, we're already on that treadmill. We see that difference. Other people, yeah, hopefully, but patients asking for it, patients wanting it, that's probably gonna be one of the biggest impets.

Dr Andrew Greenland 23:34

Thank you. So you're talking just now about you know, you are running a business, you have to make a profit. That's uh how businesses function. But in the wider dental industry, do you see sort of financial incentives that are driving clinical behaviors perhaps not in the direction they should go?

Dr Curtis Westersund 23:53

Again, I go back to the dog learning. They they they repeat what they do. Um you know, I've been doing dentistry for 46 years, but every year has been a different year. I know more this year than I did last year. I can't wait for next year. I'm gonna know even more. There's a lot of people that are just sort of in the mud, the blood, and the crud, and they are just trying to pay the bills for each day, and they're just doing the things that they know how to do. And unfortunately, technology and everything's moving us past that. This podcast being an example. So, what we're able to do is we're um as as a dentist that's trying to make a uh a living at doing their procedures, they're gonna hone down and focus and become more and more myoptic about this one thing. And medical doctors the same. I mean, you can become a specialist about pinkies, I bet. But if you take a look at that, the fact that pinkies attached to everything and you take a different viewpoint, that's when things start to change in the minds of the profession. But it's gonna take time, maybe more than our lifetime, I don't know.

Dr Andrew Greenland 25:14

Um, when we were talking before, you were mentioning about the AIDS crisis and how that changed behavior almost overnight. Do you see any similar dynamics playing out today in more subtle ways?

Dr Curtis Westersund 25:24

I'm sorry, the what the the what of uh I missed the word.

Dr Andrew Greenland 25:30

Yeah, you we were talking before about the AIDS crisis and how that changed. Oh, the AIDS crisis. Yeah, yeah. I just wonder if you see similar dynamics playing out in more subtle ways in the industry.

Digital Diagnostics And Dog Learning

Dr Curtis Westersund 25:41

The AIDS crisis was interesting because um I was a dentist before we actually started doing dentistry with gloves and masks on. Um, it was called wet finger dentistry, and your hands were wet because we didn't have masks and and we didn't have gloves, and that all came about with the um AIDS epidemics. Um, in our, we are seeing, we're seeing more and more um changes and more and more conversations about function, about head and neck alignment. I've been working for 25 years with an upper cervical chiropractor because we know that if the neck is in misalignment, the bite's gonna be changed. And we see this every day where patients actually have to actually go over the assess before at an upper cervical chiropractor before they see me. This connection between the teeth and the neck is actually more prevalent, and there's more of these education platforms that are addressing it. Trouble is they don't really have a good understanding of it, and they haven't worked with it, but it is making a difference in our um profession that the conversation now is more about how are we going to make this functional. And I think in your profession, in functional medicine, there's more and more educated patients that are looking for somebody like a functional medical doctor because you're taking a different viewpoint, you're looking at that patient from a different angle, and you're seeing that it's not a sum of parts, but it's a whole person. Patients like that. And again, patients are going to drive this.

Dr Andrew Greenland 27:30

That's very gratifying to hear um somebody in the industry. So thank you for clarifying. So thinking about your um practice as a business, because it is, and we've talked about that briefly before. What's working really well for you at the moment? What's what are you proud of from a business perspective?

Dr Curtis Westersund 27:47

So I uh give you a short little history. I've been in the same building, I've been practicing 46 years, I've been in the same office for 43 years. This is a big tall tower downtown Calgary. And back in the heyday when the oil industry was booming and everybody had lots of money. This big two tall towers, we probably had about 6,000 people in our tower. And then there were several oil boom crashes, and then there'd be a boom again, and there'd be another crash. And the last crash, um, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of consolidation again with digital. Um, people start working from home. And our business uh model in this office tower as a dentist for this office tower went away. And fortunately, by that time, I'd already started treating TMJ issues. And we supplemented the regular drill, fill and bill patients that you would see every day to these more specialized TMJ patients. So the practice morphed into this um specialty practice where now I get people. Um, yesterday I had a lovely lady from England, uh, all the way across Canada and northern Alberta, talked with a girl in Colorado that's going to come up for treatment. So it becomes more international, which really helps pay the bills. And so instead of being the traditional dental office, I'm more of a specialty office. Um, although I'm just a general dentist. I'm I'm nobody special, just an old farm boy. Um, and but you know, when you then when you get into things like marketing, you get into things like having protocols within your office so that your office can take these patients looking for help and have their experience positive all the way through. It can be as simple as having designated parking. All of that part of the business is very important. So I call them points of contact. And when a patient has all of these points of contact, they're simple, then it's easier to come in and get treatment. Um, and so uh that from the team to the the dentist to the communications that we do and and the way we we approach this needs to be really refined for us to be able to make a business that can make a profit, pay the bills.

Dr Andrew Greenland 30:25

And on the other side of the coin, what are the challenges or bottlenecks that are most impactful in your practice at the moment?

Dr Curtis Westersund 30:32

Uh the most impactful, probably time. Um so I get to work at five. Uh yesterday I left at 5.30 after doing my I do free Zoom calls with patients from around the world to talk about their issues. And I do that after my day of work. Uh it turns out, I don't know if you have this problem, it turns out, Andrew, that my team doesn't want to work 12 hours a day. I mean, I'm there. Why aren't they there? Um so my problem is probably the fact that I'm trying to get stuff done in uh seven or eight hours, um, and yet still give each patient enough time that they understand they can learn and understand what it is we're doing. I don't know about the medical field, but I know that a lot of medical or the functional medical field, by a lot of medical doctors, I mean, if they in Alberta, if they see you for six minutes, then they get paid. And it's a lot of just rushing people through, and they don't really have time to care about all these points of contact. They just know that they're gonna have a whole bunch of patients lined up the door wanting to, you know, deal with their flu or their cough or their um their hurt pinky, and all that's gonna tie in together. My profession requires a little bit more care. And I take it as a functional medical doctor, your profession obviously requires more time involved with each patient. So you have to hear their story.

Dr Andrew Greenland 32:13

Oh, for sure. And I think this is an interesting contrast. So I'll spend probably two or three hours with a new functional medicine patient. Um, contrasting within primary care general practice on the health service, they probably get a seven or eight-minute appointment. And you know, in my day job as an emergency physician, where we're trying to get through people as quickly as we can. So it's a really interesting contrast with the time we can spend with people and the value of having the extra time to really, really go through their case and unpick things in great detail and have a very satisfying plan at the end of it where we know we've encompassed everything.

Dr Curtis Westersund 32:48

It's so true, so true. I always say the more you know about somebody, the less normal they are. And you know, we all have this appearance of being fairly normal. But when you start to pull apart all their dysfunctional and adaptation ways, I mean your emergency medical professional, you're dealing with the thriving or the surviving, not even the thriving, you're dealing with the surviving, and it's urgent care, it's something they need at the moment. But then these people need to go out into the world and actually um live and raise children and have a career and and all these types of things. And that becomes uh what you and I do, which which is I again I I have great admiration for all uh functional medical doctors.

Dr Andrew Greenland 33:37

Well, you've hit on that universal about you know limitation of time. So, what is your biggest time drain in terms of all the things that you do and have to do? What what kind of eats up time that you'd rather be spending do other things?

Business Pressures And Better Patient Experience

Dr Curtis Westersund 33:50

Okay, no, number one, um, I don't think I'd want to be doing other things. I kind of like what I do. Um probably me. Um, the biggest time drain is the fact that when a patient comes in and I'm looking at a combine cat skin and I'm going around looking at their head and finding all the little signs and and the growth issues that they've had since they were a little tiny baby, uh, up to when I'm seeing them, and then sorting that puzzle all together. It's like putting pieces of a puzzle together in front of the patient. So the patient kind of owns their issues. Um, I get to, as you've probably experienced right here, talk a little bit too much and go off on tangents. And so I'm discussing things and explaining to patients about all these things. So the biggest time issue is probably me and my exams. I could probably cut my exam down to uh half an hour of just gathering the data, having a conversation, say I'll call you later with what I think. I tend to do that right in front of the patient, diagnose them in front well or in my chair. The other aspect is that patients, I can't go up to a patient and again slap him on the forehead and say, you're healed. When we're doing this functional issues, people have to heal over time. So it takes um women nine to 12 months to get to a point of stability where their posture is better, their head and neck are not flopping in and out of alignment, their bite's stable, it's not changing. It takes a bit of time. Guys, about three to six months. Um if you've had a more vehicle accident, Andrew, if you come to me of more vehicle accident, it might take a year or two or three for you to get stabled, all because all the connective tissue, all those ligaments and tendons have been stretched and now they're not acting. They don't have the elasticity, they're not acting like they should. It's kind of I use the analogy for patients. Is you ever have that pair of shorts, that pair of underwear where the elastic's gone and the underwear just doesn't want to stay up, right? Well, that can be a jaw joint, that can be muscles and tendons in the neck and the head, that we're now trying to make them um function at a different biomechanical reality. And so it becomes time as far as having to see the patients over a period of time. But uh yeah, I think the biggest offender, as you just witnessed, me.

Dr Andrew Greenland 36:35

Okay, got it. So you're working at a um a very specialized level. I'm just thinking about if you had a sudden increase in demand next week, what would break first? Hopefully not you, but obviously time is your limiting factor. What would happen with a massive surge in demand for your work?

Dr Curtis Westersund 36:51

Um my salary uh the the cost of salary for hiring more people. It the uh the unfortunate thing, I'm I don't know if this is true in medicine, but in in people that work in kind of the rarefied era that I work at, my um orthodonists that is probably one of the best in the world that dealing with functional orthodontics as opposed to dealing with traditional aesthetic-based orthodontics, um, myself, others, is that there's there's not enough of us. So either I have to work longer, and I'm 71, I don't plan on retiring for another 15, 20 years, um, knock on wood. And so I want to be around because I love what I do, but it would be a matter of probably having more people working under me, more dentists working under me, dealing with the issues that we deal with. But they would want, they would need to be curious, they would need to be professionals that really want to see patients better, not just focus on how much money did I manage to make today, but actually how many people did I manage to treat and and help? That's that's probably I think the the biggest functional limitation is finding those people.

Dr Andrew Greenland 38:21

Got it. And if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in the business tomorrow, what would that be, if anything?

Dr Curtis Westersund 38:28

If I had a magic wand. Oh, now you're trying, now this is a good question. You're trying to make me think. Um, besides fixing myself, fixing something generally in the practice. Um well, um maybe I don't know how this would happen, but maybe um having them waving the magic wand over top of all the insurance companies in the world and have them make less of a profit and be more helpful for the people that can't afford time-consuming treatment. That unfortunately, time and money are on the same side or the opposite sides of the same coin. And if we're gonna spend two hours getting to know somebody, you can't do that for free. And a lot of people think that it it's uh there's gonna be this big, I don't know, overseeing this big insurance umbrella that's gonna make everything for free. And insurance companies don't really care about patients, they care about bottom line and profit. They're a corporation, it's what they do. So I think I'll use the my one wish on all of the insurance companies. Um, I think that'd be most beneficial.

Insurance Friction Plus AI Teaching Plans

Dr Andrew Greenland 39:42

Not saying I can grant it, but I've taken it on board that that's your wish. Thank you. Um so what's next on the cards for you, say the next six to twelve months? Any particular plans um you have for the business, any goals that you're working towards?

Dr Curtis Westersund 39:56

We're trying to work towards a um, or we are working with a dental college in Florida, um with my orthodontist uh colleague and I, and to at least try and teach some orthodontists about the biomechanical approach to treating patients. Um lots of speaking engagements. I've uh gonna be starting to teach in Algeria, it looks like, of all places, because this same orthodontic colleague of mine teaches over in Algeria. Um but it's right now the the biggest advent, I think the biggest advent is um this utilizing AI to create learning platforms. So I'm on TikTok. I mean, you look at me, you see just this guy in Calgary that uh lights get his fingers wet. I'm actually a TikTok star, Andrew. Not really, but I'm I've got I've got lots of videos out there too. Essentially they were to tell dentists about what they can do, but it turned out that was the patients that are actually looking for help and the patients that want to get get um find someone that can treat them. We're I'm starting to do now so that we can keep this going, um, faceless videos so that dentists can kind of log on to that and learn about certain things without feeling that they're being judged. They can just watch these little YouTube shorts and and learn about dentistry in that way. So right now it's it's uh creating products in AI, which is um uh uh I'm an old guy that could graduated before computers are invented. So it's it's it's a fun learning curve.

Dr Andrew Greenland 41:58

Brilliant. Final question. If you were starting again today with everything you now know from your extensive career history, would you do anything different?

Dr Curtis Westersund 42:07

Would I do anything different?

Dr Andrew Greenland 42:09

Yeah.

Dr Curtis Westersund 42:10

Um you know, when we that's a tough question. Would I if I had more time, yes, I would build an office that was more geared towards a um uh an under that would be more geared towards making patients be able to go through this process um a little bit quicker in our office and with a little bit more understanding and confidence. So I'd start a new dental office that would be just TMJ. But the the unfortunate thing is if I was to start over again, um I don't know what the world would. There's so much that's happening right now, education-wise, um, information-wise, that it it it is might be just wait until six more months when AI takes over all of my jobs and I just use an AI to look at that CBCT. I I don't know. Sorry, I I'm I'm fluff that flustered on that question what I would do if I had to start over. That was a long time ago, Andrew.

Closing Thanks And Contact Details

Dr Andrew Greenland 43:29

So, with that, Curtis, I'd like to thank you so much for joining us today. It's been wonderful to hear about your career, your background, your philosophy on dentistry. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.

Dr Curtis Westersund 43:41

Thank you. Thank you very, very much. And uh for anybody that's out there listening, if they want to learn more, um, I take it you're gonna have my contact info inside, and then they can just get in touch with me. Wonderful, thank you. Thank you, happy to have you.

Dr Andrew Greenland 44:00

Yeah.