Difficult Patients Are Often Confused Patients (E.254)

“If you do not value your team, they will not value you. Your team is your family, and when patients know that, everything changes.” – Dr. Bruce Baird

Dentistry can be one of the most rewarding careers, but it can also be one of the most stressful. Many dentists feel overwhelmed by demanding patients, burned out by perfectionism, and frustrated when they try to control everything in the practice.

Dr. Baird explains how he transformed his career and lowered stress by focusing on team alignment, communication, and genuine care for his staff. When your team feels protected and empowered, patient relationships change and stress turns into productivity.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Why difficult patients are often confused or misaligned, not malicious.
• The secret to lowering stress by valuing and protecting your team.
• Simple communication techniques that de-escalate patient tension.
• How to create a family environment that drives productivity and trust.
• Why empowering your team leads to better patient care and higher revenue.

IF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR

• Your days feel stressful and reactive because of challenging patients.
• You are trying to do everything yourself and feel burned out.
• Team members avoid conflict and feel unsupported.
• Productivity drops because miscommunication disrupts workflow.
• You want to create a practice where patients trust your team and your team trusts you.

NEXT STEPS

Stop letting stress and miscommunication control your practice.
The Clinical Calibration Institute helps you:

• Align your team
• Improve communication
• Build systems that turn confusion into clarity

🔗 Learn More at ProductiveDentist.com/CCI

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Dr. Bruce Baird: This is Dr. Bruce Baird with the Productive Dentist Podcast, and you know, I, um, I look around in dentistry and you know, you see the surveys that are done and how many dentists that are, well, they used to say, I don’t know what the highest suicide rate is, but I know dentistry’s always been up there as part of it. Nobody wants to come see you, um, I think preachers also ’cause they get to listen to other people’s problems, and I’m sure that is pretty stressful on them as well, but why is that? And you know, I don’t know. I, I’m just gonna give you my thoughts about it, but I honestly believe it’s because we, we want to control everything in our business. We wanna control everything in our practice, and you know what? Being a great office is not just about you being a great clinician, it’s just not, um, do you guys have anybody, like in your town, I’m not gonna say anything, but somebody in your town who their parking lot’s full and you’ve seen their work coming into your office and you’re like, “How in the world can this person have a full schedule? Why do people go see ’em? It’s just hard for me to even believe it,” and you know the, but it’s true. I mean, their entire parking lot’s packed and the clinically, they’re horrible dentists, but through communication skills, they’ve been able to convince the patient, you know, they’re nice and they do all these things or, or whatever, and maybe their team is doing a lot of the work.

[00:01:52] Dr. Bruce Baird: I don’t know, but what I do know is what changed for me, and again, I always used 15 years in because by then I had had three of my four daughters born and I had to learn to speak a different language. I’ve always been someone, and it goes back to as a kid, my dad was a marine aviator. Many of you knew that, uh, he was like, there’s no gray area, it’s black or white, and so for me, ’cause he, he would get out there and you had the old chamberlin fences and you, you don’t, we didn’t have a weed eater, so we’d have to go in there with the little hand clippers and clip underneath there and the edgers, you know, all of this stuff, and it had to be perfect ’cause my dad was gonna inspect it. Then you go to dental school and you’re an engineer and you, you, you make a, you make a C on, on your prep for a DOL and they tell you, well, your cavo surface margin’s not exactly correct, and you know, this is a little deeper than I’d like to see it, so I’m gonna give you a C. So in other words. You are already ingrained that it has to be perfect for you to be a dentist. Well, perfection is a dream, um, and perfection is something that we strive for, but there’s no way anybody’s gonna tell me they’re a perfect dentist. It’s just, it’s the only perfect person ever on this earth was, was the good Lord, and, uh, but I, I can tell you. That is stressful. It’s really stressful on us because, golly, I wanna pack my own cord, I wanna make my own attempts. I want to, I almost, I wanna answer my first few year, I wanted to answer the front desk I wanted, you know, but I wasn’t willing to train anybody to do it. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, I didn’t want to train anyone to do what I wanted them to do, ’cause I wanted to do it all myself. Well, well, good news, good news.

[00:03:50] Dr. Bruce Baird: You don’t have to do that. All you have to do is learn some simple communication skills. Some things that will help, yeah, that will help you, um, but more importantly than that, really all you have to do is care about the other people in your practice. You know, when you’re in debt and when you’re stressed, and I’ve seen it with my kids. I’ve seen it with, uh, I’ve seen it with my friends. I’ve seen it with people. When they get stressed, everything’s about them. When I got stressed, everything was about me. “You don’t understand this. Oh my gosh. You know, you, if you ever had a situation like I did, you would’ve, you know, you would’ve reacted the exact same way.” Well, not true. You know, what I found to be true was if I. Know about my team. ’cause first 15 years I, I mean, I knew who they were, but I didn’t know anything about ’em. I didn’t know about their kids. I didn’t know about their families. Yeah, I might have met their husband at a Christmas party or whatever, but it just wasn’t that big a deal. Right. Until all of a sudden I realized it is that big a deal. You know, I needed to know about Summer and her two daughters, and I needed to know about her mom and her dad, and I needed to know about Gay’s family, and I needed to know about, you know, Shannon’s family and all of a sudden, and my hygienist and their families, the more I got to understand their families, the more we became family. Does that make sense? It’s like. ’cause I was so busy and I was just so, oh, adamant. It’s gotta be, it’s black or white because this is what I was taught it. It’s not that it’s wrong. I like things black and white, you know? But there’s always a gray area, and if something, if I’ve trained summer, how to do provisionals and, which by the way, I’d let her do provisionals on me all day long.

[00:05:50] Dr. Bruce Baird: I actually have one right here, right now that looks just like the, the rest of my teeth. I had to have a, a new veneer done. So, but bottom line is I taught her, but she’s better than I am. Working with the front desk, getting people, you know, this is how you answer the phone and this is what you do. This put surrounding yourself with people and giving them the opportunity to excel. What you’re gonna find is they’re gonna excel. They actually will, they’ll knock it outta the park. So much more than you will, um, because you can’t be everything for everybody and you, you’re gonna surround yourself with great hygienists. My hygienist, they’re my, they are periodontal specialists in my practice. Uh, they know that I stay up on top of the latest research and the latest things that are going on, um, in the mouth as far as periodontally, um, I was probably one of the first guys to get the Perilase laser doing AAP surgery. This is like, I had one of the first 50 of them, I think. Why? Because I had gum problems and I, I did the research and I looked and I said, “This is the coolest fricking tool ever.” So they know I am interested in that, and so all of a sudden I start sending them articles and I start letting them read journals and I let ’em do that, and I said, “Man, what do you think about this?” Well, as opposed to, this is the way we’re gonna be doing this. Different. What do you think about this? You know, and all of a sudden they’re going like, “Oh, let me look.” In other words, if you don’t value them, they won’t value you. If you don’t value them, then they’re there just for the job, and I read all the threads and guys just get on and just moan about how bad things are, but you know, the truth is. Is really a wonderful occupation. I mean, to be able to be a dentist and take care of people that are in need.

[00:07:48] Dr. Bruce Baird: Uh, some are in pain, some are, they can’t chew, they can’t eat, they can’t smile, they can’t, I mean, how important is a smile? How important is being able to eat? I mean, we are the, we’re the top of the food chain when it comes to taking care of people. There are people that rather have a great smile than worry about their heart, worry about anything else. They just want to have that smile. So these are the things that, you know, hopefully it’ll kind of hit you. Uh, it took me a period of time. It may take you a period of time, but treating others as, as you would want others to treat you. I didn’t do that for my first 15 years. It could have stretched to 20, I don’t know, and there are still days, don’t get me wrong, there are days that, man, I just, you know, I would hold things in and then get irritated, but if you, on a consistent basis, if they know that you love them, if they know, if your team knows you, love ’em and you’ll do anything for ’em, when that patient, that patient comes bitching in the office and everything else. All of a sudden you say, and they, they won’t bitch to you? No. They’re gonna say, “Oh, hi Dr. Baird, how are you? It’s so good to see you. Oh,” and I said, “Well, I said, Mary, I said, I got a problem. She’d go, what? What? What is it? And I’m say, well, my girls are scared of you. My team is scared of you.” “What?” “Yeah, they say, you come in and you’re irritated and you’re irritable. You gripe about everything I said here. You know, I know everybody has bad days and all that, but here’s my deal. I just want you to know these. This is my family. This is my family,” and they will apologize. “Oh, I am so sorry. I will never do that,” and guess what? Things change. All of a sudden they come in, they’re wonderful.

[00:09:44] Dr. Bruce Baird: They smile with your team. They do everything else. What does your team think? Your team says, wow, duck stood up for us. He didn’t blame us. Could have been something that they didn’t check the uh, crown coming in, but I’m not gonna blame it but the thing that changes everything is they know that you love. They know that you’re gonna take care of ’em, and you know, sometimes that patient leaves and never comes back. It’s not my problem. You know, some butt heads are just butt heads, like I’ve said in previous podcasts, but it’s not my problem, but what I have to do day in and day out is work with my team. My team is actually, and I’ve talked about this for years, my team is actually more important than I am. I’m clinically gonna do great work. I’m just gonna keep it up. It’s hard to do great work when you’re worried about everything else going on around you. You can’t do it. You know, I put the handpiece down five years ago and I miss it. I miss my team. I still go up there, um, and just say hello to everybody. I get hugs now, you know, and it’s just fun, but I will tell you, just doing things for patients. Uh, at the way you would want it done for yourself, taking care of your team, the way that if you were a team member, you would wanna be taken care of, um, are you gonna have a bad day? Sure. Eh, everybody has a bad day. You know, if somebody is, you know, I would come in having a bad day and Summer would ask me a question ’cause she felt totally comfortable talking to me. She didn’t at first, but once I started changing the way I looked at her, she would go, “Hey, Dr. B. Did you take your meds today?” What that meant was, am I being a butthead?

[00:11:39] Dr. Bruce Baird: And they would say, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. You might be,” and so I would have to internalize, well, maybe I am being a butthead today. Something, you know, usually I’d bring something in from outside and just boom, um, if, if, if gay was upset about something or she was being mean to people. I would go straight to gay. Yeah, I call that confrontational management. I’d just go to gay and I’d say, “Hey, Gay, are you okay?” She would go, “Oh yeah, I, I’m good.” “I don’t know. You just seem really uptight and are you having a headache or something going on at home?” She’d go, “No, no, no. I’m fine. I’m fine. I just had a deal happen, but it’s all good.” Guess what? Confrontational management the rest of the day. She’s fine. Would I have to do it every day? But if I had to do it every day, then we’d have to have bigger conversations, but maybe once every month and a half, two months, I would’ve to say, are you okay? Um, and I, I would do that with anybody in the office that just wasn’t on. It seemed like something was up, um, so anyway, hopefully this has been something that’ll give you pause that’ll, that’ll make you think about how do you make your life less stressful, and increase your productivity. How do I do that? Well, hopefully the things that I’ve talked about today, uh, help. At Clinical Calibration Institute, we’re gonna be talking about these things. You we’re gonna allow your teams to work with other teams and how they work through it. How did they schedule? How did you’ll be talking to dentists? Administrators will be talking to administrators, treatment coordinators with treatment coordinators, um, hygienists with hygienists and for four hundred and fifty, five hundred forty, whatever the amount is, that’s not per team member.

[00:13:21] Dr. Bruce Baird: That’s for the whole freaking office. So sign up for CCI, I think you’re gonna enjoy it. You could always say, I don’t enjoy it and quit, but I’m just saying, I think once you get involved and you see that your team, when you guys are calibrated. Game on. Productivity goes up, life gets good, uh, money goes up, uh, taking better care of patients. So anyway, tell your friends about the Productive Dentist Podcast. I look forward to our next, uh, our next one. So, uh, I look forward to seeing you again. I am headed out, um. Headed to Scotland and England and, uh, Ireland for about a month to play some golf over there, and when I come back, I’ll be right back doing this. So, uh, you guys have a great summer and I will look forward to the next time we get to visit. Thanks