I Get to Meet David Meerman Scott

I've been a fan of David Meerman Scott since I first read his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

So imagine my thrill when I finally got to meet him last week at the MassNetComms meeting on social media marketing!

David gave a great presentation about his new book, World Wide Rave -- and even though he had been traveling all over Europe just days before, patiently signed copies of his book and posed for photos -- including the one below.

Thank you, David!

Write a poem about your colonoscopy -- win $500

Next month (April) is oral health month, but so far, I haven't seen much in the local media about the importance of one's oral health.

HOWEVER!! The state of one's colon is big news -- especially given the fact that March is national colorectal month.

I watched the Today show the other day and Kathie Lee reported that a group of 46 gastroenterologists from Florida are giving away $500 dollars to the person who writes the best poem about their colonoscopy.

The GI docs are calling this the "Bottom Line Poetry Contest." Clever!

Apparently, colonoscopy poetry is a hot topic -- you can find over 69,000 entries in Google for the search phrase "colonoscopy poem."

Personally, I think the GI doctors could have awarded a larger prize.

Another physician group is flying a contest winner to New York for a stay in a luxury hotel before he/she has the colonoscopy procedure done.

A luxurious colonoscopy. Clearly, oral health has nothing on rectal health!

Here's a New Dental Marketing Idea: Social Media (duh)

The writer at the Dental Services Blog recently asked, "Are There Any New Dental Marketing Ideas Left?"

The blogger writes: "Finding new dental marketing ideas is a hot topic in the dental industry today. In fact, 'new dental marketing ideas' is one of the top dental searches done on the Internet. But is any idea really new?"

The writer touched on some things but he didn't go all the way. First of all, most ideas in business are not "new" -- they're an evolution of existing products or means of communicating.

For example, take Welch's 'Squeeze' jelly. For years, jelly came in a glass jar, then Welch's had the idea to put it in a plastic squeeze container. Neither product nor the concept (squeezable food products) is new; the company simply combined what was already available. Yet the idea was a huge financial win for Welch's.

The Dental Services blogger stated that you could put the Yellow Pages inside a newspaper. Take your message, he wrote, and your mission statement, and put it into a form of media that the public is now reading.

Unfortunately, the writer neglected to comment that newspapers are dying due to declining readership, so this isn't exactly a great idea.

The blogger also left out all forms of social media -- including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

And finally, the blogger touched on dental Websites. I would state that if a dentist has a site and wants to generate business from it, he or she needs to hire a professional marketing person to optimize it, write it, and manage it. Simply having a site, which many dentists do, means nothing if people can't find it in the search engines or if it's poorly designed / written.

Once the optimized and professionally design / written Website is in place, the dentist should then use all forms of social media to reach prospective patients -- in other words, use media the public is actually using.

Based on what I see dental marketing companies telling dentists on how to market their businesses using old tactics that don't work, this indeed would be a new idea.

NY Times Article Makes Dentist Grind Her Teeth

In a recent NY Times article, Best Treatment for TMJ May Be Nothing, reporter Jane Brody relied "on narrow and outdated perspectives supplied by a small group of dentist/academicians" -- an opinion expessed by one of my Las Vegas Institute (LVI) colleagues.

In a Letter to the Editor -- which of course was never published by the Times (but did run on the LVI email forum) -- my colleage wrote:

The information you were provided would lead one to believe that TMD (or "TMJ" as it is inaccurately called by so many colleagues) is easy to treat and self-manage or that it may all be in your mind. Your sources stated that, "TMJ problems were originally thought to stem from dental malocclusion," and go on to say that this was an infrequent cause of the problem.

The American Academy of General Dentistry (AGD), an organization of some 40,000 of the nation’s leading general dentists, recognizes the relationship between malocclusion and headache. . . . A simple Google search for TMD on keywords such as headaches, TMD, TMJ, etc., would have taken you to many other informative sources of information regarding the subject of your article.

As one who treats patients with severe TMD symptoms, I can assure you that my patients are unable to manage the pain associated with these conditions by simply receiving counseling on their habits. Further, I find that dental malocclusion is frequently one of the principle causes of TMD. Your informant’s comments that MRI and CAT scans are among the biggest advances in diagnosis of TMD is ludicrous. Those modalities are valuable and will tell you about the status of the jaw joint, but tell you little to nothing about the causes of joint misalignment, which I frequently find to be malocclusion.

Yet another incredulous statement is that "80-90 percent of the needed information can be obtained just by talking to the patient." Certainly a complete history is a vital part of the diagnostic process, but when modern objective evaluation tools such as electromyography to study muscle condition, computerized jaw tracking to document functional abnormalities, X-ray and MRI to study structure are ignored, it is much like saying, "Let’s do away with electrocardiograms, we can just ask the patient if he has chest pain."

We are now in the 21st-century. It is time for the profession to recognize that occlusion and jaw function are governed by a physiological process and diagnose and treat accordingly. I am hopeful that you will do further research and publish on this topic again, this time avoiding a slanted perspective by a small self-serving group of "experts."

All I can say is "AMEN SISTER."

Having tried for years to get the attention of the press in the Boston area regarding oral health, I can state that the NY Times and other media simply do not care that dentists are no longer the "tooth plumbers" of years past but are today's modern "mouth physicians."

(In fact, healthcare IT blogger Neil Versel posted that he was told by the Boston Globe that there is no market for Healthcare IT -- a $2.5 billion dollar industry. Amazing.)

No one would say that a dermatologist or opthalomolgist weren't medical professionals.

Why then do people -- and the press -- have blinders on when it comes to modern dentistry?

A World Wide Rave Video for the WWR Book!

Today David Meerman Scott released a new video relating to his upcoming book, World Wide Rave.

According to David, over 100 people and groups sent him photos and videos of themselves holding a World Wide Rave poster -- from Boston to Antarctica!

It's very cool.

David Meerman Scott Talks About World Wide Rave at HubSpot

HubSpot is an Internet marketing company based in Cambridge, MA (I met a few of the people in November when I gave a presentation to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, Boston chapter).

They host Webinars and HubSpot TV and last week their guest was David Meerman Scott, author of the best selling book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and the upcoming book, World Wide Rave.

As David explains, a World Wide Rave is when lots of people are talking and spreading your ideas. He gives lots of great examples of World Wide Raves and how they work (this means you don't use traditional (expensive) marketing like the Yellow Pages and magazine ads).

(Full disclosure: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex! is a featured World Wide Rave.)

You can view the full screen Webinar here: http://www.hubspot.com/archive/world-wide-rave-webinar (I had a hard time trying to make it fit into this blog.)

Children's Dental Expert Gives His Thoughts on "David After Dentist" Video

As a dentist, I was mildly distuburbed after watching the David After Dentist YouTube video that's making the rounds of Twitter and the blogosphere. As of this writing, the video has over 9 million views.



My friend, Dr. Lance Kisby, director of Pediatric Dentistry at Geisinger Hospital in Pennsylvania, however, was more than mildly disturbed -- he was downright mad.

Here are his comments about why this video is so bad with regard to children's dentistry -- and why it gives completely inaccurate information about the role of pediactric dentists (or pedodontists, as they are known).

The 2006-2007 Pedodontic Sedation Guidelines are REALLY clear regarding sedating children. The guidelines state that before the patient is dismissed from the office he/she must be:
1. verbal
2. alert
3. awake
4. able to walk under their own power
5. given verbal tests (say the alphabet or count to 20) to determine level of recovery.

The guidelines are crystal clear on this: if the patient is none of the above (you really need all five to send the patient home), the patient must stay in office until FULLY recovered.

And, according to Sedation Guidelines, parents are not allowed to premedicate kids at home before dental appointments. Once you premedicate a child and put him or her in the back seat of a car, you run the risk of the child falling asleep, having his head fall forward and dying due to:
a)Seat belt on the neck
b)The anatomical variation in kids'airway anatomy . . . it is conical, narrow at the cricoid cartilage (adults are wide and parallel).

In addition, sedating young children is not as simple as giving a kid nitrous. When doing sedation on children using nitrous, the tragus of the ear HAS to be parallel to the sternum. If not, the airway gets blocked due to anatomy.

And, most important when it comes to sedation -- kids are not adults!

Here is an equation:

Cardiac output = Heart rate X stroke volume

or

CO= HR X SV

Children, unlike adults, cannot vary their stroke volume. Thus, in the equation, stroke volume is a constant. Thus,

CO = HR

That means, blood pressure is heart rate dependant.

Decreased O2 causes bradycardia (in adults it causes tachycardia). Bradycardia (decreased heart rate) causes decreased blood pressure.

Decreased blood pressure in a child is dangerous. This is because children go FAST -- as in, they die.

In the 4-day simulation course I took last year on Sedation, we found out all too well that decreased PG means decreased 02 and then it spirals out of control. Big time. In our course on the $1 million dollar dummies we worked on, and which are true to live, the "child" was dead in 30 seconds.

Adults have 02 levels that go like this: 100-99-98-96-93 . . . etc.

A child's 02 levels go like this: 100-92-88-70. Yup, that fast.

Now, here is the kicker. Since children's heart rates are higher, here is the rule: if a child's HR is 80, you must start CPR immediately.

Let me put it in real life terms for you. You're a dentist with a child in the chair. You are talking and he is talking about your good looks, your dress, the Patriots, and the weather. His heart rate is 80. He is lucid. He is talking. No problems noted. You immediately level your chair, insitute CPR with chest compressions and breathing and call 911. I am not kidding!

Here at the hospital, we have a sedation team and they sedate kids for me in the PICU rather than me worry about all this stuff. Last Thursday, a child's O2 went: 100-99-82 . . . that fast. I had to stop and the sedation team did their thing.

I get aggrevated when dentists and parents say 'Aw, just sedate the kid.' I have been doing children's dentistry forever, and I don't sedate.

Now you know why I find this David After Dentist video highly aggraviating.

Well, I guess that sums up why dentists are truly health care professionals, why modern dentists keep up to date with technology and advanced techniques, and why really good dentists leave advanced procedures, such as sedating children, to real experts.