Winter
2005 Outlook and Bulletin Article
The
deadline our editor gave me for this article is today. The last
article dealt with the basics of handling a volume of incoming
email. This is not going to be a problem for a lot of people now,
but in a few years it will become an unavoidable convenience. The
interchange of information that occurs daily on the internet has
helped me become a much better informed dentist and individual.
For those of you who may be curious to go back to the last article,
complete with pictures which would have made the piece too large
publish in the Outlook and Bulletin, I have posted it, in its entirety
on my website at www.cent4dent.com .
Simply go to the office information home page, and there, on the
bottom row of links is a link to anything
I’ve written for Outlook.
The premise for my column was the fact that eventually, all
news, including Outlook and Bulletin, will be coming into your
home electronically. Orwell wrote about 1984 and Big Brother.
We are there. We live in a world where kidnappings are captured
on security cameras. Speeding tickets come from traffic cameras.
We cruise through toll booths with EZPass while computers track
our whereabouts. So yesterday, when I began checking my day’s
emails, my idea for this article began to germinate.
One of the pieces was a very interesting presentation, a retrospective
look if you will from the year 2014, citing the demise of the
venerable fourth estate institution: The New York Times. It tracked
the evolution of the way people receive their information from
the naissance of the world wide web, through the mergers of information
superhighway giants, to the formulation of “EPIC” – The
Evolving Personalized Information Construct. To view this stunning
futuristic piece, go to: http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html or simply read this article off my website, and click on the
link.
So my buddy, Rick Coker, from Tyler, Texas, who alerted everyone
in our on-line dental group to this interesting article, became
my muse for this month’s segment about dental and other
information garnered along the information superhighway, during
one short hour, after work. Another piece that came in the same
cluster of email was something from Mike Maroon, who summarized
a book, entitled The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Space
does not allow for the entirety of that document, however, it
will be up on my website.
- Be impeccable with your word
- Speak
with integrity.
- Say only what you mean.
- Avoid using the word to
speak against yourself or to gossip about others.
-
Use the power of your word in the direction of truth
and love. Gossip works like a computer virus that
destroys.
- Don’t
take anything personally
- You are never responsible
for the actions of others; you are only responsible
for you.
- Whey you truly understand this and refuse to take
things personally, you can hardly be hurt by the careless
comments
or actions of
others.
- What others say and do is a projection of their
own reality.
- When you are immune to the opinions and actions
of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
- Don’t
make assumptions
- Find the courage to ask questions
to express what you really want.
- Because we are afraid to
ask for clarification, we make assumptions
and believe we are right about the assumptions;
then we defend our assumptions
and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better!
to ask questions.
- If you don’t understand – ASK.
- Communicate
with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings,
sadness and drama.
- We make assumptions about what others
are doing or thinking – we take
it personally – then we blame them and react
by sending emotional poison with our word. That is
why whenever
we
make assumptions, we
misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up
creating a whole big drama for nothing.
- We assume that
others think the way we think, feel the way we feel,
judge the way we judge, and abuse
the way
be abuse.
- With this one agreement alone, you can
completely transform your life.
- Always do your best
- Your best is going to change from moment
to moment – it
will be different when you are healthy as opposed
to when you are sick.
- Under any circumstances, simply do
your best; and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse
and regret.
You must have a very strong will to keep these agreements. Wherever
we go, we find our path is full of obstacles.
Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus
only on that which we want to perceive. We can perceive millions
of things simultaneously, but using our attention, we can hold
whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind.
Keep your attention on today – stay in the present moment
My mailbox also included a letter from my buddy Mike Davis, who practices in
Santa Fe, NM who knows my personal crusade to have United Concordia join the
list of insurance companies the ADA has engaged in RICO suits. He sent me an
interesting piece about the Attorney General of New Mexico issuing a cease
and desist order against UCCI for practicing without a license in their state.
If space did not permit the publication of that information in Outlook, it
will be found on my website on http://www.cent4dent.com/html/office_info/insuranceneeds1.html
As the time progressed, I posted pictures and case history of
an interesting patient I had seen yesterday, and by bedtime,
had received co-consultations from several people across the
nation whose opinions I regard highly. There were some suppositions
given, and questions others had thought to ask that I hadn’t.
Once we have the patient’s MRI and CT scan back we will
know a lot more, and will again discuss the case. I suspected
some sort of pathology within the condyle or the joint. Very
cleverly, I had taken “mug shots” of the patient
looking right and left, from the same spot, with a Venetian blind
in the background, so that my colleagues could see the facial
asymmetry.
There was an invitation in the mail from Paul Feuerstein, the
technology editor from Dental Economics to join him for breakfast
at the Yankee Conference. Paul’s website www.computersindentistry.com has an enormous amount of information for those of you who are
just embarking down the road, who break-down along the superhighway,
and for guys who think they have all the bells and whistles (there
is some amazing stuff coming involving implantology and cad/cam
that Paul showed me last fall).
It is our goal to have the same level of interactivity on a
local basis on the Southern Dental Association website. When
this modality is ready to go, we will let you know. In the meantime,
I invite you to try interactivity by joining one of the discussion
groups listed on www.computersindentistry.com .
All of my local news comes via the web. I get my weather, on
line. I have found that WPVI.com ( http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/weather/index.html ) has the most accurate forecasts. You can get an hour by hour
forecast that truly has determined whether I went out to play
golf, or to the gym. You tell them what city you want to know
the weather for (Valley Forge vs. Mt. Holly) and it will show
you exactly when the rain is supposed to start, how heavy it
will be, and when they expect the sun to come out again. I get
my local news daily from South Jersey online (www.SouthJersey.com).
My national news from CNN, sports from ESPN and even the latest
concert information (pollstar.com and ticketmaster.com know who
I like to see, and send me updates as these artists’ tour
dates change).
For those of you with much more time on your hands, check out
Arts and Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com) which is a compendium
of the best articles, essays, opinions garnered from around the
world. This is close to what is envisioned by “EPIC” except
it doesn’t know my personal preferences…..YET!
Please send all questions, comments, and ideas for future articles
to me at drmarkus@cent4dent.com
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