Steve Anderson and Walter Hailey share...

Are you chasing clients away with your language?

WORDS that can KILLyour case acceptance

by Steve Anderson & Walter Hailey

f your slip were showing or your tie were crooked, would you want someone you trust to alert you to what you couldn’t see for yourself? If you will let us take it a little closer into your intimacy zone, what if you had bad breath? How else would you ever find out about something potentially offensive to others as a funky case of halitosis if not for someone stepping up and letting you know? Similarly, although you are the dental health professional who can cure your patients’ bad breath, you may be saying things in your case presentation that turn your patients off to saying YES to treatment. These 25 words can be as infectious as the worst periodontal condition you will ever treat.
 
Take the Case of Acceptance Verbal IQ
 
We all know that how you talk about your patients’ health has a lot to do with what they will agree to do regarding the treatment you prescribe. So take our little quiz. Rather than be guilty about confusing your patients with unclear images, limiting terms and approval-addicted-based ambiguities, we invite you to be honest. These poor choices in words may make you feel clever but they just puzzle your patients. To paraphrase Hippocrates, we challenge you to “heal thyself” by fixing what comes OUT of your mouth in order to better fix what’s going on IN the mouths of your patients. If you think of dentistry as a lifelong learning journey, then think of us as your key to smoothing out the road along the way. We have identified the potholes, dead ends, roadblocks and detours that can send your case presentations careening off the road. Get these 25 injurious and unsafe words, marked in bold type, out of your vocabulary for a more smoothly paved path to full treatment plan acceptance.

Irresponsible Pronouns 
 
Let’s start small. There’s nothing smaller than a pronoun, but its incorrect usage reveals the root of a much bigger problem. For example, “Well, Mr. Haven’t-Seen-Ya-In-Five-Years, we have a little infection here.”
 
The truth is that the patient, as his name implies, has not been back to see you in such a long time that blood and pus now characterize the activities in his mouth. It’s a swamp of deep pockets in every quadrant. We don’t mean to imply that he needs a scolding. On the contrary, he needs to be informed of what is really going on in his mouth. That doesn’t include your mouth. Therefore, WE is the worst word you could ever use. It lessens the importance—and the urgency—of his condition. He’s already failed to show a great interest in a disease he has had for too long a time, a disease that only gets more dramatic without treatment! So if WE are sharing the problem, then HE won’t have to deal with trying to find a solution. Someone else will, and he’s very likely thinking: “Don’t bother ME with this now.” Okay, you say we is a minor thing, so we’ll agree. But combine it with:
 
Limiting Adjectives
 
So the patient has successfully avoided the real deal about his or her oral health needs. Let’s revisit that apparently innocuous remark: “We have a little infection here.”
 
Well, King Kong is little, too, when he stands next to Godzilla, but he’s a pretty scary sight atop the Empire State Building! Once you put Fay Wray in the palm of one of those giant hands, you add the perspective that makes us want to DO something like call in the airplanes and save the day.
 
The entire art and science of dentistry takes place within an incredibly small portion of the human organism, but that doesn’t lessen its importance. And we all know from our earliest lessons in grammar that adjectives are designed to describe things, but they are at their best when they create a context.
 
To create a context that patients can actually understand and respond to effectively, pay attention to the three forms of limiting your language: to describe the severity of a condition, avoid saying little—or any of these “accomplice synonyms” like minor, kind of, sort of, insignificant, tiny, a touch of, inconsequential; to describe the frequency of trouble, avoid saying sometimes—or the other usual suspects like maybe, on occasion, from time to time, once in a while or the ever unclear not infrequently; to describe what action patients should take, avoid saying Perhaps you should think about or equally wishy-washy phrases like Maybe we need to look at this some more next year or Let’s just wait and see.
 
We don’t wish to insult you. We would never say that you are lying to your patients when you use such limiting terminology, but the result of these words comes to the same thing: patients decide NOT to accept full treatment. If their disease isn’t that bad, why should they?
 
How much different is that from supervised neglect? Chances are your patients have not been to dental school. Which brings up: 
 
Incomprehensible Nouns
  
We would like to get personal for a minute. If you’ve ever been to our Dental Boot Kamps or heard us speak at conferences, you know that we are in the business of helping our clients enjoy their own business more—and help them get more business for their business.
 
We know all kinds of business terminology, but we pride ourselves on speaking plainly.  We like to keep it simple. And as direct and clear as we try to be, sometimes people refuse our recommendations. It’s tough watching people, we like and want to help, lose money or their marriage or make monstrously ill-advised decisions in practice management. But we long ago discovered you can’t be everything to everyone. We know how valuable we have been to so many because they tell us every day by phone and fax and e-mail and at dental meetings. But we understand the power of rejection. If we were afraid of getting shot as the messenger of bad news every time we looked into someone’s mouth, we would get defensive, too. 
 
Looking Smart Versus Being Smart  

We know that one of the dumbest, knee-jerk ways for one to save face in the face of rejection is to retreat into the rarefied air of the high fallutin’. Using all those big fancy words form dental school may make you feel like a genius, but they may make your patient feel less than intelligent. Here’s a tip from our business school: looking smart is not as important as being smart. And the smartest professionals are the ones who make their patients feel smart. That’s the key to case acceptance.

We invite you to drop all those incomprehensible nouns of Latin and Greek derivation from your treatment case vocabulary. Though occlusal disharmony may accurately describe your patient’s bite, we think the language is a bad fit. In fact, using such words is akin to putting your foot in your mouth.
 
Take a term as commonplace in dentistry as periodontal disease. During a conversation with a very well educated business associate of ours, we were explaining the ever expanding market for dental services in North America. In an unthinking moment we told him that  “half the people do not see the dentist on a regular basis and 80% of them have some type of periodontal disease.” His immediate response was, “That’s nice, guys, but what do dentists have to do with feet?”
 
It may come as a shock to you, but not everyone gets up in the morning thinking about their periodontal condition! Our friend is very smart—in his area of expertise—but in the area of dentistry, his level of education is still at an elementary level. That doesn’t make him dumb. It just makes him normal, like most of the dental patients you see every day. So, if you expect them to understand what you say, you must talk with them at the level they can understand. 
 
“I Wish I Would Have Said” 
 
How many times have you said that to yourself long after the case presentation is over and the patient has left the office without accepting treatment? Wouldn’t it be nice to eliminate “I wish I would have said that” and replace it with “I’m glad I said that.”
 
Start by planning ahead and thinking about what you will say BEFORE you meet your next patient. Let’s face it: it’s not as if you are going to make a recommendation that you’ve never made before, so start replacing every “I’m-smart/you’re not” phrase in your diagnosis and treatment with emotional word pictures that communicate a powerful imagery to your patients and fit their belief window so that they want the procedure you recommend. Here are a couple of examples of more words not to use: 

• Probing: you don’t really expect a patient to show much excitement for such a term! Who do you know who wants to be probed? It sounds invasive. Dr. Jeff Gray, one of our Dental Boot Kamp faculty and a master communicator, says, “I’m going to use this ‘ruler’ to measure the pockets or turtlenecks around your teeth which are like fence posts in the ground. If you lose the dirt, the fence gets loose just as your tooth does if the bone dissolves from the infection. So what I’m doing in puttering around your gums is a lot like golf—the lower the score, the better. You are playing on a par 3 course.”

 Notice that now the patient not only knows what you are doing, but can “play along.” When it’s time to make a treatment recommendation, you can be sure that the patient is more qualified and less resistant to say YES. 

• Root Canal: Yikes! This has got to be the most over-rated procedure in dentistry. It has been anchored in everyone’s mind as the most awful thing you can experience.  Out loud it’s as scary and as life-threatening as gum surgery! For procedures this severe to the ear, it’s awfully tough to get anyone who’s not a masochist to say yes to the treatment. Instead of making the procedure sound terrifying, make the condition sound terrifying and the solution or procedure seem easy.

For example, you might say, “You have a serious infection that’s eating a hole in your jawbone and it’s really pretty simple to take care of. All I am going to do is make an opening in the tooth similar to doing a filling and then I’ll rinse and clean out the space where the infection is growing. That space is like the space in a sprinkler line where the water flows. We simply seal up that space so nothing comes in or out and you’ll be able to eat and chew comfortably again.”
 
If you are concerned that you might be perceived as not being totally up front with the patient, then feel free to say, “You may have heard this referred to as a root canal in the past.” As least this way they will understand what’s happening before you use a term that is negatively associated with the opposite emotional response that you want. 
 
Here are a couple more examples of word pictures:

• Excess wear on teeth: It is a lot like an M & M—the enamel is the candy coating and the dentin is the chocolate. 

• An expanded filling: It’s like a crack in the cement. When water freezes in it, it expands and breaks up what surrounds it.

• Scaling and root planning: Ouch! You might as well say, “You’re gonna get plucked and skinned!” 

• Implants: is this about breasts? Agreeably one of the greatest innovation in dentistry, it is unfortunately a trigger word that is directly associated with leakage, illness, disaster and lawsuits. 

• Bonding: This is either too intimate or some 007 technique. What about crowns, indirect only/inlay, direct composite, occlusion? Let your imagination have free rein.

Where to Next? Take it to Third Graders  

Here is our can’t-go-wrong action plan:
 
Get your entire team involved in helping you use language that is clear, imagistic, patient-centered and communicative. Let them give you—and one another—feedback so that everyone in the practice speaks effectively?
 
How do you know when you are being effective?
 
Go to your local school and do a presentation about dentistry to a class of third graders. If these children can follow what you are saying, then you know your patients will. Most adults you will meet have little more than third grade education in dentistry anyway. By raising your own case presentation verbal IQ, you automatically raise your community’s dental IQ. We wish you continued success in dentistry.
 

 
Walter Hailey and Steve Anderson are the founders of Dental Boot Kamp, North America’s leading course in case presentation and the people-skills sided of dentistry. For more information and dates of their upcoming seminars or to order your free “Leadership and the Dental Practice,” call toll free 1-800-460-3838 x106 or email gregs@dentalsuccess.net. (type DBK in the Subject line)