Meet Dr. John Athos
I really think I got into dentistry on a subconscious level. My growing up, my father played a lot of golf and he was always mentioning, “Oh, I got to play with this dentist on Wednesday. Oh, I got to play with this dentist on this day.” You get to play with this. And he kind of suddenly kept dropping it. So, I’m 12, 13, 14 years old towards the end of high school I was really committed to either dentistry, or ophthalmology, optometry of some sort. And I think I really made the decision of dentistry because no matter, and I say this to patients all the time, one of the beautiful parts of my job is the word no doesn’t exist. If you have an oral problem of any aspect, we can fix it. You may not like what it takes to fix it, but we have the ability to fix it. And if you lose an eye, we can make a beautiful glass marble, but it doesn’t work. So, I think I started gravitating more towards dentistry at that point. And by freshman year high school, I knew right away that’s what I was going to be. So, something in the dental field, that’s for sure.
There’s two aspects in there and they’re super extreme. When you have somebody who’s in severe pain I, actually, think this is the lesser of the two. When you have somebody who’s in extreme pain and you can alleviate that pain in a half an hour visit or an hour visit, and get them that in certainly even that patient who’s not the friendliest of people or somebody who comes in completely miserable, which happens. When you relieve that pain, that pressure, and you see their relief, and you physically have helped somebody in a 30-minute time frame, that immediate reward is huge. Now, there’s long-term rewards as well. Like when you see somebody go from not so healthy a mouth, and then you take progression of time, and then you, eventually, get them to a healthy situation, that’s also a different reward, but it’s longer spread out. That immediate satisfaction, which is what we Americans live for, is immediate results, right? That immediate satisfaction helping a kid who just had one yesterday. She snapped off her front tooth and she’s 17 years old. Okay? How attractive is it for a 17-year-old girl to go to school and not get picked on when she’s got half of her front tooth missing? She came in, we put her tooth back together, she’s back to smiling, she’s back to being her kid, right? So, within 45 minutes, she’s back to her normal smile again. Super rewarding to know that we made it through. But probably on a bigger level is when you can totally take somebody and recreate something that they’ve wanted for life. They’ve always wanted this or wanted this smile, and there’s countless cases, and it sounds stereotypical when you say, “Hey, when you finally put somebody fully back together and you hand them a mirror and they cry.” It’s pretty cool.
