How a Psychology Degree Made Me a Better Dentist

If you’d asked me when I was very young what I wanted to be, I doubt I’d have said dentist. I came into the profession because of one person — my best friend’s father — and I stayed because of something else entirely, which was a year I took out in the middle of my dental degree to study psychology. That year, more than any single clinical lecture, is what shaped the dentist I became.

This is the first piece in a short series I want to write for the BDS Dental site, on the way Ellie and I approach care here at the practice. Ellie has been writing his own series on minimally invasive dentistry — you’ll find his pieces elsewhere on this blog. I want to take a slightly different angle. My focus is on the why — the ethics, the trust, the soft skills, the decisions we make about when not to treat. So let me start with how I got here.

A best friend’s father, and a profession that felt useful

The honest answer to why I became a dentist is that my best friend’s father was a dentist, and he was somebody I greatly respected. My best friend Benjamin and I have known each other from the day we were born — there are photos of me being held as a baby by Benjamin’s mother while she was pregnant with him. He’s a dentist now too, which makes me think the influence was more than just personal taste on my part.

There were practical reasons as well. By the time I was old enough to think about it, I knew I wanted to do something that involved directly helping people. Medicine appealed in principle, but it requires years of specialisation before you really know where you’re going. With dentistry, you can hit the ground running. You finish your training and you can start doing the work — fixing things, getting people out of pain, making them feel better — straight away.

I’ve always thought that’s the underrated thing about this job. I have friends in other professions who look back at a working day and genuinely struggle to articulate what they’ve achieved. I rarely have that problem. I can look at a Tuesday afternoon and point to a list of patients I’ve directly, physically, in reality helped. Whether it was getting someone out of pain, restoring a broken tooth, or sitting with a nervous patient through a procedure they’d been dreading for years — it’s there. It’s tangible. That sense of usefulness at the end of a day is something I value enormously, and it’s part of why I think dentistry is a wonderful career, even on the hard days.

The year that changed how I work

I studied dentistry at Guy’s Hospital. Partway through, I did something called an intercalated BSc, which is an option dental and medical students can take to step out of their main degree for a year and study something complementary. I chose psychology.

That year is the most formative single thing I did in my training, and I don’t say that lightly. About a third of the course was psychotherapy and counselling. And here’s the part that still mildly surprises me when I think about it: I wasn’t only studying it. I was actually practising it. I treated real clients using cognitive analytical therapy. I did this not just during the BSc year, but right through the third, fourth, and fifth years of my dental degree — clinical dentistry by day, therapy sessions for clients on the side. It was an unusual arrangement, but I was allowed to do it, and it changed me.

What it taught me was how to be properly present with another human being. How to listen — really listen — instead of just waiting for my turn to speak. How to be empathic without being sentimental. How to notice when somebody in the chair is anxious in a way they aren’t admitting to. How to slow down when a patient needs slowing down with, and how to take seriously the fact that a mouth is one of the most personally vulnerable parts of the body for somebody to let a stranger near.

I think that psychology background raised my level of dentistry — not so much clinically, but interpersonally. The soft skills, as people call them. Although I’d argue they aren’t really soft at all. They’re often as important as the technical skills, sometimes more so.

Why this matters to the patient in the chair

Dentistry, broadly speaking, attracts a particular type of personality. Often clinically excellent, often introverted, often more comfortable focusing on the mouth than on the person around it. I’ve worked with many dentists like that and I have huge respect for them. But I think the very best dentistry happens when the clinical work and the human work happen together — when the technical excellence is matched by the dentist actually understanding the person in front of them.

For a patient, what this looks like in practice is small things that add up. It looks like a dentist who notices when you’re tense and adjusts the pace. Who explains what’s about to happen before doing it. Who hears the question underneath the question — the one you didn’t quite ask. Who treats your time and your fear and your money as if they actually mattered to him, because they do. Who doesn’t talk over you when you try to bring something up. Who remembers you between appointments.

None of that is a substitute for clinical skill. It’s an amplifier of it. But you can have the best hands in the country and still get worse outcomes than someone less skilled but more attentive, because dentistry isn’t something done to a patient. It’s something done with a patient. And if you can’t read the person in the chair, you can’t do that part well.

Joining BDS — finding the right place

I came to BDS Dental in 2001. A friend who’d been working at the practice told me there was a place going, and I went to meet the principal at the time, Harris Sidelsky. Harris had a very strong reputation in UK dentistry. He was one of the first dentists in this country to do a Master’s in Michigan, and his name was associated with high-quality work. He was a real personality, and he’d created an environment in the practice that was authentic, trustworthy, and genuinely patient-centred. Never over-treat. Respect the patients. Exceptional customer care. A great team. All the things that mattered to me were already mattering to him.

I’d been a young dentist looking for somewhere I could practise the way I wanted to practise. Walking into BDS felt like that. I’ve been here twenty-five years now, and partner since 2014. The work has changed over that time — techniques have evolved, materials have improved, my own approach has matured — but the underlying ethos has stayed the same, and so has the team. I think when you find a place that fits the way you want to work, you don’t leave.

What this series is going to cover

In the rest of this short series, I want to get into the things I’ve come to believe most strongly about dentistry. They are, broadly:

That teeth are different from the rest of your body in one crucial way — they don’t heal — and that this single fact ought to change how we approach almost every clinical decision.

That when a tooth does need work, there’s almost always a more conservative option than the obvious one, and that the conservative option is almost always the right one.

That prevention isn’t an afterthought — it’s the foundation of good dentistry, and there are five very practical things any patient can do to keep treatment to a minimum.

And finally, that the dentists worth trusting are the ones willing to say no — the patients you decline to treat, in many ways, define you more than the ones you do.

Some of this will overlap with what Ellie has written in his series, because we’re partners and we see the world similarly. But I want to come at it from my own angle. Less of the clinical detail. More of the philosophy — and a few of the stories that have shaped how I think.

Thanks for reading. The next piece is the one I think about most — why teeth, alone among the parts of your body, don’t repair themselves, and what that should mean for the way every dental decision is made.

Dr Ian Davis is a partner at BDS Dental, qualified at Guy’s Hospital with a BSc in Psychology alongside his dental degree. To book a consultation, contact the practice here.