Becoming a Really Good General Dentist — With Special Interests

When people ask what kind of dentist I am, the honest answer is that I’m a general dentist — but one who has spent years deliberately becoming better at the things I love doing most. That distinction matters to me, and it’s a good place to start this short series I’m writing for the BDS Dental blog.

Over the next few pieces I want to talk about the work I find most rewarding: my approach to veneers, how same-day crowns work, why I’m the one patients get sent to when they’re nervous, and how I decide when to treat a tooth and when to leave it alone. But first, a little about how I got here — and why I’ve spent so much of my career learning.

How I came to dentistry

I had a really good experience with my own dentist as a child. He was a close friend of my dad’s — we’re still good friends to this day — and my mum took us to see him regularly, so I grew up with a genuinely positive relationship with dentistry rather than the dread a lot of people carry. Even my braces were a good experience, which isn’t something everyone can say.

I knew I wanted to work in healthcare. My dad’s a doctor, but I knew medicine wasn’t for me. I loved the sciences, and when it came time to decide, dentistry offered something I valued enormously: the work itself, and a sensible balance alongside it. I did work experience, and it confirmed what I suspected — this was it. I’ve never regretted the decision.

What I will say, honestly, is that I didn’t love every part of dentistry equally. Not everyone tells you that. The truth is that finding your place within dentistry is its own journey, and over the years I’ve worked out which areas genuinely light me up and leaned into those. That’s a healthy thing, not a failing — and it’s exactly what’s led me to where I am now.

Finding what I love

The areas I’ve gravitated towards are restorative and cosmetic work — changing smiles, rebuilding teeth, getting people back to eating and smiling with confidence. I particularly love veneers, which I’ll devote a whole piece to later in this series.

I also really enjoy extractions, which surprises some people. I spent a year after graduating working in hospital doing maxillofacial surgery, and that’s where I developed my surgical and extraction skills properly. At BDS, I tend to be the one the other dentists refer extractions to — including the more anxious patients — and I genuinely enjoy that work and the calm it requires. More on that later in the series too.

The point is that within “general dentistry” there’s enormous room to develop genuine depth in particular areas. I didn’t want to be a jack-of-all-trades. I wanted to be a really good general dentist who has true special interests — and who knows her limits just as clearly as her strengths.

Why I keep studying

Dentistry is lifelong learning. You cannot coast on your undergraduate training and expect to do your best work twenty years later — the field moves, the materials improve, the techniques get better.

That belief led me to complete a master’s in restorative dental practice at the Eastman. (If you’ve seen an older version of my bio describing it as “in progress,” that’s out of date — it’s finished now.) I chose it because I’d left the NHS and I wanted to attract the right patients and offer the right standard of treatment, and to do that I needed to be better. I wanted to learn more, at a prestigious institution, under proper guidance — and crucially it was hands-on, which is how I learn best. It came at the right point in my career, and BDS supported me through it enormously.

What the master’s gave me, more than anything, was protocol. Before it, I had skill but less structure. Now my treatment follows reliable, evidence-based protocols at every stage, and the result is that I can be genuinely confident in what I produce — a crown or a veneer that I expect to last, that shouldn’t fail, that I’m comfortable standing behind. That confidence isn’t ego. It’s the quiet certainty that comes from doing things properly, the same way every time.

Why this matters to you

All of this — the special interests, the constant learning, the protocols — exists for one reason: to do better work for the person in the chair. When a dentist has invested in becoming excellent at the specific thing you need, and knows exactly where the edges of their expertise lie, you’re in good hands. And when they don’t try to be everything to everyone, but instead refer you on when someone else is genuinely better placed, that’s a sign of good care, not a gap in it.

That philosophy runs through everything in this series. In the next piece, I’ll get into the treatment I’m asked about most — veneers — and explain why I take away as little of your natural tooth as I possibly can.

Dr Reem Al-Kufaishi is a general dentist at BDS Dental with special interests in restorative and cosmetic dentistry, and a master’s in restorative dental practice from the Eastman. To book a consultation, contact the practice here.