Wellness In Dentistry

Summer's over. And for most dentists, that means one thing: time to make up for it.
That instinct is exactly what Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson are pushing back on in this episode. The idea that you need to "make up" for summer assumes summer was a mistake. It wasn't. If you planned it, lower production in August isn't a problem — it's a data point you already knew about. The hustle spiral that hits every September isn't discipline. It's guilt.
Kyle puts it plainly: dentists have been hustling since high school. Grinding to get into college, then dental school, then an associateship, then ownership. At some point you're redlining in first gear — and that's how you blow the motor. The dentists who last longest aren't the ones who push hardest. They're the ones who figured out how to be sustainable.
So what does a healthy fall reset actually look like? Start with curiosity, not panic. Look at your patient base and ask who's actually worth keeping. Fall is a great time to quietly dismiss the patients who drain your energy — and if you have a mature practice, your numbers might not even dip. Then make one change at a time. Not everything. One thing.
Give yourself some grace. You've been conditioned since childhood to feel the weight of September. That feeling is normal. Just don't let it make your decisions for you.
For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com
Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0
If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you.
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

An unspoken expectation is a premeditated disappointment.
In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into one of the most quietly destructive forces in dental practice — and in life: uncommunicated expectations. The burned-out light bulb nobody changed. The treatment plan the patient rejected. The procedure that didn't go smoothly. Most of the frustration dentists carry daily traces back to expectations they never said out loud.
Kyle's framework is simple: expectations, communication, and boundaries. Master all three and most of the friction in your practice — with your team, your patients, your family — starts to dissolve. Miss any one of them and you're setting yourself up to be perpetually let down by people who never knew what you needed in the first place.
Martin flips the script on how to handle it when things don't go as planned: come at it with curiosity, not judgment. Not "why is this so hard?" but "what's actually happening here and what can I learn from it?" That single shift — from reaction to inquiry — changes the emotional cost of a hard day in the chair dramatically.
The real takeaway: people don't change until the cost of staying the same is higher than the cost of the conversation. Have the conversation.
For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com
Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0
If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you.
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

DSOs are collapsing. DSOs are taking over. Which is it?
In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson cut through the noise around the DSO landscape and bring some actual data to a conversation that's been running almost entirely on emotion. Yes, some large DSOs are facing real financial pressure. Kyle breaks down why: a decade of overpaying for practices at inflated valuations, cheap debt that isn't cheap anymore, and private equity math that only works until it doesn't.
But the "DSOs are taking over dentistry" panic? The numbers don't support it. According to the ADA Health Policy Institute, 73% of dentists still own their practices. DSOs aren't taking over frequency bias is just making it feel that way.
Then there's the quality of care debate. Kyle and Martin have both worked on the lab side. They've seen substandard work coming out of private practices and DSOs alike. Bad dentistry isn't a DSO problem it's a human problem. The real concern with investor-backed models isn't necessarily the quality of the crown. It's whether the crown needed to be done at all.
The bottom line: make decisions based on data, not headlines. Control your emotions, build your business skills, and become a great leader or hire one.
And if you're ready to do the work in person, join Kyle and Martin at Light Side Live, November 6th and 7th in Phoenix, Arizona.
For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com
Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0
If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you.
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

You've been staring at that project for weeks. You know exactly what needs to be done. You just can't start.
In this episode, Dr. Kyle Stanley and Dr. Martin Mendelson dig into why big projects feel paralyzing and the surprisingly simple fix. Kyle's been slowly dismantling a massive bougainvillea in his backyard, 30 minutes at a time, one trash can per week. Martin organized over 600 recipes into binders by committing to just 10 a night. Neither of them ate the whole frog at once.
The same principle applies directly to one of the most avoided tasks in dental practice management: SOPs. Most dentists know they need them. Almost none of them have a complete set. Martin walks through exactly how to start not by writing all of them, but by listing what's most frustrating right now, building the first one, and using AI to scale the template from there. One move. Then the next.
Kyle makes a sharp observation: dentists are actually excellent at stepwise thinking clinically. They do it in every treatment plan. The problem isn't the skill. It's applying it to the business side of the practice.
The takeaway is simple: make the steps small enough to fit into 20 minutes. Because done in pieces beats never started every time.
For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com
Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0
If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you.
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/

Last week was Martin's 11th sobriety anniversary. This episode is his way of celebrating it.
In this episode, Dr. Martin Mendelson and Dr. Kyle Stanley tackles one of dentistry's most underspoken problems: substance abuse. Between 10 and 19% of dentists and physicians suffer from a substance use disorder. That's not a fringe statistic. That's one in six of your colleagues.
Martin shares his own story how imposter syndrome, social pressure, and the slow creep of one martini becoming three became something he could no longer manage on his own. Kyle comes at it from a different angle: a lifelong non-drinker who has watched alcohol take apart people he loves, including his father-in-law, who stayed sober for 20 years until his dog died and then didn't.
They talk about what actually defines a disorder when drinking stops being a habit and starts getting in the way. They get honest about the culture at dental conventions. And they share what recovery actually looks like: the 90% success rate for inpatient treatment specifically designed for dentists and physicians, the peer support available through state dental associations, and the slow, quiet moment when Martin realized his new life had taken root when alcohol simply stopped occurring to him.
Eleven years is a big deal. So is asking for help.
For more info or to join their live CE course, go to www.wellnessindentistry.com
Join Carabelli Club here and save $600 on your yearly membership: https://hubs.la/Q03QQGmD0
If you'd like to chat with Martin about disability insurance, you can click here to find a time on his calendar. He's a licensed agent and happy to connect with you.
Get Kyle's founder's discount for Pearl AI by scheduling a demo here: https://discover.hellopearl.com/referral/kyle-stanley/