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NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES There is an old adage that states, “Never meet your heroes.” This statement assumes that our heroes will not live up to the character we have created for them in our imaginations. Therefore, leaving us disappointed with reality. I imagine most of us have had the opportunity in our lives to meet a hero or two, and hopefully, it went better than it did for the person who coined the phrase. It’s easy to have heroes in this, the information age, the instant gratification age, the influencer age. We live in a time where young and old can make a living just for being cool on the internet. Young children and teenagers undoubtedly each have their YouTube heroes that they love. The ladies follow their blogs and Instagram gurus, whether it be for style, parenting, fitness & nutrition, homemaking, etc. The fellas will do the same with perhaps some professional athletes thrown in the mix. We
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by Dr. John F. Miller DDS - SMILE MONTANA consume carefully curated snapshots that are being presented to us as “reality.”
full reality and still be in love. As I still am with Montana, even more so today.
A hero does not necessarily have to be an individual. A big hero of mine throughout my early life into adulthood was Northwest Montana, and I consumed it much like we do today, in small idyllic doses. In other words, I spent a couple of weeks here every summer for 20 years in a row without fail. Do any of you see the problem there, leaving Arizona only in the summer to come to Northwest Montana? I didn’t stand a chance; I was under the spell.
Where am I going with this? This is supposed to be about dentistry after all. Hopefully, it’s like a Bob Ross painting and will work out beautifully in the end, happy trees and all.
What happened after the 20 years? Well, I made Northwest Montana my permanent residence. Like it or not, I was going to meet my hero. I was going to be introduced to the months of November & April (thank goodness for Big Mountain), the calendar equivalent of seeing Montana in the morning without her makeup on and then meeting her crazy family. But every relationship is like that right, you have to see the
Some years back in this same magazine I said that there “is nothing better than the real thing.” This still holds true still and will for years to come. And while I practice “Dentistry” another big word that is used to describe my profession is “Prosthodontics.” This is the combination of the words prosthetic and odontic. A prosthetic is something artificial that replaces something real or natural, and odontic simply means “related to the teeth.” With that in mind, there are very few procedures I do that couldn’t be classified as a prosthodontic procedure. Fillings, Crowns/Bridges, and Implants are what we call a fixed prosthodontic,