Inspiring the next generation

From Volume 17, Issue 4, October 2024 | Page 137

Authors

PJ Sandler

Consultant Orthodontist, Chesterfield Royal Hospital, Calow, Chesterfield, S44 5BL, UK

Articles by PJ Sandler

Article

Alison and I will be in Florence this week at the Italian Orthodontic Conference, as we have been invited to speak on the ‘Girl power’ section of the conference. We are giving a twoheader, basically a retrospective of our careers, hoping that by speaking to a young Italian audience we can inspire them on many counts to hopefully enrich many aspects of their orthodontic careers.

To derive maximum understanding of, and satisfaction from, their clinical careers, we will try to persuade them to take photos of every patient, every visit. We will detail the ‘Damascene conversion’ that we experienced, on the very first UK straight wire course run by Bennett and McLaughlin in 1987, when for the first time in our careers, we saw high-quality, visit-by-visit photographs, from start to finish. The shrouds truly fell away, and from that moment on, orthodontics was no longer a mystery!

We will extoll the virtues of orthodontic research and encourage them to get involved at some level, ideally as part of multi-centre randomzed controlled trials, an experience offered to us, and many of our friends, through the vision and the persistence of Kevin O’Brien. It resulted in the 23 co-authors getting five major publications in the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, and even sharing a research prize awarded by the Americans for our work. Research in one form or another has occupied most of the past 30-plus years and turns out to be an extraordinarily rewarding part of our careers.

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