Dental Aid Work – Ditching the Rat Race for a Charitable Cause – IC050

Have you ever considered Dental Aid Work? Imagine giving up your morning starbucks and your air conditioned dental surgery to work in a developing country that has just 7 dentists. Fellow Protruserati, Dr James Hunter and his young family will be doing just this - they are preparing for a four-year mission to Liberia, Africa, to dedicate themselves to dental aid work. Follow along as we delve into their story of skill, passion, and humanitarianism. https://youtu.be/lzKVmuuUvBI Watch IC050 on Youtube Need to Read it? Check out the Full Episode Transcript below! Highlights of this Episode:00:00 Introduction2:52 From Theology to Dentistry5:35 Dr. James on Dentistry06:44 The Decision to Move to Liberia for Aid Work09:52 Understanding Liberia's History and Needs15:28 The Future Plans for Dental Aid in Liberia18:37 Motivations Behind the Mission20:04 The Challenge of Committing to Charity Work20:57 Financial Planning, Schooling and Adaptation for Children Abroad26:40 Sharing Experiences and Encouraging Aid Work28:13 Raising Awareness and Support for the Mission32:09 Closing Thoughts and Encouragement Be sure to visit https://www.thehuntersinliberia.co.uk/ for details on supporting charity work in Liberia. Additionally, explore other charity websites in your country for more ways to make a difference locally. This episode is not eligible for CPD/CE points, but never fear, there are hundreds of hours of CPD waiting for you on the Protrusive App! For the full educational experience, our Ultimate Education Plan gives you access to all our courses, webinars, and exclusive monthly content. This includes Vertipreps for Plonkers and clinical videos demonstrating Onlay Preps. If you enjoyed this episode, don't miss out on watching "The International Dental Student – From Ukraine to Egypt to Slovakia – IC047” Click below for full episode transcript: Jaz's Introduction: As dentists, we are in a privileged position. I know it's sometimes hard to fathom that and hard to come to terms with that because of all the doom and gloom that we sometimes like to focus on. Jaz's Introduction:But really, we are in a beautiful profession, and we can actually mold our profession how we want to. Now, there might come a time in your life, if you're that way inclined, to take your career towards dental aid. This could be at the start, the middle, or even towards the end of your career, which is quite popular, to donate yourself, donate your skills to charity. This could be in a refugee camp, this could be in a third world country, to provide a much needed dental service. So on today's episode, I've got Dr. James Hunter, who, with his family, so him, his two kids, his wife, are moving to Liberia, which is a small country in Africa, and he's going to be, hopefully, working there for about four years. That's his provisional plan, along with his family, providing dental aid, which I just think it's so so noble. So, what this episode wants to do is basically let you know about the different aid opportunities out there. And actually, just had this interview with James to find out what are his motivations. How do you get involved with this? But how did you even have that difficult conversation with your spouse, with your children, that you're going to move to this country in Africa and for the next four years of your life you're going to leave the rat race? You see, a lot of us would struggle to say, you know what, I'm going to give up the income, I'm going to give up the house, give up the practice, give up the cars and move to a third world country and work for free and just do a beautiful charitable thing, which is exactly what James and his family are doing. But James and his family are very, very rare individuals. They are gems. They are the gems of this planet. And I want his story to come out and it might inspire you. It might inspire you to maybe take two weeks out of the year to do some dental aid work. It might inspire you to just take the next step and actually start researching about, hmm, at what stage in your career might it be worthwhile and possible for you to give back to the world? Because there's so many countries where we could help. We could actually give some dental aid. We can actually serve through our skills and our knowledge. Hello, Protruserati, I'm Jaz Gulati and I'm the host of Protrusive Dental Podcast. If you're new to the podcast, great to have you here. If you're a returning listener or watcher, thanks so much for coming back again. This is an Interference Cast. This is a non-clinical arm of the podcast. Got loads of other clinical episodes and CPD and this particular episode is not eligible for CPD, but it's got lots of gems in there, but I think this will inspire. I think this is one of those episodes which you take away and you become inspired about such good out there in the world and we start focusing on and how you might be able to also contribute to the world and how our skills can benefit the world. In this instance through a charitable cause. But we are in a privileged profession to be able to help and of course, get people out of pain and cure infections. So let's listen to James now. Why is he and his family moving to Liberia for four years? Leaving the rat race and doing this beautiful, beautiful thing. Let's find out. Main Episode:James Hunter, welcome to Protrusive Dental Podcast, my friend. How are you? [James]Yeah, good. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. [Jaz]I'm very excited to unpack your story. I mean, I have a gazillion questions. You don't even believe that. When I read your proposition, which I'm so excited to tell everyone, I was like, how, like, it's just brilliant. So just tell us about, like, just go back to the beginning. Tell us about you as a human, as a dentist, and what are the different steps that culminated in you doing this soon, this huge aid work abroad? [James]Cool. Yeah. I say, thanks for having me on again. I've been listening to you since my foundation training. So I say, I think, you've probably had a bigger impact on my dental career so far than my degree did. So yeah, it's awesome to be on. So studied dentistry in Cardiff. Graduated reasonably recently. I'm 33 but did it as a mature student. So I graduated in 2019. Prior to that, I actually did a degree in theology. So kind of back at A levels, I was more interested in humanities. So I did Latin maths and ancient history at A level, and then I went to Exeter to do classics. And then I kind of, during the summer, wanted to switch to do half classics, half theology. And then after my first week there, I decided I never wanted to do Latin again. So, did a three-year degree in theology, which I loved and in first year met my wife. So got engaged at the end of second year. And it was at that point where I was like getting ready for our wedding at the end of third year. And I was like, flip, I need to get a job if I'm going to get married after this. And it suddenly like dawned on me Theology, like I really enjoyed studied it, but it's kind of a degree that leads you to apply for kind of grad schemes. And I realized none of those really suited me. I mean. [Jaz]That's a huge transition, isn't it? That's a huge transition going from the humanities and theology to dentistry. So yeah, I mean, tell us more about that. [James]Well, I think I was really not sure about what I wanted to do and felt like I was dawdling. So I kind of got, tried to get as much work experience as I could in different places. I got a work experience place with my old dentist and absolutely loved it. I just thought, how have I not thought of this as a career? So I made a really big change and decided to apply for a dentistry degree. So I had to do it with a prelim year. So it ended up, there was only a few uni's which offered that, but ended up getting into Cardiff. So we got married and moved to Cardiff. I did a year, preliminary year at the beginning. Which I hate to say is, I don't want to say it's a waste of time, but it was probably a bit of a waste of time that first year. Like I remember one of my first assignments was doing a prostho project on nudibranchs, those sea slugs. [Jaz]Oh, wow. [James]So I remember thinking this didn't feel super relevant to dentistry, but so I did that, absolutely loved dentistry at uni. I really kind of feel like, even though it wasn't something that was on my radar, kind of through school. I feel like when I started, I just realized it was a really, really perfect fit for me. [Jaz]Can I just unpack that? Cause we're talking while we're recording, it is in the middle of a stress awareness month. So decisions that we make and where we go into like your perception of what dentistry was. As a mature student, someone who had a few more years under your belt, had been the real world a bit, and then you did some work experience and you thought, okay, this is cool for you. What is it that gripped you about dentistry at that work experience? What are the things that you saw that, okay, this suits you better than the grad scheme? And then also just tell me, when you became a dentist, did the perception meet the reality? [James]So I think the two main things for me were just the variety of patient interaction. I absolutely loved that. I really loved watching that guy for a week and just seeing the variety of patients coming through the doors, interacting with kind of sweet old ladies with their dentures and kids. And that coupled with, I think just a really, really intricate kind of technical aspects of dentistry. I used to love doing kind of airfix models when I was a kid. And so seeing him kind of working through his loops and doing these kind of fine mechanical things, I thought I'm going to love that. And yeah, that's kind of the elements of dentistry I really enjoyed throughout my degree.