Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to New Dentists on the Block, a podcast featuring new dentists sharing their experiences in the world of dentistry. Successes, challenges, and life in between. Navigating dentistry together, one experience at a time. This week we have Sam Asana, a general dentist who practices as an associate in the Southwest Houston area.
Speaker: He has a focus as a practitioner on digital dentistry and clear aligners. Sam is a big believer in collaboration between dentists and keeping the lines of communication open between colleagues, through direct friendships and through organized dentistry. Before dentistry, Sam's background was in classical music, which he studied in undergrad, and he tries to let a wide range of interests and hobbies help inform him on what kind of dentist and person he is.
Speaker: Sam was recently inducted as president -elect for the Houston AGD board and has been involved with NASA, the North American Sexophone Alliance. A huge shout out to Between Two Teeth for sponsoring today's episode. Let's get to it.
Speaker: So Sam, one of the things that has always interested me about your path and your history is that you studied music in the past. And then you ended up in dentistry. How did that work? Did you always know you were going to be a dentist? And what was that path for you? That is a good question. I definitely did not always know I was going to be a dentist. That probably was a little bit late to the game of as far as something that I decided I wanted to do. So the whole path of
Speaker: studying music and then coming to dental school. It was very much not like a predetermined, pre -decided path. It was just sort of one thing leading to the next. I knew that I wanted to study music in my undergrad and I did. I went to Baylor University and I got a degree in a bachelor's in music in at Baylor. They call it applied music and other schools, they would call that music performance. And I'm really glad that I did.
Speaker: and I really enjoyed every bit of it. In the kind of early parts of my degree, I started to realize that the things I like to do most with my degree were the less practical parts of the degree. So like I play saxophone and I have a degree in classical saxophone performance. And the music that I love to play is
Speaker: kind of out there strange music that is maybe not the most marketable. And so as I started looking at like a profession as a saxophonist, I realized that if I wanted to sort of be serious, I may have to sort of move into different directions of what I would like to do. And it was maybe not as appealing to me specifically. My saxophone professor, his name's Mike Jacobson. Dr. Jacobson was the first one who was like, hey,
Speaker: You don't you can do other things after you get this degree. You don't have to just follow checklists. And so he suggested I just look into law school and medical school and just check it out and see what I was interested in. So I was a premed student for a little while and didn't really connect with very much. I don't have any dentists in the family or anything like that. But I I knew the dentist that I had gone to as a high schooler.
Speaker: was the same dentist that the rest of my family saw and my parents had gotten to know her as a friend a little bit. They were like, Oh, you should just ask her what dentistry is like. Okay, why not? And went and shouted her for a day and really was like, Okay, this could be something this could be something appealing to me because
Speaker: quite a people person and she was talking to people all day. She was sort of... Absolutely. Yeah. She was moving. You know how like when you have those good days where you find your flow, you're just kind of moving from one place to the next the whole time. Oh yeah. Yeah. So she was kind of in her flow state and her name is Isabel Bahedi. She's a fantastic dentist. She's practicing here in Houston as well in Sugarland.
Speaker: I was like, okay, this could have some appeal to me. So I shouted a few different dentists, learned a little bit more about it, met some other pre -dental students at my university. Many of them had family who were in dentistry and had some more experiences to share. There was a pre -dental organization at Baylor that I became a part of and started to like really realize that this could be a good path forward. And, you know, have not looked back since and have not had
Speaker: anything, but I've not had a single regret about the path that we followed here. So that's where we're at so far. That's great. With that background, now being a dentistry, how have you found that music and dentistry kind of mesh and collide for you? Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker: They definitely don't mesh as directly as one might think because I'm not like playing saxophone in the dental office, right? That was the running joke when I was a dental student. I used to make like a lot with my patients or they would make with me where we talk about our background. You know, as a dental student, you talk to your patients so much, right? Because you spend so much time together. Yeah. So it would always be like, you can play some music for me to put me to sleep and anesthetize me. And my reply would always be it's better to do that than to prep a crown for you to entertain you.
Speaker: So, um, so I, of course I'm not playing music in the office, but there, I think there are a lot of ways in that, like that specific kind of education helped me because it's like, it's like a different kind of education that, that you get when you're studying music, because it is almost more similar to the way you study in dental school in that it's not. It's not only an academic degree. It's also like a vocational degree, right? Like you're.
Speaker: you're learning a physical skill while you're in school. So there were lots of those little things that I think I was taught that helped me all day, every day. One that I didn't realize was going to be so relevant in dentistry is just like to practice the skill of performing because I think the truth is every dentist is a performer every day. Like we always
Speaker: Not to say people aren't genuine with their patients, but I think any dentist would agree. You always come in and put on the face a little bit. It's a customer service job. It's a people facing job. The good song and dance. Exactly. You do a little bit of a different voice when you're at work. My wife always tells me when I come home from work, my laugh is like my dentist laughed for half an hour before he goes back to my normal laugh, which I didn't even know that's the thing that I do. I love it. I'm sure there's such a thing as a podcast voice too.
Speaker: Oh, for sure. But yeah, you're always performing and that is something that like takes some practice to get comfortable with, right? Like how to like turn that on and how to like fine tune that craft and knowing that like when you're performing, it's not about what you're saying, it's about what the other person is hearing, right? So you have to think not just about what your
Speaker: what you're doing, you have to think about how it's being received and being filtered through the perspectives and the opinions and the biases of the people listening to you, be that your patients, be that the other people you work with in the office, be that your patient's parent or spouse or cousin who comes along with them and wants to get involved. All those people have their own filters of perception and to perform appropriately, you have to communicate through those. So I think that was a big thing that was taught
Speaker: in music school is that it's not about what you're playing. It's about how you're playing it in the way that the people in the audience are hearing it. And you have to keep both in mind. So that was one.
Speaker: I really love that comparison that you're making. I feel that I don't have as much of a music background as you do, but you're trying to convey emotion to the audience through what you're playing. As Dennis, I don't think we're really trying to convey emotion, but we're trying to really stress to them the importance of taking care of themselves, taking care of their dentition. I really like those parallels that you just put forward.
Speaker: Yeah, and sometimes we have to talk about emotional things, right? I mean, losing teeth is emotional. Making a big expense can be emotional sometimes too. Like any amount of money can be emotional to talk about. And I sometimes forget that, and then I have to remember and say, oh, this is something where I have to communicate through the emotions that this person is going through, even though for me, I've just done this four other times today, you know? So I think that is a big thing that I would imagine most dentists would
Speaker: kind of feel that, oh yeah, we are performers a little bit. So that's something that I really think my undergrad education for. I would say another thing is by the time I arrived to dental school, I had no ego left. You know what I mean? Like the ego had been beat out of me, not even with cruelty, just a lot of being a music student and a musician too, like after school is like,
Speaker: you're trying to get better at a skill and that level of self analysis and self criticism and then going to other people and saying, is this good enough? And hearing the answer of like, it's better. You're never going to be good enough. You're always supposed to be better than you were before. Um, you get that ego death a little bit and anybody who's gone through dental school would probably agree. You have to get a little bit of that in school too. Right. Um, I've like never reached a point.
Speaker: Yeah, go ahead. I feel you probably were really prepared when it came to getting feedback back. That's tough. I think that even now, getting feedback and hearing where you can improve, it's important to take it as criticism that you can build upon, but it can be hard. That is your artwork. Those are your hand skills, and sometimes that feedback can be a little bit difficult to digest.
Speaker: I would say in dental school was a lot harder, especially for me. I have come to really appreciate it now and value it and learn to build from it. But it's hard. That's your creation that you're putting forward. So I can only imagine that there was some difficulty there as an undergraduate student learning, especially at a young age, learning how to kind of receive that and build from that feedback. Yeah, I'm sure you see it on the other end, being involved with the school in the way that you are now, right?
Speaker: Yes, I try to be kind, but it is important to kind of lay the truth down in an appropriate fashion because that's the only way that any student will really learn. Yeah, it's like I think everybody has to reach a point. And I almost feel that it's harder now in practice because when you're in school, you know it, you know, you have people whose job it is to tell you, am I good or am I not good, right?
Speaker: in practice, it's like so self guided that you like you have to I personally have to tamp the ego back down and be like, no, I'm here to learn and I'm here to grow to like separate your sense of like, am I a good person? From like, did I do a perfect job today? And like to reach that point, it's like, I should accept that there's always something I can do better. And it doesn't mean I'm a bad human being, you know? And like, right, once you kind of reach that point, then
Speaker: self -improving and criticizing your own work and getting other people to criticize it doesn't make you feel so bad anymore because it's just part of the process, right?
Speaker: I didn't think we were going to go down this direction, but the amount of perfectionism that Dennis tried to strive for and how much that really hurts us on a daily basis, I think that is something that is really, really key that we really need to kind of be aware of in the profession.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I think that many of us are type A personalities. We want everything to be right. And we know that if something is wrong or off, even a millimeter in our minds can often be very catastrophic. Yeah. Oh, definitely. I completely agree. And I think, you know, what you were asking about earlier, I think some of that, I would feel the same things when I was in my like performance degree and learning about performing is.
Speaker: knowing that, let me think this sentence through, the whole concept of like, perfect is a destination that you never got to, excellent is an action that you're always trying to do, right? So if you're trying to get to perfect, you will always be disappointed, but if you're just trying to be excellent, that's like a mindset and a process. And I saw something recently, and I think it was regarding like musicians that they were saying, the better you get at your instrument,
Speaker: the harder you are on yourself because your goalposts and standards move higher and higher up. So the more you get into something, the more you, you know, to see how imperfect you really are. And so it can be harder and harder. Um, talking about a class two composite, right? Like the more you learn about it, the more you're like, I'm terrible. Can I even do a feeling? It's not even, it's not that it's that the better you try to get, the more you realize all the things you want to be better at. But the truth is if you're, if you're just seeking to improve constantly,
Speaker: you will always be heading in that direction. And it is definitely the same with playing an instrument and performing little things of like, you know, I used to talk to people when you're like 15 years old and you're playing an instrument, you can quickly reach a point where you're like, you know what, I'm really good at this. Like, I'm so good at this when you're 15.
Speaker: At 15, you're good at everything. Exactly. The world is your oyster. I'm terrible. I can't do anything right. I can't even play a single note. That's really not the truth at all. It's just you're learning more and you're getting better.
Speaker: You always know the right things to say and the right way to phrase things. I think that if listeners really want some astute insight on life, I think that having a conversation with you is the way to go. Well, thank you. It's because I talk to myself endlessly. From our conversations. It's because I sit in the car. I could be a little left alone for more than five minutes without starting to talk to myself. I'm in the star of my own Jimmy Fallon talk show alone in my car.
Speaker: I know that you are an associate, but as a musician, what music do you play for your patients? That is a great question. Well, the first boring part of that answer is I usually will let my assistants pick the music that we're listening to because I have learned that the happier my assistants are during the work day, the happier I am also during my work day. So that's the boring part answer to that question. That's a good Dennis right there.
Speaker: Out of the few things I've learned in my first few years of working, that is definitely what I've learned. If my assistants are happy, I will also be happy. When I do pick my own music, it's a great question because sometimes I want to listen to very upbeat or very intense music that is not a good fit for the middle office. I like to listen to a little bit of everything.
Speaker: in every genre of music, there's something really cool out there. But I do have like a lot of time, I've worked in two dental offices since I have been out of dental school in both places. As people who work there have realized that I have a background in classical music, they've been like, oh, can you play some classical music? We're in dental office, like, we can do classical music in a dental office. And that's always when it's like, ha ha, you fall into my trap, you know? I have
Speaker: I have a playlist that I have been curating on Spotify for many years, which is like my classical music that is exciting and may challenge people's ideas of what classical music is playlist. And so I will hit people with that sometimes where they're like, yeah, I want something really soothing and relaxing and quiet. And it is really quite the opposite of that. So it's this playlist filled of like
Speaker: classical music that sounds like video game music or classical music that is like super upbeat and bombastic or like written by non -European composers and like a different sound than people expect and that's how I seek to trap people and then spring my my musical preferences on them. So yeah this we've got a playlist with some like John Cage piano music
Speaker: We've got a playlist with some Argentinian tango music, which could be broadly considered classical music or like Brazilian music. We got a playlist with some like lesser known pieces by French composers that I think sounds like the Legend of Zelda. So we got we got a bunch of stuff on there, but that's on my me days. You know, that's on the days when.
Speaker: my dental assistants were like, Doug, I want to hear what you want to listen to today, which I usually get one or two of those a month. So yeah. Love it. Tell me a little bit about your involvement with NASA. And I'd love if you could share what NASA is. How are you involved, if in any way, and how you balance your work in the profession with some of your passions, including music? Yeah, for sure. NASA is a phenomenal group. First of all,
Speaker: I must give a disclaimer that though I live in Houston, it's not the space NASA. And that's been a conversation I've had with people since I was like 17 years old and first went to a saxophone Alliance conference where I was like, I'm going to NASA. They're like, you're going where? NASA, it's the North American Saxophone Alliance. It's a phenomenal group. It's a organization of saxophonists of all genres in the United States and Canada and Mexico and parts of the Caribbean and Central America.
Speaker: a large United States presence, but not exclusively. And they're a great group. It's a group of performers. It's a group of teachers, educators, composers, students, academics, and researchers. And they have conferences the way that our dental organizations have conferences, the way that we just had the ADA conference last, like in October.
Speaker: So they'll put on their biennial NASA conference around the country. They've got regions that are broken up where they'll do regional conferences every other year. So I've been a NASA member since I was a high school student. And as I entered dentistry, I thought it was a very surprising pathway that I could stay involved with a lot of my friends and icons and role models in the saxophone world through this organization.
Speaker: And I would actually say NASA was like my first intro to being part of like a professional organization, the way that like now I find a lot of like gratification out of being involved with groups like the Academy of General Dentistry or the ADA and other organizations like that. NASA was like my gateway, you know? So I'm still a member. They also like have like a periodical that they put out annually. I'm not much of an academic at all, like a researcher at all, just like I get my,
Speaker: my general dentistry and my Jada's in the mail and I flip through them and I'm like, oh yes, very good. Yes. And then I put them in my stack. But I do try to attend our NASA conferences and have given some presentations at some of them over like TMJ Health for musicians and like just general like orofacial anatomy for musicians and trying to be useful in the ways that I can. But it's just like what we were saying at the top of the episode, right? When you were like reading my
Speaker: little bio to me is that it's important to have avenues to just like talk with people who do what you do and share ideas with them and learn from them and just also vent sometimes, get things off your chest, get inspired. I think that's not exclusive to dentistry, that's in anything. You just need community to talk about the thing that you do that isn't just on the internet, you know?
Speaker: Venting is one of my favorite hobbies. And I would say that I get to do a lot of it with friends that I make from across the nation and organized dentistry helps with that as well too. But I'm sure that within those conversations that you have opportunities to share, you know, how you can improve your lifestyle, your practice, both in and out of dentistry. And I'm assuming in music as well too, you all have similar conversations. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: And these days, I'm just happy to be involved with all these. I mean, there are amazing professional musicians out there doing really cool stuff. And one thing that I didn't realize is a lot of them have lots of questions about dentistry. So it's nice to be able to represent, you know.
Speaker: I bet they do. And I saw that you did a little workshop or presentation to a music group. I think with regard to, was it an anatomy and how it comes to play with musicians? Yeah, there's a lot of musicians, especially when musicians can accrue like a lot of like muscle and joint tension. And it's something that is
Speaker: It's like a very hot topic amongst musicians right now is like performers health, just like in dentistry for, I, for the last few decades, I guess, ergonomics for providers has been for like practitioners. It's been a big deal talking about like our own health and our bodies, very similar conversations that musicians have been having recently. And so a lot of them have, have a lot of thoughts and ideas about like why they get muscle pain and joint pain. And I think that.
Speaker: it can just be beneficial sometimes to get the, the biologic and like, dental perspective on how everything actually works physiologically. So then they know how they can accommodate for it in their routines, and then they're playing and how they can know when they're overloading their joint musculature. So that was always something that was very interesting to me when I was like a music student, especially when I first realized, Oh, I think I want to go into this dentistry thing. So enjoyed talking to like some
Speaker: some young musicians about that. And I don't know that I am the furthest thing from an expert on that. I just know what a general dentist would know, you know, but I'm just sharing a little bit of information that we all have. It's things that I think amongst us as dentists, we just think like, oh yeah, everybody knows this, but you know, we are taught things that are meaningful to like specific pockets of people. So it's nice to be able to share that with them.
Speaker: That's great that you have that set of tools that you can share with the community that you feel passionate about. And you're completely right. You know, ergonomic self -health is very, very important. Mental wellbeing as well too is something that has been in our conversations as of late, which is great that we're even speaking about that because I feel for many years it was not spoken about openly. What advice that you have received ever? The best advice that I've received ever.
Speaker: You said best, right? Not worst. You can throw in the worst if you'd like us to. We'll keep it positive. I'll go with the best. The best advice I've ever received, do you mean in regards to dentistry or just in general? How about we do both? How about you give us a dental best advice and a life best advice?
Speaker: I think the best advice I've received might it might be the same for both. OK, let's start with like a dental focus one. It's the same piece of advice in different ways that I've gotten from multiple people. I had a professor in dental school once who he used to say he had really high standards. He was always the one who would grade us the hardest. But he also would tell us, like, don't forget that they're just teeth.
Speaker: And, uh, I think about that sometimes cause it's like what we were talking about earlier about like the ego of it all and wanting to be excellent, wanting to be so good. You can really beat yourself up over stuff. And I think that's not always a bad thing cause it's important for Dennis and you know, for anyone really, but specifically Dennis, it's important to have really high standards, right? We're working in somebody's body. Um, but just that little moment of like, don't forget to not take yourself too seriously.
Speaker: Don't forget that we're not doing open heart surgery. And if something is not perfect, you need to fix it and figure it out. But you don't have to go home and cry for three hours after work every day. It will be OK. And I remember in my undergrad, there was a professor who taught some special interest courses to just all kinds of pre -health students, pre -medical, pre -dental, pre -nursing.
Speaker: And she gave a very similar piece of advice where she said, she's an MD. And she said, if your goal as a physician is to save lives, you're going to, in the long run, you're going to lose every time because every one of your patients will die. If your goal is to cure disease,
Speaker: you're probably going to be very disappointed too. Cause most of the diseases that you do, you're not going to actually ultimately cure in general, you know, something's going to happen. Um, she said, if your goal is just to make people feel better and to try to make them better than they were before they came in to see you, then you're probably going to be happy with what you do. And so I think those two pieces of advice together, um, helped me to be able to enjoy what I do and get better at it without also, um,
Speaker: falling too far in the burnout direction, or just absorbing all the stresses of what we do too much, because I want to be really good, and I want to make steps in the direction to be really good. At the same time, I can sort of let it go and decompress when I get home from work. Ultimately, they're just teeth. We did the best we could do for what we're doing today, and we're going to try and do it a little bit better tomorrow. So I think that is probably the best professional advice I've ever gotten.
Speaker: That is really, really good advice. I would say that stuff goes wrong in dental school at the end of the world.
Speaker: Oh, it's so bad. Yeah, so bad. But now as a practicing dentist, I feel like we should all strive to be the best that we possibly can be. But remember that at the end of the day, they are just teeth. And we need to give ourselves a little bit of grace to fail sometimes and to improve from that failure. I think that the best way to improve is to fail a few times, learn from those mistakes, get that feedback and that criticism and go from there.
Speaker: Yeah. And, you know, like we were saying earlier, not every failure is a true failure. Sometimes it's just, you know, so much that you can see all the things you wish had gone better. Doesn't mean that, you know, that anything catastrophic really happened. It's just you're, we're trying to get better. And along the same lines, I think a general piece of life advice that I've gotten that is really good is that if you ever meet anybody who says they know everything,
Speaker: And there's nowhere better for them to go than it's time for that person to retire and just switch over to relaxing and having hobbies. But the truth is we should probably all forever have like a next step we want to go to. Otherwise, what's the point?
Speaker: We should all always be students of our craft. When dentistry gets boring or you learn it all, that may be time to go on to the next thing. I agree. Yeah. How about you? What would be like, I don't know about best because I bet you have to, for every episode you're getting lots of best advice or giving, but like just a good piece of advice to give to me. What do you think that would be?
Speaker: That's a good one, was not prepared for that one. I would say, you know, surround yourself by others who make you be the best version of you. So I try my best to find like -minded and not like -minded people who I can surround myself with and kind of become the sum of all of them.
Speaker: I think that it's great to learn from people's backgrounds and experiences and grow as a person from there. And so I try and surround myself mostly by others who are passionate about the profession and want to see the profession grow and want to do well for the community that they serve. And I feel that I learn a whole lot from being around them. So I would say that I was instilled that advice, you know, make sure that your group of people
Speaker: that you hang out with are great ones. In Spanish, there's a saying that says, tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are. And I think that that is very, very telling and very, very true. So I would say that if I could instill a piece of advice or a good piece of advice that I've received, that's what it would be. Yeah. Surround yourself with the people that you want to be like. That is great advice.
Speaker: Sam, if you had to give one piece of advice, speaking of advice, to a new dentist or a dental student, what would that be? Oh, I think it would be have a hobby. Definitely. Have something that you care about that's not teeth. I think that's really important. Have something you care about that's not teeth and it's not money or practice building. Those are really important things to care about.
Speaker: But have something else, you know, whether it's music or cooking or a sport or gardening or you just you have to have other things for your brain to do. Otherwise, you'll start to, you know, whistle like a pressure cooker. Oh, yeah. So I didn't even have to think about that. That's great. Yeah, that's my definite go to for advice for that.
Speaker: It's good to leave the office and leave everything there sometimes. And Sam always knowing the right things to say, I really appreciate you taking time to speak with me today. And hopefully others who are listening found some pearls in what you had to say. And if they'd like to connect with you, would you say that Instagram is the best way to do so? Instagram is great. I'm Sam underscore Astana on Instagram. I have a little website. It's AstanaDDS .com. That's a great place too. Thank you for letting me come and practice my podcast voice.
Speaker: It's wonderful. And you are welcome back anytime. Thanks for tuning into this episode. If you'd like to connect with Sam, you can find him on Instagram, Sam underscore a son. If you'd like to connect with new Dennis on the block, you can also find us on Instagram at new Dennis on the block and connect with me at TS my SS dot DDS. Thank you again to between two teeth for sponsoring this episode and we'll see you next week.
