How To Become A Dentist

Hi. I'm Brian Halvorsen, and I'm a dentist. I've been in the practice for over 35 years and I have written a book about my principles on holistic dentistry.

The book is called Great Teeth for Life. In this video, I will discuss how to become a dentist. To become a dentist, you need to actually think about what you want to do at school, because dentistry requires having a background education in the sciences, such as biology, zoology, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

Now, most dental schools throughout the world require quite high levels of grades to actually enter school, so you really do have to work hard and be top of your tree to actually be considered to be allowed to be into a dental school. So you've now managed to successfully get into dental school. It's normally a minimum of five years, and you learn everything from medicine, pathology of the whole body, and obviously as time progresses, you spend more time actually doing dentistry.

When you qualify, sometimes you can actually either stay on at university, and follow a career in, not so much the academic, but in the hospital life, or you can leave for general practice. And sometimes there are courses where you can actually spend time working with a dentist to show how practice works. Now, this doesn't end at this point, because you can take further specializations, because these days dentistry is very much more of a specialized nature.

I would regard myself as a general practitioner, but if I were to take extra courses I could, say for example, become an orthodontist so I could practice tooth straightening. There's a specialist in periodontics which specializes in gum disease, there's an endodontist that specializes in doing root fillings in teeth, or oral surgery. So there's a huge variety of various degrees and courses you can follow to become specialized in this particular profession.

I hope this gives you a few hints of how to become a dentist, and also where the career can actually be furthered. .