Week in Review: SalaryScan results | Pediatric legal case | Biden nutrition plan

Dear DrBicuspid Member,

Curious how your salary stacks up against other DrBicuspid.com readers? Now you can find out. Our top story of the week covered the results of our first SalaryScan survey that compared dentist salaries by age, specialty, practice type, and more. Check it out to see how your salary, debt, and benefits compare to those of your peers.

If the results of the SalaryScan survey make you want to invest in your employees and practice, our columnists this week can help you. Ali Oromchian, JD, from HR for Health, wrote about three ways to invest in employees to keep them happy and engaged, and Rob Medina shared three ideas for marketing your dental practice that can generate big returns.

Dental file in boy's lung

Legal expert Dr. Marc Leffler is back with another of his popular legal cases. This time, Leffler and the MedPro Group tell the cautionary tale of Dr. H, a pediatric dentist who performed endodontic treatment on a 13-year-old boy without a dental dam. During the procedure, the boy became agitated, and the dentist dropped her file. It ended up in the boy's lung.

The case is a good reminder that dental fear and anxiety can directly impact behavior during dental treatment, especially for pediatric patients. If you want to brush up on calming behavioral management techniques for children, a new review analyzed a wide variety of strategies to see which ones were the most effective.

Oral health orgs support $8B nutrition plan

Last but not least, the Biden administration unveiled an $8 billion plan this week to reduce diet-related disease in the U.S., and multiple dental organizations stepped up to pledge support for bolstering nutrition education.

The organizations have made some big promises, including committing to nutrition education as a foundational competency, ensuring that 5% of board certification exam questions include nutrition-related topics, and ensuring that training programs have at least one educator with formal training in nutrition science.