Dentistry Career Paper

The career chosen is Dentistry. The student hopes to become a renowned oral surgeon and have a prestigious practice that is well known for its results of having healthy and satisfied patients. In order to better expand on what a dentist goes through, this essay will analyze and synthesize four psychological concepts that were learned in the textbook Psychology and how the concepts relate to some aspects of a dentist’s career or life. This essay will also briefly discuss why someone may want to become a dentist. Some reasons a student would want to pursue dentistry is to be able to use their creative side of their personality and be able to shape people’s lives and boost peoples self-esteem by helping someone get one step closer to loving

“Stress is a response to a perceived threat or challenge resulting from stimuli or events that cause strain”. (Licht, Hull, & Ballantyne,2014 p.506) Dentistry is a lot more stressful then one might think. Dentistry is a profession that is linked to severe stress, burnout, depression, substance abuse, and is a potential cause of someone committing suicide. Stressors, such as prolonged mental and physical effort, before surgery can induce an increasing of these stress biomarkers, with consequences on health.( Marrelli, Gentile, Palmieri, Paduano, & Tatullo,2014) Being aware of these things gives novice dentist a head start to finds ways to prevent such things occurring. In recent studies there is progress to find useful guideline to monitor the stress levels of oral and maxillofacial surgeons in order to improve their quality of life. The importance of the study is to want involve Government, National and International Agencies’ attention, in order to reduce life-threatening risks, to which these health professionals are daily exposed. (Marrelli,Gentile,Palmieri,Padunando,&Tatullo,2014) Due to the fact that being a dentist is a high risk job, certain precautions need to be put into place to prevent consequential events from occurring. The aforementioned article gives an example of how stress can affect a procedure and compromise patient safety. After performing an experiment on surgeons who performed three different surgical procedures with ranging levels of experience, it was observed that more experienced surgeons showed higher stress management ability compared to those with less experience who are generally younger and are more exposed to the risks of developing secondary hypertension. ( Marrelli, M., Gentile, S., Palmieri, F., Paduano, F., & Tatullo, M ,2014) This finding sheds light on why younger