Top 5 Topics:

- 2 Years Of High Unmatched 6-Year OMFS Program Numbers, & the Future of Oral Surgery Training

- Periodontists vs Oral Surgeons: The Silent Battle for Implants, Sedation & Dental School Influence

- Is Office Anesthesia in Danger? The Fight to Save OMFS Sedation from CRNAs, Hospital Politics, And Misleading Data

- The Economics of Becoming an Oral Surgeon: $750,000 Debt, Low Reimbursement & the New Reality

- How Oral Surgery Can Survive: Marketing, Value, Full-Arch Implants, and Reclaiming the Specialty In The Dental School

Quotes & Wisdom:

04:07 – “Oral surgery is the great bridge between dentistry and medicine.”

05:37 –06:56 – “You have to know when to step back… I think 25 years is a good run. I’ll always be motivated to teach and motivated to share knowledge. That’s been my passion from the beginning.”

09:49 –10:31 – “Along the way I grabbed my MBA as well… taking night school for three years every Monday night for four hours… Now, having the MBA has allowed me to kind of see the errors that I made early on in my own practice.”

14:55 –15:26 – “Our students are the consumer of the programs… If you look at the dynamics and the history of the specialty and what the specialty wanted to do 30 years ago, it may not be what the product of the specialty wants to do now.”

18:56 –19:44 – “You have to market. You’ve got to market to the consumer what the value is. And if that perceived value makes sense to the person, then you’ve got a win-win.”

29:21 –30:40 – “You think back to your own personal experience with the specialty… There is that one experience that really hits you in the heart, and you hold onto that experience and that’s why you chose this field… You have to derive the value of the specialty for you, and it’s going to be different for every individual.”

38:17 –39:06 – “I love this specialty. You want it to flourish. I want it to be there many years beyond my own existence, and that we’re at the cutting edge… We want to expand without losing anything.”

55:14 –55:41 – “I think the data is going to be our defense… How many fewer patients would actually receive care if they didn’t have access to our ability to give them anesthesia in dentistry? How can you argue with numbers?”

Questions:

05:23 - “Why this step back? To private practice at this point and step away from the director role?”

13:23 – “Don’t think all those years and rotations are necessary—how many rectal exams do you really need to do as an oral surgery resident, you know what I mean?”

17:38 - “I get this question all the time: why the 6-year versus the 4-year OMS program? What did the 6-year track benefit for you, and what do you recommend for others to pursue with the MD?”

21:11 – “If periodontists are filling the gap at the dental schools—doing implants, sedations, managing complications—what does that mean for oral surgery’s foothold and for who gets called when something goes wrong?”

32:32 – “If we don’t make full-arch ‘all-on-X’ a real requirement in OMFS training, is one of the other professions going to step in and own that space instead of us?”

41:13 – “What drove you, during residency at Case Western, to go into the cosmetics direction? Did any other people from your program graduate and take that same path?”

43:59 – “Do you have any residents rotate through your practice right now, or is it very separate from the residency?”

Now available on:

- Dr. Gallagher’s Podcast & YouTube Channel

- Dose of Dental Podcast #197

- 11.2025