Changing Lives Through Oral Health Care

You may have noticed that 3M ESPE launched an inspirational campaign this summer that just wrapped up at the end of September. It was called, “Make a difference. Change a life.”

We know dentists use Filtek™ Restoratives to change lives every day, but we wanted to hear from our loyal customers, the personal stories of how they were using Filtek to enhance their patients’ lives for the better. What we heard was unbelievable.

What’s Your Story?

“Not long ago, one of my long-standing friends lost his job. He had always been self-conscience about his smile, but had never done anything about it because he made his kids’ teeth a priority. But now that he was looking for a new job, and after several months without success, I offered to help him with his smile…”

And so begins a great story from Dr. John Weston about the power of dentistry. We’re all involved in a very exciting industry/profession that can really make a difference in people’s lives. Do you have a story to share?

Stat: 21% of survey respondents said that reading a blog helped them decide on a product/service. Source: Jupiter Research, October 2008

An Easier Way to Find Product Evaluations

Have you ever cleaned out a closet or filing cabinet and come across a huge stack of old magazines? There was a time when many dentists kept their back issues of The Journal of the American Dental Association and other periodicals, as this was the easiest way to reference them without a trip to the library. Many people did the same with mainstream publications like Consumer Reports.

While it can be briefly entertaining to stumble across an old stack of magazines—for the vintage ads if nothing else—thankfully today most of the product rankings and studies we need can be accessed online.

What are your go-to online sources if you want to look up product information? Do you do a deep dive for studies on PubMed, or do you prefer a faster distillation from a source like REALITY? (If you are a REALITY member, you may be interested in seeing the recent 4.5 star rating of our Filtek™ Supreme Ultra Universal Restorative.)

I’d be interested in knowing how frequently you use resources like this to find product evaluations. It’s certainly easier than keeping all those print issues in a box.

Not-so-accidental inventions

There are a lot of legends floating around 3M about our inventions and how they came to be. Some of the best of these stories are about “accidental inventions,” like Scotchgard, which was discovered by a chemist working on a new material for jet fuel lines. An assistant in the lab spilled a bottle of latex material on her shoe, and the chemist noticed that the substance stuck to the white shoe and resisted soiling.

If 3M were not such a diverse company, however, this discovery might have gone nowhere—as it didn’t have much to do with jet fuel lines. What’s helpful about our size is that it allows us to take innovations from one division and apply them in many others. For example, the same technology used in the Pentamix™ Automatic Mixing Units in your office is also applied to automotive repair with the 3M™ Dynamic Mixing System. And the nanotechnology that is the backbone for our Filtek™ Supreme Ultra Universal Restorative is also helping to create the next generation of fishing rods.

So while some of our legends are about accidents, many more are about collaboration between divisions, and finding new applications for existing technologies. By working this way, we can make one invention into many.