Embracing a New Era
Graduations are celebrated all over the country this time of the year, and we had the opportunity to celebrate too as we honored the achievements of this year's graduating class of the Robert G Gerety Orthodontic Education Program in Tulsa. While we worked hard presenting our two courses, the fifth session of the Comprehensive Ortho course and Kay Gerety's Advanced Orthodontics for Assistants, we made time for some fun as well. On Saturday we had our graduation party to recognize the accomplishments of this year's students, with the highlight of the night presenting the certificates to our course participants. It was just delightful to celebrate with yet another new class of students and to visit with so many of our past students who were attending as Monitors. We have always encouraged our students to return as Monitors; they are a perfect example that graduation is not the end, graduation is just the beginning!
Our goals for session 5 of the doctor's comprehensive ortho course were to do a complete review of the previous sessions and to reinforce the material that the students wanted clarified. Dr Joe Schmidbauer did a thoroughly professional job of covering a broad range of topics and a tremendous amount of material from our first four sessions. During session one our focus was establishing protocol for the initial stages of treatment which covered proper record taking, cephalometric analysis, diagnosis and treatment planning, and the proper placement of brackets and bands. During session two we built on the concepts from session one and introduced Big Bob's archwire sequence, force systems, ligation methods, and the use of the Multi-Distalizing Arch. Session three covered elastic forces, pletcher springs, cuspid retraction, anterior retraction, lip bumpers, Nitanium Palatal Expander, and fixed lower lingual retainer. Session four was devoted to understanding the indications of Early Interceptive Phase I treatment.
On Sunday we had the case review segment of our ortho course which is an invaluable part of our program. The case review offers our students the opportunity to present cases for help with initial diagnosis, or cases that are in treatment, and provides them with the exposure to many different treatment objectives as they observe the many cases presented by their colleagues. Our students have chosen their cases wisely and it has been fun to watch the progress they have made with their patients. We are looking forward to seeing even more progress when we come back from our summer break!
Kay had a very enthusiastic group in her Orthodontic Training for the Advanced Assistant course, and we sincerely appreciate all who attended and hope that they enjoyed the experience as much as we did. Kay led her group through a brief review of the concepts that were established in the Basic Assistant course and then focused on adding the mechanics, archwire sequence, auxiliary forces, adapting and placing the Multi-Distalizing Arch, individual root torque, cuspid and anterior retraction and the fixed lower lingual retainer. This course also featured several hands-on projects to develop and reinforce these new skills and Kay did an incredible job presenting her course!
We are thrilled with the response and feedback that we received on Kay's newly updated and restructured Assistant program. We listened to your requests and introduced a clinical photography module to the Basic program and offered the Ceph Tracing module as its own stand alone course. Thanks to your requests we also repeated the Clinical Photography module as a standalone course during the weekend of the Advanced Assistant course and we had so much fun with a very eager and enthusiastic group. We value your input and will continue our efforts to help you to expand the duties that may be delegated to, and performed by, the assistant.
We are so pleased to have been back in the classroom for our fourth year presenting the Robert G. Gerety Comprehensive Orthodontic Education Program. It was truly a wonderful experience for us to introduce Big Bob's course to another new group of students, and to see our old friends too! Thank you to all who participated in our ortho courses and who helped to make this last year such a success!