Has dental productivity been hiding the decline in real demand? Yes, and that crutch is running out. Look at how practices stayed profitable through the early 2000s even as real income and the insurance pool shrank. The counterweight was raw productivity. If you have practiced since 1980 you have lived it. Dentists went from two-handed dentistry to four-handed, then six and even eight, with assistants stacked in a super operatory and high-speed protocols moving cases through fast. A modest operator gained maybe twenty percent. The gunners at the top doubled their output. That speed quietly offset every downward trend for a [...]