Dr. Craig Rathjen

I got into dentistry because my next door neighbor as I was growing up was an orthodontist and one of my folks best friends was our family dentist and he would take me down to different dental things down at the University of Iowa and I just kind of grew my interest. You know, I just like helping people and I want people to be happy because I want to be happy and people when they have pain or don’t feel good about themselves aren’t happy and they aren’t happy on a different level. So if I’m able to coax them through some of that, it’s very rewarding.

I went back to school about 12 years after I graduated from dental school to the Center for Advanced Dental Study that is down in the Tampa St. Pete area and the people putting that on were are in fact still are considered some of the paragons of dentistry. They figured a lot of stuff out that we all rely on and that change in education and thought process that you get after learning things that you always wanted to know the answer to but you didn’t know and you couldn’t find anyone who’d give it to you and here you are getting those answers. That changed my life because it changed the way that I practice and about 40 percent of what I do in my practice I can directly relate to that continuing education.

That was a multi-year program. It was well worth the best thing I ever did and I we figured out while I was down there only about two percent of dentists ever go through a program like that and that’s really sad because it changes your whole life and what it does is it positions you to do a better job to do better dentistry. The things you produce whether it be a filling or a crown or something like that are going to be better and our stuff is better.

It does fit better. We’re known in our area for having stuff that fits as well as really you can do it with present technology so yeah we try very very hard to everything consistently good if we can. We’re human so once in a while that doesn’t happen but the majority of time it does.