Dr. Larry Benz Turned Called to Care Into Training for Hundreds of Dental Clinicians
“It's not the caring that depletes you. It's caring without connection.”
Dr. Larry Benz, author of Called to Care
Dr. Larry Benz is a physical therapist, the founder of Confluent Health, and the CEO of Dental Care Alliance, which runs about 400 dental offices. This year he published the second edition of Called to Care and a new dental edition built from it. He has already turned the books into an online course that trained hundreds of dentists, dental assistants, and dental hygienists.
It started as an annoyance
Clip · Larry Benz on what patients wrote about · 28s
Larry calls himself a left-brain science guy. In 2002, his clinics took part in a large patient loyalty study with open-ended questions, and the answers did not match where the money had gone.
“And one of the things I found was that there wasn't anything a patient ever wrote about technique, about the specific intervention, about equipment, about anything that we had invested a lot of time, effort, and money.”
— Larry Benz
What patients wrote about was how they were made to feel: whether anyone listened, whether they were treated as a whole person, who remembered their daughter’s name. He had seen the same thing as an Army physical therapist and treating patients in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake.
Soft skills are the new hard skills
Clip · Larry Benz on the outcome study · 21s
So he went to the research. Good bedside manner now has names like therapeutic alliance and high-quality connections, and Larry treats each one as a skill that can be trained.
“And we did an incredible third-party outcome study that showed the providers who had gone through that training got better clinical outcomes.”
— Larry Benz
From a book to a course for hundreds of clinicians
Clip · Larry Benz on turning the book into a course · 29s
Called to Care lays out about 15 interventions, from empathy to gratitude to the meaning effect. Larry put them into an online course with cohort discussion, short videos, and reflection.
“Well, it's a timely question because we just trained hundreds of dentists and dental assistants and dental hygienists in these soft skills. So we took Call to Care, and it amounts to about 15 different, call them interventions, or different teaching constructs from high-quality connections to empathy, to placebo, to active-constructive responding, to gratitude, to meaning effect. And we put it in an online course.”
— Larry Benz
He points to business results, too.
“And dental, we know that dentists and dental hygienists that have better soft skills have better treatment case acceptance.”
— Larry Benz
Rebuilding the book for a new profession
The second edition is not a light update. Larry added chapters on burnout, AI, and virtual care, refreshed the research, and grew the book by 25 percent. At the same time, dentists kept telling him Called to Care was their story too. When he stepped in as CEO of Dental Care Alliance, he planned to swap the word provider for dentist. It did not work.
“Your patients seldom talk to you. They talk to the hygienist.”
— Larry Benz
Only about half of the original book carried over. The rest came from walking the clinics as CEO, watching operatories, and asking questions of a profession he found unusually generous with its time.
Language is a dose
Clip · Larry Benz on explanation as a dose · 27s
Larry now calls placebo the meaning effect, and he treats every word a clinician says as part of the treatment.
“And what changed it for me was I stopped treating explanation as a courtesy and started treating it as a dose.”
— Larry Benz
Readers are already putting that idea to work.
“Some of the best messages I've gotten back from the book already is, man, I've already changed my language around this.”
— Larry Benz
Believing is seeing
Clip · Larry Benz on believing is seeing · 14s
One story in the book is about Tommy, a Green Beret rebuilding after a parachute accident. Every test said he was ready. Fifty feet into a march, he sat down and would not move. Nothing physical was wrong. It was fear.
“What worked was we formed a pact. Soldiers understand pacts. We co-created a phrase, believing is seeing.”
— Larry Benz
Tommy borrowed Larry’s confidence until he had his own. A few weeks later, he completed every march he needed to get back to where he wanted to be as a soldier.
Shame, and the hygienist
Clip · Larry Benz on shame in the dental chair · 21s
In dentistry, Larry found something orthopedics never showed him. Nobody is ashamed of a torn rotator cuff. Dental patients often are.
“Fear makes you avoid treatment or things. Shame makes you avoid the one place where your avoidance will be seen.”
— Larry Benz
The fix runs through the hygienist, who spends about 45 minutes of a recall visit with the patient to the dentist’s five. It is the longest chapter in the dental book.
Clip · Larry Benz on the hygienist · 14s
“And for the dentist, I say, get over yourself, sit down, ask the hygienist what he or she saw and learn from them because the reality is they're the secret sauce of your practice. They're not your assistant.”
— Larry Benz
Caring without connection
Clip · Larry Benz on caring without connection · 37s
For Larry, burnout does not come from caring too much. It comes from caring behind a wall.
“So to the burned-out clinician, you don't need less of what you brought here. You need a way to let it land.”
— Larry Benz
He makes no money from either book by design. Every dollar from the medical edition goes to Rising Tide, a foundation that helps underrepresented students get through physical therapy school, and the dental edition supports other foundations. Both books are on Amazon.
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