Dentists routinely focus on improving patients’ smile, making it brighter and maybe a little better.
Dr. Harvey Passes, DDS, doctor of dental surgery, goes a step further. He often gets patients smiling while in the office.
A dentist focusing on general dentistry and reconstructive dentistry, he, along with specialists at his 15-person office practice, Dentistry with a Difference, repeatedly wins Best Of awards for general, cosmetic dentistry and Invisalign treatment.
“We do all of the basic things, implants, fillings. We have a periodontist, do sleep studies for sleep apnea and we have hygienists taking care of prevention and cleanings,” he said. “We run the gamut here. We do our own surgery.”
What makes the practice so special that it stands out beyond a laundry list of services, awards (plaques and trophies), technical ability, and technique?
“What people want is listening, caring and explaining. That puts us into a different category,” he said. “We’re not just interested in getting you in. It’s a different attitude completely.”
Dr. Passes (whose practice just received their first Chat GPT referral) focuses on skill, but also listening, caring and explaining.
A founding member of the Academy of Laser Dentistry and its third president, he helped develop a dental laser, focusing on both expertise and patient experience.
Once offered a singing contract at Columbia Records, he chose to attend the New York University College of Dentistry instead, externing at 15 dental offices during his time in dental school. He did two hospital residencies, in general practice and general anesthesia, and developed the Dental Anxiety Control Center.
Dr. Passes helped create advanced dental techniques, lecturing around the world and writing textbooks while also teaching and training other dentists.
He also, however, uses his talents and entertaining skills to provide an unusual “patient calming supportive experience,” finding music can be, if not the best medicine, calming, comforting, and even entertaining.
Dr. Passes said when patients are in the chair, and he would put on music and sing, they would tell him it makes them feel calm.
Sometimes dubbed the “singing dentist,” he today doesn’t only rely on products to calm, but creates a welcoming, warm and even entertaining environment with music from Sinatra to the Beatles and beyond.
He says over the years he also learned “what it takes to create the perfect dental team” and “create the best possible patient dental experience.”
“It’s not an easy practice to get a job in,” he said. “You have to have skills and be a person interested in your own growth and development.”
He calls this holistic dentistry about the problem and the patient. “If somebody comes in, I take time to talk to them, listen to them, address their concerns,” he said. “If I do all of that, the results are fantastic.”
Dr. Passes, who in 1997 began a string of more than 1,000 half-hour television shows on Cablevision, communicates about dentistry to the public as well as to his patients.
“When patients come here and they feel trust and comfortable and comforted by the team and by me, the individual doesn’t have their muscles all tightened up,” he said. “That affects things in a positive way. It makes the treatment go better, and post-operative discomforts are minimal.”
Follow-up is also important, showing that care, particularly after surgery, doesn’t end when patients leave the office.
“If I’m doing surgery, we always call our patients at night, not the staff, not the team. The doctor who did the work calls the patient and says, ‘I want to know how you’re feeling. I want you to know we’re there for you,” he said. “They say, ‘That’s so nice. No doctor ever called me at night to see how I’m doing.’”
They use every technique and tool possible to make a trip to the dentist not something to be avoided.
“We do everything possible to make the experience so wonderful that the patient says, ‘I had a good time here,’” he said. “At times, I’m irreverent to make them laugh. They have the time of their lives. You can’t beat that.”
They do pediatric dentistry, and while fun chairs and frocks can help, Dr. Passes said a touch of Donald Duck also comes in handy.
“Talk like Donald Duck and use Donald Duck language. When I speak like that, the kids become so totally distracted that they forget what’s going on,” he said. “I can give them an injection. They don’t even know they got an injection because they’re focusing on Donald Duck.”
