WHAT DO WE OWN?
What do we own?
It’s a simple question, but it quickly gets complicated.
If you own a piece of land and a heavy rain washes the topsoil downstream, can you go and retrieve it? Legally, that soil was yours. But practically, ownership didn’t protect it, and it won’t bring it back. You can own the deed to the land and still lose what makes it valuable.
We own our dental practices — or at least the banks that finance them let us think so. We own our equipment, our lease agreements, our accounts receivable. These feel solid and concrete, like things we can point to and say, this is mine. But what about the things that actually make our practices work? What about the trust a patient extends to us the first time they sit in our chair? What about the assumption — before we’ve said a word — that we are competent, ethical and worth listening to?
We didn’t earn all of that from scratch. Some of it was handed to us.
The respect that patients bring into our offices was built over generations — by the dentists who fought to establish licensure standards, who created dental schools, who lobbied for water fluoridation when it was politically unpopular, who worked to make oral health part of the broader conversation about systemic health. The professional reputation we enjoy today was gifted to us, collectively and quietly, by people whose names most of us will never know.
Do we own that reputation? We have influence over it. Our individual behavior shapes it at the margins. We can tarnish it. But we didn’t build the foundation, and we can’t maintain it alone.
So here is the question worth chewing on: if we benefit from something we didn’t entirely earn, what do we owe in return?
Part of the answer, I think, is about paying forward. Somewhere right now, a student is sitting in a first-year dental school lecture, trying to imagine the kind of dentist she’ll become. A new graduate is signing the lease on their first practice, nervous and hopeful in equal measure. They are about to receive the same quiet gift we did — a professional reputation they had no hand in building, extended to them in advance by people they’ve never met. What we do today, individually and collectively, determines the condition of that gift when it reaches them. We are the giants on whose shoulders they stand, or we are the gap. The dentists who came before us chose whether their work would matter to us. We don’t get to choose whether ours matters to the past. But we do get to choose whether we show up and make a difference for the future.
John F. Kennedy gave several memorable speeches during his presidency, but his inaugural address remains one of the most remarkable. As the youngest person elected to the presidency, he understood he was representing a generational shift — and he wanted his first words as president to mark what that moment demanded. The central theme of his address was civic responsibility. Its most famous line has outlasted the Cold War context that produced it.
“Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
I’ve been thinking about that line a lot lately, specifically in the context of a conversation I keep hearing — in hallways, at study clubs, in online comment forums — about organized dentistry.
The argument goes something like this: Before I pay dues, show me the return on my investment. What does membership actually do for me?
It’s a fair question on its face. We are business owners. We think in terms of margins and overhead and cost-benefit analysis. That mindset serves us well in a lot of areas.
But applied to professional association membership, it starts from the wrong place.
It assumes that the value of belonging to organized dentistry is primarily personal — a list of discounts, CE credits, maybe some legal resources and insurance you hope you never need. And if that’s all it was, the skeptics would have a point. You can probably find most of those benefits somewhere else, cheaper.
What that framing misses is everything that isn’t transactional.
The ODA and ADA fight on your behalf with the OSDB, CDC, FDA, state legislators, and federal regulators. They monitor scope-of-practice proposals that, if passed unchallenged, would reshape the profession your children and grandchildren might enter. They fund research, establish clinical guidelines, and defend the evidentiary standards that give our recommendations credibility. They work, continuously and mostly invisibly, to protect the professional standing that allows a patient to walk into your office already trusting you.
You benefit from that work whether you belong or not. Sadly, the rain doesn’t check your membership card before it falls and washes away the dirt.
But here is what changes when you don’t participate: the resources available to do that work get smaller. The collective voice gets quieter. The foundation — the one you’re standing on, the one that was built for you — starts to erode, slowly and without drama, the way topsoil moves downstream.
Ownership, it turns out, isn’t just about what you hold title to. It’s about what you’re willing to take responsibility for. And responsibility isn’t something handed to you — it’s something you accept. Quietly, without fanfare, often without immediate reward.
We did not build this profession alone. We will not sustain it alone either.
So perhaps President Kennedy’s question is worth adapting for our purposes:
Ask not what dentistry can do for you. Ask what you can do for dentistry!
The dues are almost beside the point. What we’re really deciding, each of us, is whether we own our place in this profession — or whether we’re just renting it.
Dr. Messina may be reached at docmessina87@gmail.com.
