2018 Holiday Letter

December 30, 2018

Dear Patients, Family, and Friends,

I am very grateful for your continuing support in the past many years.

I sincerely appreciate your patience, time, trust, and understanding in me. Your confidence in us makes us work harder to be better and competent to fulfill your trust. Thank you.

It has been a challenging year for me.

We had losses of loved ones from some of our patients. Even though I don’t know how you feel and how much pain and suffering you went through, I sincerely hope I could do something to ease this feeling.

I have worked six days a week for most of this year with new and extended hours. Our Los Altos office has been opened since March 21, 2018. I have been working extremely hard to complete the work loads at both places.

Throughout 2018, I had studied 56 hours of continuing education hours at different conferences and meetings in different cities of the US.

Watching and listening to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous speech, “We shall overcome,” I have been living up to this encouraging statement.

Each of our patients is an inspiring story for me. We all have to work very hard to support our own individual or our family and to keep our life busy and interesting.

This year, I had the most frightening experience of public speaking when I presented a 15 minute presentation about Aesthetic Anterior Composite-A Simple Technique in New Orleans on June 7th, 2018 to about 100 dentists at the AGD Annual Meeting. Besides the lack of internet connection for the teaching video, I was so nervous that I was shaking and forgot everything that I had practiced 20 times before the presentation. Oh Dear, I didn’t know how scary it would be to look at so many eyes looking up to me. I admire those who can speak so well in front of so many eyes and so many people.

To conquer my fear of public speaking, I will volunteer to be a course master for the continuing courses at the next AGD Annual Meeting in Uncasville, Connecticut, in July 2019.

I would also like to let you know that in my continuing commitment to excellence in dentistry and your care, I have successfully taken the steps necessary for certification by the Academy of General Dentistry. This year 2018, I received the Lifelong Learning and Service Recognition award on June 9, 2018 in New Orleans. Since its inception in 2005, only 336 of the AGD’s 40,000-plus members have received the prestigious Lifelong Learning and Service Recognition Award.

You can also be so proud of me as your dentist that I was in the 2% of all these dentists who received the Mastership award in 2010.

In April and October of each year, I join the California Dental Association Foundation which organized CDA Cares event to provide Free Dental Care such as cleaning, fillings, extraction, root canal therapy, dentures to the poor and homeless in selected cities of Northern and Southern California. It has always been fun and rewarding for me to give healthy and beautiful smiles to at least ten people who are also very happy at every CDA Cares event that I have attended since 2011. We always need general volunteers to help set up and take down and do many other things to make this event possible. Many dental students and dental assistants learn a great deal by helping us. If you know anyone who likes to volunteer, this is the best opportunity for students to learn if dentistry or dental profession is for them.

We are preparing for a busy 2019 as well. Besides volunteering, we will take continuing education classes at the International Bone Symposium in Implant Dentistry and at the UOP Alumni Annual Meeting in San Francisco, in March, and UCLA School of Dentistry Hawaii Dental Symposium in the Big Island, AGD Annual Meeting in Uncasville, Connecticut, in July, and CDA convention in San Francisco in September 2019. I am also a member of the Board of Directors or Member-at-Large for the CDA Mid Peninsula Dental Society so I will be meeting with my colleagues throughout the year to help identify difficulties and issues dentists are facing and promote excellent practices in dentistry to improve the oral health of the people in our local communities.

This is my story of this and next year for now.