Do Prosthodontists Always Have One Of The Best Paid Jobs?
Prosthodontics is not your "average" dental field and a lot of people wonder why the median salaries for specialized medical fields are so high.
If you've read over some of the job descriptions on Medicaljobs.org you will have noticed that we spent a great deal of time emphasizing the need for Doctors to hire a staff if they have their own practice and the need for Doctors to stay away from highly "saturated" areas. What do I mean by saturated? Well...
If you are...say...a Prosthodontist, and there are 4 other Prosthodontists in your small town you probably don't have the best odds of building a large client base.
So, as your field gets more specialized you will tend to want to find an "exclusive" market where you are "The Prosthodontist" or "The Ob/GYN", etc. Although it would nice to find an "exclusive market" you can certainly do well with someone up the street doing your same work. Let's see. Prosthodontists produce dental implants like crowns, dentures and implants and that can be a pretty limited market for someone who only does Prosthodontics. If you're in the specialty of making these sorts of dental products you CERTAINLY cannot work up the street from another person who does the exact same thing if you aren't willing to "branch out".
Many times a Prosthodontist can work as a General Dentist or Oral Surgeon AS WELL AS work in Prosthodontics. This is the easiest route to padding your income, but you CAN make a very nice income just working in Prosthodontics...
If you are producing and installing implants, crowns, and dentures then you would have to diversify your client base by not simply moving to a small town where you are "The Prosthodontist". You can keep individual clients whom you see regularly to install and/or check the progress or condition of an existing implant or crown, but you could also work with Hospitals or other medical facilities to produce crowns, implants or dentures for a general base of patients. You could also work "in tandem" with a Dentist or Oral Surgeon to keep a steady flow of clients from that one Dentist or Surgeon. Life becomes much easier when you have a steady flow of clients coming from one colleague.
Working in tandem is a great way to do things, but remember that you could easily being doing all of that dental work yourself and keeping all the patients "in house" too. If you wanted to branch out and do some work for a dental equipment sales house where you could model certain products for them or do some sales in your office you could easily pad your income by doing some work on the side AND working in your office.
Keeping your work to yourself and trying to hold onto a client base is the way to go if you want to make sure your income stays pretty high, but you can work with colleagues in your area (to your advantage) if you want to make sure your income is pretty close to the median salary for this profession of $169,810. Prosthodontics is not a "lawnchair job" where you sit back and the checks roll in. You'll have to do some legwork to get your income where you want it, but if you do you can surely prosper.
