Miguel Stanley, Founder and CEO of White Clinic, is the latest guest on “E Se Corre Bem?” (“What If It Goes Well?”), where he defends a more conscious, critical oral medicine that is integrated with systemic health.
Founder and CEO of White Clinic, Miguel Stanley is one of the top 100 dentists in the world and the 39th guest on the ECO podcast “E Se Corre Bem?”. Recognised internationally, with more than 200 lectures given in 54 countries, he is also a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant at Harvard. The dentist begins the conversation with a warning about the biggest barrier that currently exists in healthcare: bringing oral medicine closer to conventional medicine.
An advocate of oral medicine integrated with conventional medicine, he criticises the lack of dialogue between health professionals and gives the example of cases of serious illnesses such as cancer: “The medical teams are completely unaware of the degree of infection these patients have in their mouths. That’s because they don’t have a dentist there. Dentists and doctors don’t talk to each other”. For Miguel Stanley, inflammation in the mouth is not just a local issue: “Inflammation that exists in the mouth spreads throughout the body,” he explains.
“I don’t look to the right, or to the left, or back. I do what I think is right in my heart.” — Miguel Stanley, Founder and CEO of White Clinic
At the White Clinic, he uses cutting-edge technology and focuses on broader diagnostics, measuring vitamin D and inflammatory enzymes in saliva, for example. He created the Slow Dentistry concept, where the priority is to slow down the pace and raise the standard. “We can’t achieve excellence at speed.”
According to the dentist, a quality dentist needs three fundamental ingredients: “Having the time to do things well, having the education to know the difference between one thing and another, having the technology and the team to calmly carry out what needs to be done and done well. These three things are rarely found in the same room. It’s a luxury,” he says.
Miguel Stanley also shares his passion for continuous training and gives an example of the importance of constantly keeping up to date: “I think in the same way that a sushi chef sharpens his knife between cuts. It doesn’t just happen at the end of the day”.
Despite the global scale of his clinic, he admits that he still has to deal with the limitations of the system: “Imagine a person comes in who has a lot of problems with their mouth, but they don’t have any money. How do we deal with that? By refusing to treat the patient. We are private doctors, we pay taxes, this is a problem of the state”.
With a career that began in the Algarve and has reached the world’s top universities, Miguel Stanley continues to argue that the future of dentistry lies in slowing down, listening and diagnosing better. On how he deals with competition, he says: ” I don’t look to the right, or to the left, or back. I do what I think is right in my heart. “
This podcast is available on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. An ECO initiative, in which Diogo Agostinho, ECO’s COO, aims to bring stories that inspire people to take risks, to have the courage to make decisions and to believe in their abilities. With the support of Doctor Finance and Nissan.
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*Originally published in ECO.
