‘Social media is quite good in informing patients but can be quite dangerous because we’re doing clinical work’

FE It was generally positive, it was obviously interrupted by COVID-19, which was a bit frustrating. I liked the practical element of working with your hands. That’s something specific to the profession, even in the early stages being a doctor, you only really get your hands-on surgical experience when you graduate. The social life was also great, I was quite involved with different societies; it wasn’t just seeing dentists day in day out, which was a good decision.

FE Yes, I started that project during COVID-19 because I was bored. Essentially, the way that came about was through sheer need. I’m quite fortunate; I went to a grammar school. I was in Stratford, so I also saw the other side of students who went to state school and were disadvantaged because they didn’t have the right accent, or extracurriculars and were biased against. That’s basically what FarisDent became: an opportunity to help students from all backgrounds get into medicine and dentistry.

FE So, I started Auralyse in my final year – it was a very busy year – three months before finals, with my co-founder Angelina who’s a software engineer. Then we raised money for that around December 2023. We raised about £125k from an accelerator in America called Techstars which was in Atlanta. And now we’re building it, we’re a fully-fledged company, I do it alongside dentistry. It helps medical, dental and jobseeker applicants get into their dream career. Essentially, it’s interview prep helped by AI. That’s the one-liner, and that’s how it happened.

FE Again, it’s all about problem-solving again. For a good tutor you’re probably charging £40-50 an hour, we provide our service for an entire month, with unlimited questions for £20. It’s a no-brainer. These are careers, people don’t realise, that are the next 40-50 years of your life – looking at teeth. Some people get put off when they don’t get in the first time, it’s not because they’re stupid, or they’re not confident, they’ve just not done the correct preparation. It’s about getting rid of these barriers.

FE I do mostly restorative work, that might be the best way to describe it, with a heavy focus on cosmetics. The reason why I picked restorative is when you’re in the dental space you meet a lot of clinicians, a lot of mentors who have done what you did before you. A lot of them said, look, start with your restorative, make sure your restorative work is perfect, and then build on that with everything else. 99% of the work you’re going to do is going to be fillings. Someone comes in, you remove the caries, etch, prime, bond and put a composite in. You might as well be perfect at that.

FE Definitely, social media is a massive factor. Patients come in with examples of work, wanting you to recreate other dentists’ work. You know, when you buy a car, or an iPhone 16, you look up reviews. It’s the same thing with patients, especially when they’re spending so much money, they want to know you know what you’re doing. It’s important to have those open discussions with patients but also validate concerns.

FE Just one word: TikTok. It’s a difficult app to deal with. I always tell patients that dentistry is never black-and-white, there is never any one solution: dentistry is grey. Everything I am going to do is going to fail. When you disarm a patient at the start, they start to understand. You as a dentist have to explain to them and try to understand them, they might be saying this not because they misread something, it might be because their friend had a root canal and they’re trying to do everything to avoid it. You don’t know the cause.

So, in all honesty, social media is quite good in informing patients but can be quite dangerous because we’re doing clinical work. It can be quite pretty, but I can’t do composite bonding on a patient that has a crossbite, or their teeth overlap, or they have no space, or all their teeth have been destroyed from tooth wear. You have to have those conversations, and it can be difficult.

FE I think it’s less on the aspect of social media and AI, and more advertising standards. In terms of AI it can help by screening for abnormal claims, exaggeration, hyperbole that you will see on social media. A quick one, someone says the ‘best’ veneer – how do you define that? Or in the aesthetics world, you can’t say Botox; you have to say anti-wrinkle treatment. These are parallel industries, we just need to see it more in dentistry, that this is regulated.

FE It’s not a case of dentists doing anything wrong, but something that is particularly challenging is that there’s a big shift in the mentality of dentists that are graduating now compared to dentists that were graduating in the past. If I see a patient with an MOD amalgam, I will tell them I would rather replace that with a composite or an onlay, while another dentist might not. I’ll tell them, look, there is no decay here, but the biggest thing is prevention, and different dentists have different mentalities on that. This is one of the things that can confuse patients a lot.

You have to learn how to treat a patient as a human that has their own expenses, their own income, that has Christmas coming up, so they don’t want to do that big filling. And that’s something you have to learn on the go as you leave university.

A big one that is always going to be a challenge is money. Money is a big issue for a lot of patients. Most patients would benefit from minor orthodontics, how many people are Class I perfect? But am I going to tell every patient that comes through the door, let’s do Invisalign now? Technically, yes, but not if they don’t want it, or they have gum disease. You have to learn how to treat a patient as a human that has their own expenses, their own income, that has Christmas coming up, so they don’t want to do that big filling. And that’s something you have to learn on the go as you leave university.

SAC That’s actually really interesting. I had never thought of that, neither of us, ever since it’s been busy on clinics we’re doing a bit of everything – some periodontal work, some prosthodontics. In reality, it’s not going to be like that.

FE I think this concept of getting more experience is such a dangerous term, you’re never going get enough experience – you have to actually do the thing. A lot of people say practice makes perfect; that’s rubbish: I could practice something incorrectly for 1000 hours; it’s perfect practice makes perfect.

In short, the plan is work at these practices, scale up, do my next set of training probably in oral surgery or implants. From then I’m looking at practice ownership in the next 3-5 years – that’s my short-term 5-year plan.

SAC Thank you very much Faris for sharing your expertise and giving your time to us!

AK We really appreciate it!