Dr. Donnell Hanson joins The Cone of Shame Podcast to share her passion for helping veterinarians overcome their fear of dentistry through her unique training center, The Four Legged Tooth Fairy. In this episode, Dr. Hanson and Dr. Andy Roark explore why dentistry can be such a source of stress for veterinarians, the most common roadblocks that hold doctors back, and how a hands-on, supportive approach can transform anxiety into confidence. They discuss the role of mentorship, repetition, and small group learning in making dentistry feel more like “arts and crafts” than a high-stakes procedure. Whether you’re a seasoned vet looking to refine your skills or someone who dreads dental cases, this episode offers insights into the power of training, mindset, and learning in a judgment-free environment. Tune in for a refreshing take on veterinary education and personal growth!
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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Donnell Hansen, a Minnesota native, and a small group of friends joined together to form the Moxie Center (which was the first hospital to be now known as BluePearl) in Minnesota’s twin cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. Although her daily life is spent in specialty care, in 2011, her and her husband, also a veterinarian, opened Rice Creek Animal Hospital which provides a little balance and perspective about life in family practice. In 2019, Donnell developed Four Legged Tooth Fairy, an interactive small group conference center for the veterinary community to enhance their patient health, practice health, and mental health through veterinary dentistry. Dr. Hansen’s special interest in maxillofacial surgery, however the truth is, she loves the whole darn gig… especially when she gets to share the fun of veterinary dentistry with others!
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome, everybody, to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a little different episode for you today. I’m talking to my good friend veterinary dentist, Dr. Donelle Hanson, and I’m talking to her about a passion project she has called the Four Legged Tooth Fairy.
Now, this is something that I just wanted to talk to her about. She has this really interesting business where a couple of times a year, she opens up a training center that she started and she hosts veterinarians to work with them for three days on dental skills and it’s usually people who are terrified of dentistry. They’ve had– maybe they’ve had a bad experience.
We talked about that in the episode or they have just never felt confident or they really like it and they want to go to the next level and they’re doing training They all come together and she works with them all as a group with another dentist and in three days they, they go after it and they tackle those things.
And it’s just the way she describes it is really just amazing and I love her approach and how she focuses on meeting the people’s needs who come there. And so I wanted to do an episode. It’s not about dentistry. I don’t talk to her about how to actually do dentistry. I wanted to talk to her about the experience of training veterinarians to do dentistry.
Seems to me like a lot of people are terrified. How do you work with somebody who’s terrified and get them to not be terrified in three days? How does that happen? What are the patterns that she sees? When people come in and they want to get better? What are the biggest weaknesses in their game so to speak?
And we break down all that stuff. I talked to her sort of about lessons learned and she’s been doing this for years and years. And yeah, I just she’s such a wealth of knowledge. I’m just interested in what her perspective is as a teacher? Who educates veterinarians who are sometimes late into their careers. Where brought out vet students who are just used to learning. So anyway, this is a really neat conversation about something in vet medicine.
That’s not clinical practice It’s around the education of veterinarians. So I hope you guys will enjoy it. This is something I just geek out about this stuff. I said it’s a little off the path from usual clinical practice I hope you enjoy this episode. I really enjoyed making it. Let’s get into it.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast. Dr. Donnell Hanson. How are you?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: I’m well, sir. How are you?
Dr. Andy Roark: I’m great. Thank you for, thanks for coming back on. For those who don’t know you, you are a boarded veterinary dentist. You have been on the podcast many times. I love talking to you about teeth. You are also the founder of the Four Legged Tooth Fairy and the last time that we talked, you were getting ready to have a group of veterinarians. Is it all veterinarians, or is it veterinarians and technicians?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Right now we mostly do veterinarians. We used to do both, but COVID ate the technician track, and I just haven’t gotten my poop in a group to get a technician track back. So I have to, in my spare time, figure that out.
Dr. Andy Roark: In the spare time to figure that out, yeah, okay. Why don’t we just start off, why don’t you give me a high level of what is Four Legged Tooth Fairy, and what do you do? How do you bring this to life?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Yeah. It really just is a CE center for folks to come and reconnect with their comfort and their confidence in dentistry. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I take that back. I do know why. Dentistry inspires a ton of stress in family practitioners. An exorbitant amount of stress compared to what you guys actually do on a day to day.
But dentistry inspires this fear. And it’s carpentry, so it’s fun. You don’t need to have stress. And that’s our goal.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay, so this is what I wanted to talk to you about because the last time we were together you talked about it. You said the same thing is the goal is comfort. The goal is confidence and I thought that was really fascinating because usually when I talk to people and they run a CE Center they say we want to bring about mastery of these skills. Or we want people to really be able to do X Y Z and that’s not what you’ve ever said to me. You’ve always said We want people to be comfortable and confident.
And I go, that’s just the fact that you lead with that. And that’s how to consistently communicate it. I think that’s fascinating. I think that you were right. When you say this about dentistry and stress, I have this weird muscle memory of my shoulders being up around my ears as I do dentistry.
You know what I mean? I’ve got, I’ve got the and I have to catch myself and then breathe and then put my shoulders back down. And it’s, they do, they just creep up. And I don’t, if you asked me, you said, Andy, are you stressed? I would look out from you between my shoulders.
I would look out and say, no, fine. But my head would be squished down. I think there’s two different things. I think that there’s this stress that you’re talking about that I have totally thought and then there’s fear of dentistry, which I’ve not had but I see a lot in colleagues and so to me i’ve always thought that the stress is something around I think that there’s a mechanical aspect of it, right?
Like I am here and I am, I don’t want to push too hard because I don’t want to break a tooth but I have to continue to apply pressure. And so there’s this just that I generate with my wrist, but then it goes up my arm and into my shoulder and then my shoulder goes up to my ears. And then I’m just, by the end of the session, my whole back is sore from doing dentistry.
So I think there’s that stress component there. And then there’s just a general fear. Let me say to you, okay. I see myself in your comments of someone who’s I feel this level of stress. To me, I’m always like, no, it’s just how I’m sitting or it’s my stool or things like that, but that’s probably not really true.
When you start to work with people who have self-selected to come to Four Legged Tooth Fairy, and so these are people who want to work on this and get better, how do you start to approach this level of stress? What do you think is important to people who go, yeah, it just stresses me out?
How, what do you think is required to start to help them build to a place where they’re more relaxed and they feel like you do where they’re like, this is carpentry. It’s fine. What are the– how do I start to go in that direction?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Really, what is stress? It usually is accompanied by a lack of knowledge or a lack of comfort or a lack of muscle memory familiarity, right? And also comes from other people judging you and saying you’re doing it wrong or you didn’t do this right or not supporting what you are
doing. We just try to meet everybody whenever we spend time with folks as we just try to meet everybody where they are. And some folks come here in their new grads and they’ve never extracted a tooth before, and that’s not about the center, but when people are doing dentistry, they might be freshly new and some have been doing it for a very long time.
But I learned on a coke can and my first extractions were with the pliers.
And so I got not the pliers that you have in your surgical pack, ones we drove, physically we drove to our local fleet farm and bought pliers and that’s how we pulled out teeth. So the whole gamut’s out there of what people know.
Dr. Andy Roark: You pull the actual teeth or like what is the coke? You said you learned in a coke can? What is that? What is that?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: So if you take a scaler and you use a can of coke, you can take the paint off the coke can. That’s how you, we learn to scale teeth.
Dr. Andy Roark: Okay. That’s I knew new and then when you were like pliers I was like, we’re just hitting you can get all this at Home Depot like the coke can and
Dr. Donnell Hansen: and dremel tools and giggly wire, and those are things that we all learned about, when we first, those in our generation, that’s how we learned. Now, of course, I was fortunate to go to a place that had a dentist and became a mentor and I adore him and learn so much, but my first experience in dentistry was truly pliers and what’s that called?
I don’t know. I’m the daughter of a hardware guy.
Dr. Andy Roark: The dentist what don’t–
Dr. Donnell Hansen: And I can’t think of a screwdriver.
Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, screwdriver. Okay. I thought you were asking about dental appliances. I was like, don’t ask me.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Putting the right tools in the right spaces and the right information in your hands to just try to help guide you.
Dr. Andy Roark: Do you think that a lot of people are held back in this move towards being less stressed and more comfortable by caseload? Do you think that there’s a lot of people who don’t get to do the level of dentistry that they would need in order to be comfortable?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Either you’re asked to do seven dental procedures in a day or 14, right? Or you’re the new grad they’re like, we’ll give you one a month and I’ll understand. I know why from a business standpoint, I understand all of that, but it’s really hard to learn like your muscle memory and confidence and see that thing over and over again to really thrive.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, one a month is, it’s funny when you say that, I go, yeah, I’ve heard that, but that is, that’s absolutely brutal for learning, it’s all of the stress at a frequency that you never get better, so you just continually, once a month you get reminded how stressful this is, like that’s what it feels like.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: feels And yes, you never get the chance to have success because it’s oh, I just have been sitting here in my adrenaline for three hours, not in comfort.
Dr. Andy Roark: Do you get, do you ever get doctors that come to your sort of CE experiences who are flat out afraid of dentistry?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Oh, yeah, it’s expensive to come to any CE right? And ours is not, it’s not disincluded, not the right word, but you get what I’m trying to say.
And so when they click that button for the cost of our center or cost of any CE they’re either doing it out of, oh my gosh, I’m scared to death, so I gotta go do this, I’ll make myself do it, put my big girl pants on or my big boy on, as you’ve said. Or sometimes their practice is sending them because there might be some level room for improvement there that they said, okay, you’re going to the center.
Some folks, it’s part of their contracts, they just, what they do, they come join us. And then some folks are like, hey, I’m doing good. I think I’m doing good. I want to go ninja level. I really want that
Dr. Andy Roark: I wanna be next level. Yes.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: They’re all in the same group. And we just, it’s fun because they learn from each other and we guide them together.
And that’s any CE you’re going to go to. That’s not about our center. That’s any dentistry CE you’re going to go to. That’s the hope and intent.
Dr. Andy Roark: When you think about doctors that are really uncomfortable with dentistry, do you see a pattern there? Are there certain experiences they had or certain beliefs that they hold that you see again and again that seemed to really hold people back?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Yeah. PTSD.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
This bad thing happened and I don’t want to go through it. Is it often that of people, they had a bad experience and it really turned them off?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Yeah. And, for some reason, the ones in dentistry really sink in. Root tips and mandibular canals, noses,
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s the crack, like I hear it in my sleep, there’s a certain crunch or crack and you just, you feel it through your body and like you just never, you never forget it when you’re like, oh no.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: And I think we’re expected to know this stuff, but really most of us nearly all of us, even now, despite a lot of my friends who are in academics and teaching scenarios, many of us never got enough. The amount of training we get versus what we’re expected to do is discrepant.
We got to meet that space, people feel like, Oh, I’ve done this before.
Dr. Andy Roark: What’s the key to breakthroughs? So like you have people and they come and they, they’ve got PTSD or whatever. Do you see people in this for the limited amount of time with you, when you’re with them? Do you, have you, I’m sure you’ve seen people who have really just felt like they’ve come in sweaty, palmed and they have left with this idea.
I can’t wait to do more of this. What flips that switch?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: I’m going to be corny when I say this, but obviously practice. But someone believes in you. There’s never been someone who’s left here that we thought, that’s not going to go well. We just sit, it’s like small batch learning, like small group learning. So we can see where you are? And help you with this thing. Because it truly is just arts and crafts.
I love that you keep saying that such a, it’s such a friendly, low stress thing. It’s no, we’re just, it’s just doing arts and crafts.
One of our attendees, she and I, we always have dentists say this a lot. I’m sure you’ve heard us say this. It’s not just a dental. We get annoyed by this notion of just a dental.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: You might be 17 years old with a heart murmur and liver stuff, but it’s just a dental. It bothers us because that’s not a real word, right?
And so we’re always harping. It’s not just a dental. It’s dental care, oral surgery, all the things that go along with it. But in the end, it really is just a tooth. And I can win over a tooth. I even say to them, I had a veterinarian text me yesterday. He’s what do you guys do when you’re so frustrated?
And I, I threaten it. I’m getting you, little sucker. I’m gonna win. I’m gonna win this. You just have to be patient. Okay. it’s just a tooth. It’s not a spleen. That’s scary. Taking out spleens. That’s scary. This is just a tooth.
Dr. Andy Roark: How long have you been running these sessions?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: The center opened in 2019, but part of back in the day of doing a residency back in 2008 companies would have us out to hospitals to help them learn. Like the reps that you have, they put in so much energy and effort into supporting the veterinary community. They would have us out to their hospitals to help them learn. So we’ve been teaching for a long time.
Dr. Andy Roark: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started? So just as far as you see, I worked with a lot of people on these skills. What did you not know or what did you not realize at the beginning that you now know?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: This is more than dentistry. This is a life lesson.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, I mean I could be I’m just curious what you’ve picked up.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: A little bit of vulnerability that I don’t have to be perfect. Same thing here with extractions, with care. You don’t have to be perfect.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Perfect is the enemy of good. We can do good and it’s important.
Dr. Andy Roark: That means a lot. I love that. All right, cool. Donnell, where can people learn more about Four Legged Tooth Fairy if they’re like, I think I’d like to try that?
Dr. Donnell Hansen: Just check it out on the website, fourleggedtoothfairy. com. We’re around.
Dr. Andy Roark: I’ll link it up in this show notes. Donnell, thanks for being here. Thanks for talking with me. Guys, thanks for tuning in and listening, everybody.
And that’s what I got guys. Thanks for checking it out. Thanks to Dr. Donnell Henson for being here. Check out her training center, the Four Legged Tooth Fairy. I’ll put links in the show notes. Gang, it’s really it’s always interesting to get off and explore other things. I love the idea that veterinary medicine is a house with a million rooms and I think Donnell starting up a training center and running these programs is a perfect example of things that none of us ever thought we could do as doctors, but somebody’s out there doing it.
And so anyway, I hope you found this as inspiring as I did. Take care, everybody. I’ll talk to you later.
