Welcome to The South Carolina
Dental Equipment Advisor

As the Benco Equipment Specialist for South Carolina, I am providing this website to help customer's in their decision to purchase dental equipment, transition dental practices and to research pricing and promotions in one convenient location.  I hope you find it useful and feel free to contact myself or any of our other friendly Benco representatives if we can be of further assistance.

The idea behind this design is the unfriendly equipment when we enter the dental hospitals. To ease nervous and tense feeling of patients, the dental chair has to be clean and simple, and instruments have to be quiet and inconspicuous. Chengli Hung designed this chair and made it with the help of bending technique to hide and integrate different parts of components into a new-moon shape main body. It simplified the whole appearance by decreasing unnecessary parts and concealing complex mechanism. Most elements are hidden inside the body shells. This makes the dental chair easier to keep clean.

 6/22/09

As an equipment sales rep I've had the pleasure of seeing hundreds of dental offices. Some offices are the Taj Mahal's of the dental world with every gadget and toy manufactured this side of China. One office had a special viewing window so that patients in the waiting room could watch the Cerec machine mill a patient's crown, while others had fish tanks that would make the Georgia Aquarium proud.

On the other side of the coin, I have seen offices that look like they belong in the Museum of Dental History. Dark, wood paneling, bright yellow and green dental lights that are as big as a watermelon and fabric upholstered chairs held together with duct tape. I'm sure everyone has heard the “You know you are a Redneck...” jokes, but in the equipment world we have similar sayings and one of them is “You know you need to remodel your office when...you have to use pledge to clean your walls.”

By far, most of the offices I see are a happy medium. They have some new equipment - digital sensors, lasers; and some equipment that should be laid to rest – film processors, manual sterilizers, green watermelon dental lights. The office's have a contemporary, open design and provide a warm welcoming environment that provides the patient with a sense of professionalism.

When I talk to dentists I try to encourage them to try and see their practice the way a new patient would. Pretend that you have just moved to a new town and that you were used to going to the “happy medium dental office.” If you walked into the Taj Mahal office you would think “This guy has got to be charging way too much money!” Although, that may or may not be the case, just by your office's design and image, you will be targeting yourself to a patient base with higher income AND higher expectations.

On the flip side, if you are used to the average dental office and walk into the office that time forgot, chances are that if you actually stay for the first appointment you won't be coming back anytime soon. If the the dentists dental chairs, lights and equipment are being held together with duct tape...what kind of patch job is the doc going to do on me? You might be the best dentist in the world but your customer's impression is that the dentistry you are providing is less than average because of the atmosphere your office creates.

In upcoming blogs I will discuss the steps that you can take to make sure that you are either the “happy medium” doc or the “Taj Mahal” doc depending upon your target market.

 6/14/09