Meet Experienced Restorative and Cosmetic Dentist Dr. Alex Hecht

Dr. Alex Hecht: Back in the '80's, '90's I was practicing more or less like most other dental practices. In time that got to be a little boring for me because there was nothing new happening. And I guess, maybe 1995 to the year 2000, all of a sudden there was this big boom in aesthetic dentistry. Everybody was doing aesthetic dentistry. And, of course, I got on that band wagon, also. I took a whole bunch of continuing education courses, and I started to do laminates. And I started advertising that we do laminates. And in the '95 to 2000 time, when there was a real big economic boom, there were literally hundreds and hundreds of laminate cases that we were doing in the practice here. It came to a point where not a day passed where I was either prepping or placing the laminate case. And when the economy sort of bottomed out, people weren't doing them anymore. That was the time when I started getting interested in gin-technology, placing implants. So I started taking courses on implant placement and luckily right around that time is when the CAT Scan machines made specifically for dentistry came into being. I was one of the first few offices on Staten Island that owned a CAT Scan machine. Here together with my son, Jason, who'll be talking, I consider him to be very quickly, five years since he's out of his residency, I consider him to be as well qualified as I am because we treat essentially all cases together. We consider each other equal, and it's a very nice thing to be able to discuss cases together. So we bounce all the cases off each other. Dr. Jason Hecht: It's like I have a fast forward button in the world of dentistry. I have behind me someone with 30, 35 years of experience in the dental field. In addition to all the technical knowledge, I additionally learned customer care that he has such a strong, natural understanding for. He actually came from New York at a young age, around 11 years old. And from the time he came to this country he hit the ground running in all areas of customer care and customer satisfaction related fields. He was a florist, a watch maker, a caterer, a videographer, a photographer. What I gathered from all those various jobs he had since 11 years old, he really learned how to take a customer's wants and needs and really deliver to them, deliver what they ask for and deliver it on time in a way that they just become satisfied. And he, of course, brought that knowledge and experience over to dentistry. There's a huge value in the end results we find with our patients. Basically, yes, we create new teeth for them. Yes, we create new smiles for them. Yes, we create the ability for them to chew. But really what it is it's not too much about the teeth. It's about their new outlook on life, that they had this thing in their mouth weighing down on them for years and years and years that just affected every aspect of their life. It's also one of the reasons that additionally, I got into dentistry in the first place because around the time that I was of the age to look into a career, my father was just getting into these full mouth implant reconstructions. And in the little bit of time that I would come here and volunteer, assisting him and seeing the reactions from the patients and seeing how their lives have been changed from having the implant work done, I saw that dentistry wasn't just about doing fillings and doing some cleanings and things like that. But it's about transforming lives.