Resident Spotlight: Dr. Steven Schluentz

Dr. Steven Schluentz, of Asheville North Carolina and Mountain Sky Dental, is like many of our residents, inspired to provide life-changing and optimal care to his patients. As a teenager Dr. Schluentz shadowed a local dentist who performed an immediate denture. The life-changing procedure inspired Dr. Schluentz who realized the impact a dentist can make on a patient. Since that initial experience Dr. Schluentz has continued to improve his skills and knowledge in order to provide optimal care.

Dr. Schluentz has attended both the Spear Institute and The Schuster Center. During his time at the Spear Center he was told to create a “centric-relationship” but the path to achieving that remained difficult to obtain. Dr Schluentz describes it as “a mythical thing but nobody seemed to know how to get there. They showed us how to get the jaw stable but they never really told us how to go from there”.  He knew he was missing a piece of knowledge that would allow him to provide a higher level of care that would help create those centric-relationships.

He then came to join the residency program here at the Texas Center and recognized the difference immediately, “At Spear you are taught to develop a treatment plan that generates from the face. What I found was that at the Texas Center you are taught to stabilize the jaw FIRST, which alters the face dramatically. Only after the jaw is stabilized do you make a treatment plan”.

Armed with this new knowledge he was able to return to his practice and immediately put his knowledge to use with a patient who had been suffering with cracked molars and TMJ pain, within a short period of time Dr. Schluentz was able to resolve the TMJ pain and restore the molars. Dr. Schluentz has seen the impact this treatment has made on his practice, “being able to address the root cause of a patient’s pain and then solve that problem, has allowed me to form much deeper relationships with those patients. It’s a much different kind of relationship – deeper and more connected and that is the kind of practice I have always wanted.”