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Dentists spend years mastering precision, technique, and patient care. What they often underestimate early in their careers is how quickly a physical injury can interrupt that work and place an entire practice under pressure. During a recent episode of The Income Protection Podcast, I spoke with Dr. Eric D’Hondt about the moment he realized the physical demands of dentistry could suddenly threaten the stability of both his career and his practice.
Dr. D’Hondt is a partner at Greenwood Dental Associates in the Denver area and has practiced dentistry there for more than two decades. He also serves as an adjunct clinical professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry and sits on the board of the Dentist Professional Liability Trust of Colorado. Those roles have given him a long view of the profession and the risks that many dentists do not think seriously about until they experience them personally.
Dentistry is not simply intellectual work. It is highly physical work that depends on sustained posture, precise motor control, and repetitive hand movements that accumulate over thousands of procedures each year. For most dentists, those demands remain invisible until the body begins pushing back.
The Physical Risk Dentists Often Ignore Until It’s Personal
During our conversation, Dr. D’Hondt described how that realization crept into his own career.
“When you’re twenty something years old and in dental school, you never would think your body could give out from doing dentistry,” he told me. The profession feels manageable in your twenties, when stamina and flexibility seem endless. But somewhere in his early thirties he began noticing neck and back problems that hinted at how demanding dentistry can be over time.
That experience is not unusual in the dental profession. Dentists spend long hours leaning over patients while performing delicate procedures that require steady hand control and intense concentration. Small ergonomic compromises repeated day after day can slowly become chronic problems.
The consequences extend beyond discomfort. A dentist who cannot perform procedures cannot generate the production revenue that sustains a practice. When the dentist is also the owner, the stakes multiply.
Eventually Dr. D’Hondt developed severe arthritis in both thumbs, a condition tied directly to the repetitive motion involved in dentistry. At first the pain appeared gradually during everyday activities. Then it began affecting his work.
He remembers the moment when the situation became impossible to ignore.
“I remember sitting in my house thinking this is going to end with me dropping a handpiece in somebody’s mouth and my career is over.”
The thought forced him to confront a reality that many dentists rarely imagine while their careers are still moving forward normally.
Why Disability Insurance for Dentists Matters When Clinical Work Stops
When a dentist becomes unable to perform procedures, the financial impact is immediate. Patients still need treatment. Staff still expect to work. The practice still has obligations.
Dr. D’Hondt eventually underwent surgery on both hands. During the first procedure he was temporarily unable to practice, which meant his patients had to be cared for by someone else. He brought in another dentist to help manage patient treatment during his absence.
That solution preserved patient continuity, but it also created an additional expense for the practice. The experience revealed something many dentists overlook when they think about disability risk.
Income is only one part of the equation. A dental practice is also a business with ongoing obligations.
Staff wages, facility costs, equipment payments, and utilities continue regardless of whether the owner is performing procedures. For dentists who own their practices, disability can threaten both personal income and business stability at the same time.
This is where disability insurance for dentists enters the conversation. The purpose of these policies is straightforward. They replace a portion of a dentist’s income if illness or injury prevents the dentist from performing the material and substantial duties of dentistry.
In Dr. D’Hondt’s case, personal disability coverage helped address income risk, while business overhead coverage helped stabilize the practice itself during his recovery.
The combination mattered because the practice still needed to operate even while he stepped away from clinical work.
What Younger Dentists Often Realize Too Late
The conversation also turned to a question many younger dentists face early in their careers. When should they begin thinking about disability insurance?
Dr. D’Hondt obtained his first disability coverage shortly after completing his residency training. At that stage he had no serious health issues and little reason to expect problems in the future.
But that timing turned out to matter.
Years later, when arthritis appeared in his thumbs and degeneration in his spine became visible on imaging, those conditions would likely have complicated the process of obtaining new coverage. Medical underwriting often evaluates an applicant’s health history before issuing a disability insurance policy.
Because he secured coverage earlier, those conditions were not exclusions in his policy.
Looking back, he sees that decision differently now.
“If I had waited until after those problems started showing up,” he told me, “my thumbs and my back probably would have been excluded.”
That observation reflects a broader reality in dentistry. Many dentists focus heavily on building their practices, repaying dental school debt, and growing their patient base. Insurance planning often receives attention only after a health issue raises new questions.
By then the options available may already be more limited.
The Conversation Behind the Article
The episode explores these issues in more detail than an article can capture. Hearing Dr. D’Hondt describe the moment he realized surgery was unavoidable adds a level of context that written words rarely convey.
The pauses in his answers, the way he reflects on the uncertainty of that period, and the practical decisions he had to make about his practice all become clearer when you hear the conversation directly.
Dentists rarely imagine the day they might need someone else to treat their patients. But as this conversation shows, the physical demands of dentistry make that possibility more real than many practitioners expect.
Listening to how Dr. D’Hondt describes that turning point makes the risk feel much less theoretical.