Specializing in Prosthodontics

Dr. Casagrande: I grew up in Butte, Montana and no one had ever been past high school in my family. And I watched my family and their business. My father had a number of businesses. But one of his partners in one of those businesses was a dentist. And early on, I shadowed him and thought I'd like to consider being a dentist. I considered, honestly, being a physician. And then I shadowed his partner and watched him and thought, you know, dentistry is a good field for me. It's mechanical. It uses your hands and yet, it uses your brains. It's got a nice lifestyle. You help a lot of patients. I thought it would be something I'd be interested in. I was in dental school and going to general dental school. And I had an opportunity to work with a prosthodontist there. And I saw the difference between what a prosthodontist does. The quality and the type and the difficulty of their cases compared to a general dentist. And I became very intrigued with it because it was more thinking outside of the box. You don't treat patients with a recipe card that all patients are treated the same. Everybody has to be looked at uniquely and differently. And I liked that challenge. And the challenge of kind of using physics and medicine and dentistry together to give a great restorative result. And that's truly what intrigued me.