Dr. Steve Michaluk
Dr. Steve Michaluk
Welcome to Osborne Bay Dental Health Centre. I’m so grateful to finally ‘be local’ – living, playing and working in North Cowichan.
Everyone has mixed feelings about the dental office experience and sometimes those feelings just aren’t that great. It is my responsibility to ensure that your experience should remove all those doubts. There should be no mystery – fear persists in the shadow of doubt. When we have the time and opportunity to remove doubts, we have a chance at casting away our fears. I can’t take on your fear, but we can work through it, together.
Is dentistry, or any ‘conventional western medicine’ for that matter, an art or a science? I’ve thought a lot about this question for years, and by way of training, it is of course, both.
You can train an artist, and you can train a scientist, as a matter of practice. Thankfully, I have had the privilege of being trained by excellent teachers, arguably some of the best. Nevertheless, art and science have no soul. Art and science can only be held up and enlivened by the relationship you and I foster together.
My teachers have always insisted that relationships are the most important part of providing patient-centred care. My most important teachers have almost always been my patients.
We do very simple work for our patients and we also do very complicated work. We have all the latest and greatest dental tech to assist in describing your oral health needs and completing our work with great precision and accuracy.
I use this technology to provide data and records that will inform us of any required treatment. However, these are the three most important considerations I make regarding treatment:
1. If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it.
2. Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
3. Sometimes we just let the sleeping dog lie
I spend countless hours every calendar year maintaining and upgrading the clinical foundation of my work with various professional study groups, seminars and courses. While I have found that all of these courses fully and completely address the art and science of dentistry in provision of treatment for the patient, none of them focus on caring for the patient, the person.
There are so many different kinds of people in the Cowichan Valley, and everyone has different needs; some are very conventional and some are very unconventional. I’m very conventional in a contemporary evidence based medical dentistry sense, and I am very proud of that offering. I am also personally very unconventional in a holistic medical sense, and I have completed a host of holistic trainings to complement my dentistry practice; acupressure and acupuncture, basic traditional Chinese medicine, yoga teaching certificates and professional counselling. I have also completed a masters degree in Ayurveda. All of which I incorporate into my dental practice as is practical. While still abiding in my responsibilities as a contemporary western medical practitioner, I believe that these holistic trainings have created a more practical bridge for me to be able to communicate with you about your very personal and unique oral health care needs and goals. They can be very simple or very unique and complex. We are ready for you.
On a personal note, I’m from Winnipeg, so if you’re from Manitoba, we probably know the same people! I love being on the west coast and on this island, it is a dream come true for me. In no particular order, I love kitesurfing, judo and jiu jitsu. I love teaching all of the above. I love reading a lot, historical fiction and things with a philosophical bent. I love staying current on world events, and finding out where ‘the middle ground’ is. I love finding out what people think about the world around us. I love laughing, the dental office is so drôle without laughter! I love having conversations, they’re so important. In a community, we create good, open, honest relationships – that’s what I’m looking forward to in the Osborne Bay area, and that’s why I’m here.