...please hold until it ceases to be important to you.

I had reason to call my new broadband provider yesterday. I was looking through my bank statement and there was a direct debit for far more than I expected.  I checked the previous month – same. Some mistake? Maybe I was mistaken so I got out the contract and looked for small print or hidden costs to my introductory offer. Nope, there was supposed to be 12 months of reduced fees and it was supposed to start 2 months ago.

There was nothing for it but to call them. That meant looking up online to find an ...

After a busy day of orthodontic treatments, I was in the practice one evening doing some treatment planning for the patients that would be coming in later that week and the phone rang with Prof Stassen’s name on the screen.

As he does the jaw surgery and other special procedures for my patients that need them, I’d always take the call when I get it because it usually means something needs to be discussed in detail and I’ll have to make special appointments and the quicker I know what I have to do the quicker I can help my patients. In this case it was “remember ...

I have blogged about mouth cancer before. We had mouth cancer screening days in the practice, there was a national mouth cancer awareness day.

It’s not one of the more famous ones, there isn’t a national campaign where we wear a ribbon or a flower or have a coffee morning at work for it, but it’s certainly there in the background messing around with people’s lives. Before I was an orthodontist I used to work at the junior levels of various oral surgery departments around Northern Ireland and England and saw many patients receive treatment for it. Those patients were referred to us from one source ...