Most dental practices have a bio page. You read a paragraph about where the dentist trained, maybe something about their interests outside work, and move on.
This is a different kind of story. Because before either of us held a dental handpiece, we held a rank.
Two Dentists, Two Services
Dr Louis George served in the Royal Navy. Dr Jeremy Collins served in the Australian Army.
We didn’t come to dentistry through the same path, and our service experiences were shaped by different organisations, different cultures, and different postings. But there are values that run through both services — thoroughness, accountability, a certain directness — that we’ve both brought into how we practice.
We’re not going to over-romanticise it. Military service has its difficulties, and neither of us would claim it was all formative experience and character-building. But there are things you learn in uniform that you don’t unlearn, and we think they make us better clinicians.
What Service Teaches You About Healthcare
You Learn to Work Under Pressure
In any service environment, you’re called on to make decisions under conditions that aren’t ideal. Incomplete information, time pressure, resource constraints. You learn to be methodical when you’d rather rush, and thorough when it would be easier not to be.
Dentistry isn’t a battlefield. But it does require careful decision-making — particularly in complex cases where the wrong call costs the patient a tooth, or a year of unnecessary treatment, or their comfort with dental care for the next decade.
The habit of checking twice and proceeding carefully doesn’t come from a dental school textbook. For us, it came from service.
You Learn That Detail Is Not Optional
In the military, attention to detail is not a personality trait — it’s a professional requirement. A checklist exists because shortcuts create risk. Equipment is maintained because failure at the wrong moment has consequences.
In dentistry, the equivalent is clinical rigour. It means reading the full patient history before picking up an instrument. It means taking the time to get accurate diagnostic imaging rather than guessing. It means explaining a treatment plan clearly, getting informed consent, and not assuming the patient understood because they nodded.
We take time. Our tagline — “Good Dentistry Takes Time. We Take the Time.” — isn’t a branding line. It reflects something we actually believe.
You Learn What Duty of Care Really Means
In the military, you’re responsible for the welfare of people under your command. Not just their performance, but their wellbeing. That obligation is real and it’s personal.
In healthcare, it translates to genuine accountability for outcomes. Not the bureaucratic version — not just documenting what you did to cover yourself — but the actual belief that your patient’s oral health is something you’re responsible for.
That means telling patients things they might not want to hear, rather than what will keep them happy in the short term. It means recommending the right treatment, not the most profitable one. It means following up.
You Learn to Work with All Kinds of People
In a civilian career, you often work with people from similar backgrounds to your own. In the military, you work with people from every walk of life — different socioeconomic backgrounds, different education levels, different cultural expectations of authority, different ways of communicating.
You learn quickly that there’s no single way to explain something. Some people want technical detail. Some people want the short version. Some people need more time to process. Some people need you to ask different questions before they’ll tell you what’s really wrong.
We see patients from their 50s to their 90s, from all sorts of backgrounds. That range doesn’t throw us. We’ve been adapting communication style for years.
Why This Matters for Our Veteran Patients
We see a lot of veterans in our Buderim practice. The Sunshine Coast — from Maroochydore and Mooloolaba through to Nambour and Palmwoods — has one of the largest ex-serving ADF communities in Queensland, and many of those veterans have deferred dental care for years.
Some of that deferral is practical — it wasn’t a priority during service, access was limited on deployment, life was busy after discharge. Some of it is something else.
Veterans tend to be stoic. You’ve been trained to function through discomfort. The idea of making a fuss about a sore tooth feels at odds with the culture you came from. And healthcare environments can feel strange after years of service — particularly if your experience with medical assessments involved proving your fitness rather than describing your pain honestly.
We understand that, because we’ve lived it.
What that means practically:
We don’t judge deferred care. We’ve seen it before, and we understand the reasons. The examination is a clinical assessment, not a moral evaluation.
We explain things directly. No unnecessary softening, no evasive language. If there’s a problem, we’ll tell you what it is, what the options are, and what we recommend. Then the decision is yours.
We move at your pace. If you need to stop, we stop. If you need a break, you get one. If you need a longer conversation before you can agree to treatment, we have that conversation.
We don’t pressure. Ever. If you’re not ready for a particular treatment, we’ll discuss what that means for your oral health and leave the decision with you. Healthcare decisions belong to the patient.
Dwi George: The Third Part of the Team
You can’t talk about Sunny Dental Buderim without mentioning Dwi George. As practice manager — and a registered nurse — Dwi is the reason we can offer sedation dentistry in a private practice setting.
In Queensland, safely offering conscious sedation in a dental practice requires a registered nurse on site. Without that, sedation simply isn’t possible outside a hospital.
Dwi’s nursing background brings more than just regulatory compliance, though. It brings a clinical care culture — patient-focused, attentive, thorough. The standard of care in our practice is set not just by the dental team, but by the whole team.
For anxious patients, particularly veterans who find dental environments uncomfortable, the knowledge that a nurse is part of the team matters. It changes the feel of the practice.
What We’ve Seen in Veteran Patients
We’re not going to generalise about veterans’ experiences — service varies enormously depending on era, branch, posting, and individual history. But in our patient base, a few patterns come up often enough to mention.
Deferred treatment. Years of missed check-ups, often starting during active service, mean problems that could have been caught early have had time to develop. This is fixable, but it usually requires a more comprehensive treatment plan than a straightforward recall patient.
Wear and tear from grinding. Stress and hypervigilance — which don’t disappear when you leave service — often manifest as bruxism. Grinding and clenching, particularly at night, wear teeth down over time. We see this regularly in our veteran patients.
The effect of medications. Many conditions that veterans carry — physical and psychiatric — are managed with medications that have side effects on oral health. Dry mouth is particularly common. Less saliva means more decay, faster. Some veterans don’t connect the dots between their medication and their dental problems.
Dental anxiety. For some veterans, clinical environments trigger a stress response that makes dental care genuinely difficult. This is not weakness; it’s a physiological response to a specific trigger. It’s also very treatable. Sedation, when appropriate, gives these patients access to the care they need without the experience becoming something they have to white-knuckle through.
Read more about common dental issues veterans face →
The Practice We Set Out to Build
When we set up Sunny Dental Buderim, the goal was simple: a practice that does dentistry properly and treats patients the way we’d want to be treated.
That’s not a complicated vision. But it requires certain things. Taking enough time per appointment to do the job well. Not overloading the schedule. Having the equipment and skills for complex work in-house rather than referring everything out. Building a team that stays calm and consistent rather than rushed and reactive.
The military instilled in us a clear idea of what good looks like. We know what it feels like to operate in an environment where standards are non-negotiable. We’ve tried to bring that into a practice setting.
We work primarily with older adults — many of them veterans, many of them with complex dental histories. They deserve care from clinicians who take the work seriously.
Come and Meet Us
If you’d like to see whether Sunny Dental Buderim is the right fit, book an initial consultation. There’s no obligation to proceed with any treatment after the examination.
Call us on (07) 5445 8400, or contact us online. If you hold a DVA card, let us know when you book.
Learn more about our full range of services, including dental implants and sedation dentistry →
Return to the Veterans & Defence dental care hub →
All dental treatments carry risks. Outcomes vary between individuals. The information on this page is general in nature and does not replace personalised advice from a registered dental practitioner.