2023-2024 Presidential Message
TOSC 2024
”AB INVICEM”
With great honor and anticipation, I am happy to announce the 77th meeting of the Texas Orthodontic Study Club to be held just outside of Austin on January 19-20, 2024. The theme for this year’s meeting is “Ab Invicem” which is Latin for “From Each Other”. This year will be a year to experiment with some new ideas and focus our meeting on the collaboration amongst colleagues and all that we each have to share with our members and guests.
I have long believed that what makes our meeting unique is the fact that we have dedicated orthodontists who are willing to come with their own cases and share the details of their craft. This can be daunting for new members, but the rewards are priceless to get a “boots on the ground” account of how to handle clinical situations without the concern of a financial conflict of interest like we have when speakers are being paid by sponsors. So, in the spirit of focusing on a collaborative exchange, here are some of the highlights:
1. We are going to dedicate 1/2 day to the evaluation of cases from the model room for the “People’s Choice Awards”. I don’t know about you, but every year I try to see all the cases and end up feeling like I missed some of the best ones. This makes voting quite a challenge! We are going to organize this time by arranging the model room into tables of 6 cases where everyone will sit with one of the cases that they bring to the meeting. We plan to have time for everyone to evaluate all 6 cases at their table followed by a period of open discussion for each group to talk about the merits of each of their table’s cases. After which each table will nominate one case to represent their table in the “finals” on the following day (see #2 below) If your case gets nominated, you are going to be asked to present the case to the group at large. So, bring your PowerPoint or Keynote slides and I promise we will help with any technical aspects.
2. The Finals will be held the following day when we will spend another 1/2 day hearing the case presentations from the best cases from each table. We will have 10-12 cases to present to the whole group. We will all get to see and hear the “best of the best” followed by a short question and answer session. Again, I don’t know about you, but I so often wish I had the ability to ask questions when looking over a well-treated TOSC case. Each finalist will receive a “People’s Choice” award, but since the whole group will have seen all 10 finalists presented orally, we will be able to vote for “Best in Show” for the first time ever. What an honor and what fun!
3. We are going to limit the formal speakers to Dr. Greg Huang, Program Director at the University of Washington. When you have a speaker of this caliber, what else do we need? Greg will spend only 1/2 day presenting the best EVIDENCE for some common controversies in orthodontics including Aligners, Airway, and Open-bite treatment.
4. We are going to ask the residents to not just attend but to participate! For this, we will dedicate an afternoon session for the residents to present their own research projects or cases. I hope that getting them on-stage in front of the group will create buy-in to the meeting and our organization. I also hope that the residents might seek feedback from our distinguished group of orthodontists who are mostly outside of the institution of Academia.
5. For our sponsors, we are going to create more buy-in by having our progressive lunch with some tweaks from last year. In addition, we are going to try, for the first time, giving members an opportunity to personally endorse the sponsors that they champion by placing small logo stickers on their case notebooks. This is strictly up to the presenting orthodontist, but I know that my notebook will almost certainly have either a “Speed” sticker for the braces that we use, or a “3M” sticker if we treated the case with aligners. Since our theme is “From Each Other”, we can hear “From Each Other” the brackets and products that we truly endorse. What more could a sponsor ask for?
6. We are going to experiment with a two-day meeting. Sunday morning attendance is always so low and we thought that by wrapping up on Saturday night, we can have big blow-out party and end the meeting on a high note! Spoiler Alert: A casino night seems in line with our theme “From Each Other” ;-)
7. Finally, in addition to all these changes, we are going to decrease the registration fee for our members to attend. We want to grow our meeting and the club, and the executive board have done some careful budgeting to make sure that we can have an incredible meeting for everyone, but by sharing “from each other” the cost of the meeting will make attendance much more accessible for members and guests!
WOW! As I write this all out, there is surely a lot in store. Not every idea will be flawless, but I do think “from each other” will make TOSC 2024 memorable and meaningful for all who attend. I hope to see you there!
Nick Salome