Dr. Lee is so trusted by his fellow dentists that they trust him with their teeth. Dr. Lee’s patients include Minish providers and Dr. Jung Ho Kang, the creator of Minish Veneers.
Now in his 20th year, he designs and teaches Minish courses to dentists nationally and internationally. His greatest pride is when colleagues, who looked at him with suspicion in the early days of Minish, ask to hear him speak first.
As a dentist in Wollongong, seeing denture patients and being convinced that “the most important thing is to prevent them from reaching the stage of complete tooth loss” has become my practice’s compass. The following is a one-liner.
Q. What inspired you to become a dentist?
I originally wanted to be a neuropsychiatrist because when I was in middle and high school, it seemed so cool to me to be a doctor who could heal people’s emotional wounds and traumas.
But to become a psychiatrist, you have to go through a mandatory surgical training program, and at the time I had a vague fear of “having to look at blood,” so I was worried.
At that point, my family said, “If you become a dentist, you’ll never have to bleed, you won’t have to work nights, and you’ll make good money,” so it was a relatively light-hearted decision.
But the reality was very different. Night clinics were a thing of the past, and I was doing tooth extractions and dental implants on a daily basis, so I had a lot more blood on my hands than my colleagues in internal medicine and pediatrics.
Q. Is there a particular reason why you chose to run a dental practice in Wollongdo, where you have no connections?
I wanted to put into practice what I had learned at a young age, so I bought a dental practice in Wollongong and ran it for about four years. I had enough patients to actually do the kind of practice I wanted to do, which was mostly elderly people with dentures.
I watched him struggle to eat, relying on dentures, with not a single tooth left, and I think that’s when I realized that as a dentist, the most important thing I could do was to prevent my patients from getting to the point where they completely lost their teeth.
The experience in Wollongong paradoxically inspired him to focus on minish, the most conservative treatment.
Q. How did your relationship with Minish begin?
When I was in my 10th year as a dentist, I took a year abroad with my wife to recharge my batteries. When I returned home and was preparing to open my own practice, I needed advice, so I went to someone who I thought was the best in the neighborhood.
He was Dr. Jung Ho Kang, the father of Minish.
That evening, over beers, I stayed up until dawn listening to Dr. Minish talk about his practice and philosophy. Dr. Kang was a 15-year dentist at the time, and he was very different from the other 15-year dentists I had seen.
Usually we talk about things like real estate, cars, and children’s education, but Dr. Kang only talks about “how can we reduce tooth removal by 0.1 mm.”
It was the first time in a long time that I felt that passion in my heart, and I connected so deeply with the Minish philosophy that I’ve been with them for 10 years now.
Q What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the field over the past 10 years?
We’ve seen an overwhelming increase in referrals, especially when they bring their family members, and because they’ve already been through the treatment, they’re more open to it because they’ve seen the stability.
We’ve also noticed a shift in our patient base. Whereas we used to have a strong aesthetic focus on the 2030s, we now see a lot of visits from middle-aged people in their 50s and 70s.
In the past, people were reluctant to undergo minis because they thought it was cosmetic, but now it’s recognized as a way to restore aging teeth.
We realize that Minish’s status has changed when people come in with a lighthearted attitude, saying, “I’ve been using it for 60 years, it’s time to give my teeth a good coating.”
Q As your patient base has expanded, you must have had more challenging cases. Do you have any memorable ones?
As the life expectancy of humans increases, the incidence of cancer is naturally increasing. Sometimes harsh chemotherapy drugs are required, and the side effects include dry salivary glands and frequent vomiting, which can lead to cavities all over the teeth.
One patient I met came to me after a grueling, life-or-death chemotherapy treatment with a tooth that was too damaged to touch.
Long appointments were another pain for a patient who was already exhausted, so I used the Minish to treat all 28 teeth, from incisors to molars.
Q. Is there any reason why Minish treatment is appropriate in treating such difficult cases?
In the past, we used to do full-mouth crowns, which are made up of individual teeth that have been chipped away, but the amount of tooth removal was very taxing on patients.
Minish full-mouth restorations (full-mouth) are much less painful and easier on the patient because they minimize tooth removal.
Of course, it’s not a simple treatment because we’re dealing with the entire tooth, but I think it’s definitely more advanced in terms of the pain that the patient feels and the effectiveness of the treatment.
Q. If the treatment is successful, won’t the patient’s lifestyle be affected?
The success of your “aftercare” is just as important as the treatment itself.
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in post-treatment care issues, most notably gum recession due to excessive brushing.
I think this brushing habit is probably connected to the hectic pace of modern life, where we feel compelled to scrub harder and faster to get our teeth cleaner in less time.
Even if brushing your teeth seems easy, changing a lifelong habit is pretty hard, almost as hard as waking up early every morning, which is why I think professional training is essential.
Q. Do you have any prevention and care tips for using minish without problems?
The first thing I tell my patients is that they need to learn how to brush their teeth properly. My criteria for a good dentist is one that teaches you how to brush your teeth.
For my patients who are prone to gum inflammation, I use a special toothbrush that specializes in cleaning just the gums, and I clean them myself.
Q. Why do so many dentists come to you for minish treatment?
I must have seen dozens of dentists who have treated me with Minish. My wife is my primary care dentist, as well as the Provider dentists, and most recently Dr. Jung Ho Kang, the creator of Minish.
Minish is not just an aesthetic treatment, it’s a treatment that prioritizes tooth preservation, and because of its technical perfection and stability, even the same dentists feel comfortable entrusting it with their own treatments.
I think trust comes naturally because we have the best people and technology.
Q Outside of your practice, you teach at the Minish Course, where you teach dentists.
When we first created the Minish course, I was the director and designed the course, and I focused on removing the psychological bias that my fellow physicians had because Minish awareness was close to zero at the time.
We tried to make it compelling enough to make people feel like, “I want to give my patients a Minish treatment,” and as part of that, we did a “one-day live clinic” with real patients, where they completed their treatment in just one day, demonstrating the intuitive and transformative power of Minish.
Q Now that the program has grown in stature to include doctors from overseas, how has the response from your peers changed?
In the early days, there was a lot of “let’s see how good they are” skepticism. But now, I think a lot of that doubt has gone away.
I think there’s a kind of consensus among doctors that Minish’s philosophy of tooth preservation is the right one.
I only run the course about four or five times a year, so I have a limited number of attendees, but now I have colleagues who are the first to ask me to run the course, which has completely changed the atmosphere.
We are very proud that more and more people from abroad are traveling to Korea to learn Minish.
Q In the early days of the Minish course, you were focused on spreading the word about Minish, but what do you teach now?
As technology advances, it paradoxically simplifies the practice. For example, while it varies from person to person, what used to take two minutes per tooth to prepare 10 years ago is now down to about 30 seconds per tooth.
Advances in technology and equipment have made it possible to dramatically reduce the amount of teeth removed, and the practice has become more efficient.
In situations like this, what I emphasize to doctors in my lectures is “basics. We go back to the basics that we learn in the lower years of dental school and spend a lot of time talking about why we obsess over removing even 0.1 millimeters of tooth, and how amazing and precious the structure of natural teeth is.
Q. I’m curious about your mini-course plans and goals.
For those who have already completed the Minish course, we will be offering refresher and update trainings to share the evolution of Minish technology, and we are also considering introducing an advanced course.
Another personal goal is to create a more organized system for training dental hygienists.
Q. Any final words of advice for patients.
The first thing I would say is that you should definitely go to your local dentist for regular checkups, because that’s what I tell my family, “If you don’t have any problems, go to your local dentist for regular care,” but if you’re in a situation where you can’t do regular care or you really need a full complex restoration, like in the case of the cancer patient I mentioned earlier, you can come to me.
In fact, I don’t do implants or other treatments anymore. I’m only a Minish practitioner, and I’m dedicated to giving people healthy smiles with Minish treatments.
