For Dr. Ryan Linn of DMD, LLC, 425 Market St., he is living the life he always envisioned as student in college.
"I always wanted to move back here," he said. "Even when I was in school, I planned on moving back here at some point. For me, it was something I envisioned doing, and I didn't know when I was going to start my own practice, and I ended up doing it."
Linn opened his practice in the fall of 2007, he said, which dovetails his father's practice.
"My dad is an orthodontist," he said. "My practice is general. We do a broad range of things: root canals, crowns, cleaning - the whole gamut of dentistry."
On average, DMD, LLC sees about 20 patients a day, Linn said.
When it comes to procedures, Linn said he doesn't find many that are complex or difficult, but considers some of them as "challenging."
"There are people that need more work, that you have to work up," he said. "There are people that walk in that need more than a half hour."
Linn said he thinks of himself as someone that has a comprehensive dentistry and oral health practice.
"We want to get everything healthy and promote good home-care," he added.
"We take complete X-rays, models and photos to make sure everything is done, and people get a complete work-up."
Rather than just focusing on a single tooth, Linn said he likes to develop a treatment plan for patients that affects everything.
"A lot of people come in that have other stuff going on that they are unaware of, like gum disease," he said. "They may not like the way one tooth looks, but it could be more than that."
To determine whether there is more going on, Linn said, as part of his thorough treatment, he likes to gather all the information he can from a patient to make a good diagnosis.
"My goal as a health provider is to be comprehensive and be complete and give people their options - show them what's available to them," he said. "If you don't show them, they don't know."
What he finds to be the most rewarding aspect of the job is the interaction with people and educating patients on proper dental hygiene and seeing how, through treatment, the positive changes can come about after helping.
"It means I'm really helping them," he said. "I'm a people person - I really like the patient interaction, I really do. It's also nice when you get people that need a lot of stuff done, seeing how it changes them in a good way - that's the cool part of what we get to do."
Linn graduated from Lycoming College in 2002 before moving on to graduate from dental school in 2006 from Temple University in Philadelphia.
"After that, I decided to do a general practice residency," Linn said. "That was in Reading, at the St. Joseph's Medical Center, which was a year in post-graduate training."
Linn's interest in dentistry is a combination between two people, he said, crediting his father for his initial interest and observations of Dr. Robert H. Frederickson in the development of pursuing a degree in this field of work.
"I just sort of watched what he (Frederickson) did," he said. "At that point, I was pretty committed, but it kind of gave me a different perspective."
