dentistry i don't know too many people who are extremely comfortable with being a dentist the common fear for everyone so conscious sedation is just giving a couple of sort of like a value type medication that you come in an hour before we give it to you and you just sit and relax for an hour you're conscious you can respond to commands you're not out and during the whole process we're monitoring your vitals making sure everything's going smooth so you're basically are able to reduce all the things i have the intention that's what prevents patients from getting numb a lot if you're nervous and if you're anxious and if you have anxieties about dentistry so you're always releasing so much cortical that fights with the anaesthetic so yeah it's hard to get you to relax and i know from a selfish point of view i hour before and the before i knew it all i could remember was open wide open wide that's the only thing every member and i was totally relaxed and you guys are very kind your front office and i remember open has widest possible because i want to please i hear that's good you don't want to remember a lot of the details of what you went through ages want to remember little things here and there but you don't want to remember the whole process of what was done in a dental office that's what makes conscious sedation a little bit easier for some patients so you very much involved with the internet first of web design a with the follow up with emails to follow up on the appointment t text messages so you guys are right into the current secretary yeah it's a different world you can't just expect to pick up a phone call made sure patients come in they everyone's on their mobile phones and they want to have that instant messaging name probably fifteen seventeen sixteen years ago and at the time was unique but now it's like so many iterations of that going on so but it's our website now so we can really change those n y c smile design dot com we're been part of the internet and search engine and people can find us and it's been great you know we we try to build a reputation and we really cater to the cases that are really more involved a little more complicated it started out as just cosmetic dentistry and it's really developed into something more than that now and then we do a lot of reconstructive cases patients who come in with missing t just and believe it or not it happens to a lot of c e o s and people in really industries that really have no time to set for themselves to really even take care of basic needs so sometimes that happens with someone like that when something is really dire happening and they come and see us and then you realize that there's much more going on than just one or two teeth that are break and we really have to anyone can throw really fright white porcelain over the teeth that on television mane look ok but honestly i think it just looks around this because it looks like a bunch of white teeth piano keys you know people like that yeah and it to me it just doesn't look realistic for me it's important that when a patient walks out from my office and has their work done if they meet someone for the first time the praise that they would get about their smiles like wow i wish i had smile like yours not a word to get your teeth done to me that's a really bad find if somebody know that you had your dental work done and it's released if you can make it natural make it beautiful it should be something that just beautiful dental work so that's a great explanation thank you all right let's go back to the beginning tell us where you were born something about the growing up here so i was born in iran i came to this country in one nine hundred seventy nine at the height of the iranian revolution at the time most kids don't know what i'm talking about when i tell them that but at the i'm sure you know what was going on back then and you know you're right there has always been a new yeah we don't we're always a new revolution who know yeah so we left during that upheaval as religious refugees some jewish and then we came to united states and we have family in the states for a long time so we've been here before so we just moved to  new york well by way of jersey actually i was there for high school i was fourteen when i moved to the states and to to speak english i did i went to a american school actually in iran yeah an american school and then i went to a catholic school in iran in iran yes and people don't know that but there was a lot of different groups of people it was a very permissive society and we had catholic schools we had american schools  was just a lot of europeans people used to come there for travel and so into the water rose arce yeah before the revolution so i had a strange upbringing because i lived in a you know predominately muslim country and i'm jewish and i went to a catholic school so you can kind of understand my well you have to things and i could be a little bit i'm sure current events must tell you a part to people they're going through very difficult times was involved in fitting in in the culture because it was a very strange time at the time because of the iranian revolution happening and the hostage american hostage crisis so it was very difficult for me as my sister and i we came here and we went to a school where we're just pretty much only two or three iranians and i remember the fights and singling us out and you know so it was just a matter of survival for me there was a lot of fighting going on you know it was it was uneasy and i honestly i thought i left left the revolution for a better country and i came to a place that i really could not  bullied and yet so the high school years were something i just never wanted to remember and wanted to forget so when i went to college that's when i think i really blossom then it's like wow people are accepting me in this is interesting like i don't have to you know nobody do in college i was just taking liberal arts i knew i liked biology so i had a biology degree but i didn't know what i wanted to do with it and i think a friend of mine at the time he said he wanted to apply for dental school and he wants to go for an interview is really interesting i never really thought of it i don't know anyone in my family is a dentist and i think about it so it was it happenstance for me and i decided to apply  i went to columbia university oh it's a tough one yeah it's that for your dental degree program which is would take a lot of courses with the medical school so some of the courses after that i decided to start working and learn about the craft and that's when i would met my wife so he's a dentist too because he's part of the office yes i let my wife the dentist we both graduated the same year and everyone asks us if we want the same school which we did my wife went to n y u and she was top of her class she was i mean she's really brilliant it's interesting how we met we both had it looking for jobs and we both had an interview in the same day so we were in the waiting room waiting to be interviewed i remember it was like right before fourth of july so we both were interviewed on that day and then we found that we both got the job it was a big huge practice need to we knew a space actually that had in in that it in the area you know i just happen to walk by and i saw a space that's available and used to be a dental office before that and we just inquired about dentistry we really had a philosophy in how we want our cycle to be grown up around us and we didn't have any patients i mean really we started out with like my uncle and my mom and you know it really family and of course it's all good but it just momentum and get some patients to see us so we had to do something and you didn't we did buy a practice that we can rely on a patient pool that's there what worked for you so it was just hard work of advertising trying this maybe we you know small advertising magazine and different magazines we were in and i think our biggest break was we wanted to have a presence on the internet and we started that out really early probably about  women in the sense that are men as equally likely to see you guys as women or stewart difference i would say that most our practice our practice their women probably seventy percent went oh yeah and the reason is men i'm included in that i mean i don't i hardly ever want to be proactive about my health and some even though i am a dentist you think i'd want  to i have something going on i try to you know persevered but women i find more proactive and they they want to be taken care of their health so a lot of times women come in and they want to have her boyfriend husbands but we do have men coming to see us as well but it's predominantly women so they're more likely to brush their teeth after after meals and cleaning i think the clean it's recommend like runner are there any tips that are specific to going to some terms of dentistry and running yes so here's my take on runners and dentistry and not that this tree but oral health is concerned running is very damaging i think to your teeth and i think this might sound bizarre but it's true when you run and when you put a lot of miles your mouth is dry when your mouth dries up bacteria level can rise up and acid production can even increase and cavities can be a big problem if you start out with cavity a few small ones and you are a very very active runner i would be very careful to make sure that they don't have a lot of you get your teeth checked and before you embark on what's mileage because drying up the mouth and not just that runners are taking replacement gels and they're taking gator oystering over the sugar if it's really terrible and they these blocks that a lot of runners could between their cheek and just run with it and what it's doing it just slowly releasing sugars in their mouth and causing severe decay and it works the it really damages the teeth especially twice a year checkup it's really critical and one of the tips i would say if you don't ever take those blocks and put it in your cheek and just run with it a man has terms of nutritional and you know i think nutritional gels are fine you really have to drink water with it i think there are new ones that are coming out now that are not as damaging to the teeth as  that are have a different glycaemic potential of causing cavities for instance i don't know if i can give names or try to act there's a new product called martin it's very new comes from europe and i  feel like it's not as sticky it's not very sugar concentrated i've been using it and i just don't think it has the potential to cause it's so fascinating is something very new to me sounds like somebody group of us good friends and one of us said why don't we do this marathon at the end of our school year like marathon i don't even run so i said shores let's do it so there's six of us started to train together and got into it and i turned that to the second best of the six so i got into it and the next year i did it again and the following year i try to do it and i got injured so that was one nine hundred ninety s so then there was a break in running for me i did not run and you know it was just concentration of dental career and you know didn't have didn't put any effort in in running and then i'd say about five years ago or so the resurgence of running started again i just wanted to get back i always loved it i got to get back into it i joined the running club i was running on my own but i said i need the camaraderie and just to get into it wasn't a run it was an urban athletics another group i was with them for a year but i didn't feel like there was that improvement that i was looking for my running it was a structured and he said wanted to come and run with us and then there was alan was another coach come on you'll like it different we're different and so i find that urban athletics really improved my running they have a structured plan we're twice a week you do these exercises and if you want coaching they can do some coaching for the week and i really feel that i improved drastically joining them and it's been an amazing journey met some really amazing nice people and so it's been really good for me and i get that i love everyone there and i set some goals in running and some goals that i had surpassed when i was twenty five this recently the new york city marathon fifty three and i did it that hour and twenty seven minutes and change in my best i think around twenty's i didn't own two hour and twenty eight minutes or so because i mentioned that it was running when i was younger twenty's and one of the reasons that i the resurgence to run again happened to me is because i had a health scare and that was in two thousand and six seven  was misdiagnosed and at the time they thought i had leukemia oh my god so i was getting these these fevers constant fevers every day and it was very painful and i had just come that didn't know what it was so they trying to diagnose said and then one i got really bad my fever and it was i remember those bad snowstorm and i had to pretty much get a cat in this huge snowstorm to take myself to the hospital emergency room emergency room and they did a x ray and the lady who came in he goes i have to say we believe you have this lymphoma pia thing like that my mom was sitting there and i think my mom was afraid of drop in to you know it was pretty i had to like recess it like it's fine i'm will be ok you know so it was it was a very scary time and i think that kind of scared that you go through your life  it sort of reprocesses everything in your brain differently now so you're looking at things in a from a different light you cherish things differently and you want to be healthier you want to be stronger so that's when i said i gotta get back into running i really loved running so it took me a few years from there different exercises but to really get healthy and then i think like i said five years ago that's when i said i'm focusing on running x and then finally is there a race called destination run that is looking forward to i signed up for the new york city half marathon that's coming up following year  i haven't signed up to many races i'm kind of a go in spurts and right now i'm just enjoying the process of running and with urban athletics and no goals in mind but i think two thousand hundred i will probably race more often and i had the new york city i'm sorry the brooklyn half that i did this year also another milestone for me was the fifth avenue mile which i did it had five minutes seventeen seconds time for almost any yeah so i feel like i keep getting better there are some amazing runners in urban athletics and honestly i don't think i even come close to what some you know