When we caught up with Dr. David Aronowitz, it was his first day back in the office after two weeks in Israel for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.
“It was lovely,” he told us.
Aronowitz has two facets to his practice, Bellevue Specialized Dental Care: The first is general dentistry, and he’s got a regular clientele that comes back, hopefully every six months, to make sure their teeth are healthy. We know he’s got a regular clientele who loves his work, because a call for dentists on Facebook yielded more votes for Aronowitz than any other dentist.
“We don’t have the time to check everything in our mouth, we have busy lives,” Aronowitz says. Which is why it’s important for a dentist to ensure that “the mouth, the teeth, the gums, the oral tissues are in good health.”
Six months, he says, is that magic number to make sure that the mouth stays at its optimal level of health.
“If there is something going on, it is a good time to work on it,” he says.
That part of Aronowitz’s practice makes up about 70 percent of the patients he sees.
“It’s family oriented,” he says.
The rest come to him because of his specialty: Dealing with oral and facial pain. When Aronowitz and his wife arrived in the U.S. in 1995—they came from their native Mexico City following dental school—he studied at the University of Dentistry and Medicine of New Jersey for his specialty and master’s in oral and facial pain.
He finished his thesis at the University of Washington, which brought him to the Seattle area, and he spends close to a third of his time working with what might be called short-term patients.
“They come to see me, we work on their pain, and they go back to see their regular doctor,” he says.
Aronowitz gets referrals from medical professionals as varied as other general dentists, neurologists, ear, nose and throat doctors, and primary physicians if a patient has some type of facial pain, whether it’s a TMJ disorder, or headaches, or anything else. He does not perform surgery in his office — TMJ surgeries have not been the norm for close to 40 years, he says.
“Dealing with facial pain is important to my training and to my expertise,” he says.
As for Aronowitz’s community activities, he has a few societies he gets involved with, and he sends both of his daughters to the Jewish Day School in Bellevue. The JDS community involvement for his daughter Tania’s Bat Mitzvah was very gratifying he said. Overall, he says it’s important to keep the balance between his family and dentistry, “and I think we’re doing a good job of that.”