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The Work We Do: Dr. Charles Melton, Total Dental Care

My name is Dr. Charles Melton. I am a one-third owner of Total Dental Care of Mattituck. I’ve been here since 2001, so 19 years I’ve been here. 

I was born and raised on Long Island in eastern Suffolk County. I went to St. Joseph’s in Patchogue for my undergrad. For dental school, I went to Stony Brook University and graduated in 2000.

Thankfully, we have a really great team of people here behind me. My day here in the office on workdays is actually pretty nice and smooth: I come in in the morning, we run our morning meeting, takes us about 15 minutes to go over our patients for the day, any procedures that we have outlined and anything in particular. On my schedule, I’ll probably see something like 10 or 12 patients every day, depending on how large the procedure might be.

There are two other owners — Dr. [Henry] Korn and Dr. [Gary] Klemons, who have been here since 2002, when they purchased the office. Originally, Total Dental Care, there were three of them, and they were owned by a pretty well-known dentist, Dr. [Jeffrey] Fox. … So, I was first here with Dr. Fox many years back and I decided to stay when they bought the office. They made me a partner here in 2009.

One of my favorite parts of working here is the team that I have here — the people that I work with. … It’s been a stable group of people for a really long time, so it’s nice to come in and work with people that you really enjoy working with.

I feel like I get to contribute to my community. We’ve got a really great pool of patients here. One of my favorite things is to take patients who may be very anxious and little by little, know that it’s not a scary thing, even though some people might think so. … It’s really nice at the end of a procedure to take a patient like that, and they walk out saying, ‘Wow, what was I worried about? That was not painful, that was not bad at all.’ And it turns out to be nothing at all. Most of those patients turn out to be some of the best patients.

“The Work We Do” is a Suffolk Times multimedia project profiling workers on the North Fork. It is made possible by Peconic Landing. See more photos every Monday on Instagram @thesuffolktimes.