Told To Quit Dentistry, But Never Gave Up – Dr Hussein Seedat
Why Did I Become A Doctor South Africa
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In his third year at Wits, Dr Hussein Seedat says a lecturer told him he wasn't meant to be a dentist. By then he had already been before the exclusions committee twice. This time he wasn't excluded, just told to quit. So he packed his car, drove home to Durban and spent December in front of the television, with a plan B lined up to study medicine in Santo Domingo.
Instead, he went back. "To hell with what she said," he tells us. "I'll go back and I'll make it work."
This is the longest conversation we've recorded, and one of the most honest. Hussein takes us from Parlock, a grandmother who taught him kindness and a family uprooted by the Group Areas Act, through nearly a decade at Wits and the Faculty Advisory Committee on Exclusions, to the moment he decided not to walk away.
Then the slow build. A spell in a small town in Mpumalanga. A practice on the Bluff, and an older colleague, Dr Hymie Herr, who handed him a tooth that wouldn't settle. Hussein found a fourth canal, and his path into endodontics began. The Pretoria diploma with his friend Dr Imran "Pochee" Cassim under Prof Peet van der Vyver, a master's on MTA, and evening lectures to bring endodontic education back to Durban. Along the way, a story about two psychiatrists in a New York lift that changed how he deals with difficult people, and the afternoon in a shoe shop when he realised he didn't give a damn about shoes.
Years later, lecturing to dentists who had once been his classmates, he told them: "In case you're wondering, I am that guy." His advice to anyone starting out is simple. Be ethical, don't over-service, and never stop learning.
As Hussein puts it, failure is the stepping stone to success.
GUEST
Dr Hussein Seedat, dentist, Seedat Endodontics & Restorative Dentistry, Umhlanga Rocks, Durban: https://seedatendo.co.za/
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