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Alumni Profile- Dr. Douglas Peebles
Dr. Douglas Peebles – The long and winding road to gratitude
There are lots of key moments and turning points in a person’s career track, some obvious and others less so. With benefit of the view looking back from retirement, Dr. Douglas Peebles often thinks about the forks in the road that he encountered and navigated successfully on his way to a very rewarding career in dentistry.
The Michigan native lives in Lexington, Kentucky, after his start in general dentistry took him on a path that led to advanced training and expertise in implant dentistry. Retired since 2017, he says he has a greater understanding of the importance of his graduation from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry in 1978 and how it provided the solid foundation for the rest of his career.
That wasn’t always the case, particularly when he was in the middle of dental school trying to keep up with the heavy academic load in an era when faculty had a reputation for harsh critiques of student work. Having earned his undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College, Peebles was accustomed to small classes, sometimes with as few as a dozen students in a class. Now he was trying to keep up with 150 classmates, which at times seemed like chaos. He thought he was pushing himself hard, but his grades were less than stellar.
By the end of his sophomore year, he was stressed to the point of considering that he might not be cut out for dentistry. He met with the school’s academic counselor and shared that he was thinking about dropping out. The counselor retrieved Peebles’ Kalamazoo College transcript, browsed the range of grades and offered, “Well, maybe that’s the best we can expect of you.”
That might sound like the wrong thing to say to a struggling student, but it was the right thing for Doug Peebles. He has always considered himself “a bit of a rebel” and the tough-love response from the counselor proved effective. “It really lit a fire under me,” he recalls. “I said to myself: I’m gonna show him.”
“What I eventually realized was that everyone is going to fail some part of the training,” he said. “The idea was we had to learn to do it properly and correctly and that we would get another chance. I developed a belief that everything was going to be OK. I learned to go back after failing something and immediately work on it until I got it right.”
His conversation with the counselor was one of those forks in the road. He could have bailed out of dental school, but instead he refocused his considerable intellect and built on the earlier successes he had achieved in high school and college.
The son of a General Motors engineer, Peebles had developed excellent hand skills through his interest in building model cars, airplanes and rockets as a kid growing up in Flint and Grand Blanc. In high school, he was active in public speaking through the Junior Achievement program and earned one of its college scholarships. At Kalamazoo, he majored in chemistry and took advantage of its Junior Abroad program, living in Hannover, Germany, for six months and traveling around Europe. For his senior independent study project, Peebles worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, at a time when dental implant research was in its early stages. That experience was an excellent set-up for research opportunities that would come at the dental school and later as his dentistry career evolved.
With those earlier impressive successes as a track record, and his newfound commitment, the last two years of Peebles’ dental school went well. Once his DDS degree was in-hand in the spring of 1978, Peebles was facing another fork in the road: What to do next? He considered moving to Australia to practice with some colleagues he had met, but that didn’t work out for various reasons. He also weighed the benefits of going to law school. Then the kindness of a classmate intervened.
The classmate, Rick Scavo, was working as a dentist at a community clinic in Pontiac, Michigan. When Scavo was accepted into orthodontics graduate school, he reached out to alert Peebles about the job opening in Pontiac. Peebles applied and became “Doctor 81” on the staffing list at the Medicare clinic. “It showed me what I didn’t want to do,” he says, but it was a start and provided his first paydays as a dentist. Peebles soon accepted a position as an associate dentist in Dearborn with Dr. Harold Simon, a denture specialist who needed a general dentist at his practice. Peebles learned a lot about fabricating dentures and their limitations for many patients. Eventually, he purchased Simon’s practice and, with no business experience, learned that growing a practice was exhausting, but he stayed with it.
A couple of years into it, while looking for Continuing Education courses, he discovered information about the Midwest Implant Institute (MII) in Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1980, the institute trained dentists and their staff members in the then newly-developing techniques of implants. Peebles was skeptical of the fledgling implant research, but he also was well-versed in the shortcomings of traditional dentures, so he attended a session at MII. He liked what he learned and began taking more courses, receiving training in many areas at the forefront of implant dentistry, such as I.V. sedation, surgical grafting techniques and temporomandibular joint disorders, among others. This was more than a weekend CE course; MII would bring in 20-30 dentists at a time for an extended period. It was intensive training with long days that involved studying test cases and literature, assisting in surgery, being graded and eventually leading surgery on each dentist’s own patients. Peebles embraced the new methods and became an instructor at MII, maintaining ties with it for more than 25 years and significantly changing the trajectory of his career. “Basically, we were constantly learning and passing it on to others,” he said. He helped establish a group of MII Fellows who put together an annual symposium that drew participants from around the world. He was still offering general dentistry to his patients in Dearborn, but he was so committed to the benefits of implants that he re-named his practice the Michigan Implant Institute, a slight variation of the original MII.
In 1994, after years of practicing and teaching implant dentistry, another fork in the road presented itself when Peebles decided that earning a graduate degree in periodontics would enhance his teaching and career options. He was accepted into the 3-year perio program at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He sold his Dearborn practice and moved south to Bluegrass territory. The UK program refined his understanding of various periodontic procedures and, as an older non-traditional grad student, he enjoyed sharing his knowledge with other students. However, he withdrew from the program after two years when he realized that what he liked most was taking a patient from start to finish, not just the implant surgery that is typically done by a periodontist, but also fabricating the final prosthetic components.
After leaving the perio grad program, Peebles worked as an implantologist in the Lexington area at a couple of practices, finishing his career at the Audubon Dental and Implant Center from 2004 until his retirement in 2017. “Being able to take patients from beginning to end was a great advantage,” he said. “That was a big selling point for people. It’s hard enough meeting one doctor, but if you then have to meet another to finish the process, that is stressful and not as efficient.”
Peebles’ career, both in Michigan and Kentucky, also included occasional periods of freelance dentistry when, for example, a dentist at another practice would need to take medical leave. At one point he filled in for several months for a dentist in Traverse City, Michigan, which was a long commute north from Dearborn, made easier because Peebles had completed his pilot’s license and owned an airplane. That was also his faster method for most of his trips to MII in Columbus over the years. In Kentucky, on weekends in the spring and fall for about six years, he used his pilot skills in a program that took forest rangers aloft to watch for forest fires as he flew “low and slow over the mountains.”
These days, from the hindsight of retirement, Peebles is well-stocked with memories and gratitude for his dental career and the lifestyle it allowed him to create. He lives with his wife Linda in Lexington and keeps busy with traveling, various volunteer activities and his reputation as a fix-anything handyman, occasionally taking his adult step-children and grandchildren on flights over the Kentucky countryside.
“It’s all beyond what I would have ever expected, I can tell you that,” he says. “It’s been tremendously satisfying. I took on the challenges and it put me in a very good situation. I was able to retire with a nice lifestyle. I’m very thankful for my health and my skills and the fact that I was able to help an awful lot of patients.”
A few years ago, as the dental school’s Blue Renew renovation was underway, Peebles returned to Ann Arbor to tour the building and learn about the project. He was impressed and decided to make a financial gift as part of the school’s operatory-naming program. In 2022, when the school held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house at the completion of Blue Renew, Peebles was again on hand to celebrate and see the operatory bearing his name. He was particularly moved by the school’s innovative new Integrated Special Care Clinic that focuses on the unique needs of special needs patients. Among its specialized features, the clinic has a customized, tilting wheelchair lift so there is no need to transfer the patient to a dental chair. Radiology equipment is integrated into the space so that patients don’t need to leave the comfort of the clinic’s quiet space to use the radiology equipment that other nearby clinics share. It inspired him to make an additional financial gift – as lead donor for a new fund supporting operations of the special care clinic.
“When I went back and saw the dental school being redone, I was overwhelmed and I actually started crying. I didn’t expect that,” he said. “I was overcome by the fact that I had been so blessed to be a part of this wonderful university. When I was a student, I didn’t really appreciate the fact that I was at the best dental school in the country, and second in the world. I am so thankful that I got my training there and I am so thankful that I am able to give back because of things that I learned there and applied later with implantology.”
Peebles says he donates to a variety of causes. “In retirement, I couldn’t be more blessed. I realize that we only go around once in life, so I feel compelled to give back in a number of ways. My favorite is the opportunity to give back to the University of Michigan. I know this is only a small portion of all the benefits I have received. I would strongly encourage other alumni to take this opportunity as well.”
