In 1994, under the encouragement and guidance of his father, Doctor Mohamed Emad joined the School of Dentistry at Cairo University. He graduated in the year 2000 with a thirst for success and ambition that couldn’t be contained. He then traveled to the United States to continue his studies to later become a member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry and the American Academy of Dentistry. He returned to Egypt, and in 2008 opened up Whity Clinic, which over the years has become one of the most prestigious dental clinics in Egypt. With Whity’s fame and success, Doctor Mohamed Emad’s reputation as one of the most skilled and professional dentists in the Middle East quickly started building. Despite his wide success, Doctor Mohamed Emad describes himself as a simple family man who enjoys traveling and spending time with his wife and kids. Seeing as HE Magazine prides itself on being first to get exclusive interviews with pioneers in various fields, we sat down with Doctor Emad for a quick chat about how he became the phenomenon that he is nowadays.  

He welcomed us in his spacious and well-furnished clinic in Nasr City with an opening joke about how he has struggled his whole life with punctuality. After settling down, we had to ask him about what started all of this and why he decided to be a dentist in the first place. He smiled nostalgically and told us that it was his father who pushed him into the field. Despite being a sculptor himself, Doctor Emad’s father insisted on him having a career in dentistry because he had the manual talent of a sculptor and the brains of a doctor. Having inherited his father’s manual talent, it would have seemed logical for him to follow in his father’s footsteps, but when we asked him if he considered it he shook his head profusely and said that neither he nor his sister, who is also a doctor, did. 

This pushed us to wonder if he went into dentistry under the pressure of the Egyptian social stigma of medicine and engineering being the only respectable or worthy professions. It’s hard to imagine a charismatic and individualistic person like Doctor Emad being pressured into anything but he revealed that at the beginning he did feel a bit of pressure from his father to go into dentistry. “Now, I’m very grateful that my father insisted on it. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for him and his vision,” he added. 

When you look at Doctor Emad, you see someone whose eyes are gleaming with passion and a thirst for success. His enthusiasm to talk about Whity, his brain child, leaves no room to wonder how he reached the status of Maestro of Dentistry. We went back to the beginning, however, and asked him what his goals were when he first started out as a dentist. He laughed at the question and said, “Do you want the truth? At the beginning, my goal was to make money.” His honest answer which may shock some, is actually very valid. Graduating from medical or dental school, you are already a couple years behind your non-medical peers and it’s a struggle at the start to just get by. He insisted that he never aspired to be filthy rich, he just wanted to lead a comfortable and happy life. Little did he know, that he would achieve his goal and more. He is now one of the top dentists in Egypt and the Middle East, treating patients with all sorts of dental ailments who go to him as their number one choice. We asked him if he ever expected to surpass his goal and achieve all this success, and he sat up in his chair and replied seriously, “Never. Not for one minute. I’ve always been a simple man with simple dreams. I was always content with what life dealt me, and now it’s hard to believe that I have all this.” His humble answers and disbelief of how successful he is makes it easy to understand why he is a patient’s favorite. 

With HE Magazine being a lifestyle magazine that aspires to shed light on the lifestyles of successful figures in society, we moved on to ask Doctor Emad more personal questions. We started off by bringing up a common Egyptian belief that doctors and dentists should only marry from the medical field. Upon hearing this statement, Doctor Emad got very animated and stated his avid rejection of it. Having married outside the medical field, he insisted that two doctors or dentists getting married is a recipe for disaster as neither party will have time for a life together to be possible. He asserted his point of view by saying that he loved that his wife isn’t a dentist because when he gets off work, the last thing he wants to talk about is work. A family man through and through, he likes that he gets the chance to be immersed in his family’s issues and lead a different life when around them; one that includes soccer trainings, PlayStation, and zero medical talk. 

Talking about his family made us wonder how it’s possible to be able to spend so much time around family while working in such a demanding and time-consuming field as dentistry. This led us to ask Doctor Emad about his routine and how he balances his personal and professional lives. “My weekends are sacred,” he quipped. Despite it being hard to achieve with the profession he occupies, Doctor Emad spends all weekends with his family doing whatever they want to do. A lot of doctors tend to work on weekends, but he strongly refuses to do so, saying he’d rather spend the time with his wife and kids. They also take a lot of vacations together both outside and inside of Egypt as travel is another passion of Doctor Emad’s. Being his own boss also means he gets to spend most of his mornings with his wife, with his professional day starting at 3pm and stretching to 1am on some days. With Doctor Emad working very long hours five days a week, we couldn’t help but wonder if his wife was okay with his workload, especially since she’s not a dentist herself, and he said, “There is a price for everything, and in my case it’s long working hours. She is very understanding and knows that we wouldn’t be living the way we do if I wasn’t working so hard.”  

There are thousands of bright and ambitious students graduating from dental schools all around Egypt every year. Many of them go on to open their own clinics after graduating as well. This fact made us ask ourselves why Doctor Mohamed Emad was different? Why do patients go to him and not other dentists? From our little chat with him it was easy to conclude that his charming personality was the secret behind his success. He confirmed our conclusion by saying that it is “who I am as a person not who I am as a dentist that makes me different”. He is a very passionate and animated person and when his patients see that and see how invested he is in their issues, it’s hard for them not to keep coming back. “I enjoy what I do, so I give it my all,” Doctor Emad added smiling. On a technical level, Whity is also unique. The techniques and material used there are used in very few other clinics around Egypt. Whity is equipped with a fully digital lab that is the first of its kind in Egypt. This lab is used to digitally map out all designs and prosthetics, first for them to be 3D printed and later to have final touches added to them manually at the end. Whity is also in possession of a removable orthodontic appliance that was brought all the way from Manhattan by Doctor Emad personally. All this state-of-the-art equipment is, of course, very costly. But is it money well spent? Should the equipment be considered an investment in building up Whity’s reputation? Doctor Emad definitely seems to think so saying, “Of course it is very costly, but I think that it definitely will pay off in the long run.” He added that he thinks of Whity as a business, and for it to flourish he has to invest time and money and effort into it for it to grow and stand out. 

The medical field is known to be very challenging and difficult to navigate. After 18 years in the dental field, there must have been a lot of obstacles that Doctor Mohamed Emad had to overcome, but one of them stands out clearly in his memory. When he was first starting out, older doctors who had been practicing for much longer than he had weren’t giving him the credibility and support that he deserved. He was attacked for being too young and talking about, at the time, relatively new topics in the field such as cosmetic dentistry. Remembering his early days, he sighed and added, “Now that my experience has proven successful, a lot of the doubts around me have dissipated, thankfully.”  

Having mentioned cosmetic dentistry, we jumped at the chance to ask him more about the field that is considered his specialty. A pressing question we had was what made him go into the relatively uncharted territory of cosmetic dentistry to begin with. His eyes shone with the wit of a tactful businessman as he said, “I saw a need for it in the Egyptian market.” When he first graduated in the year 2000, people were traveling to Beirut and Dubai to receive aesthetic dental services and that seemed to bother Doctor Emad greatly. So with the innate sense of care he has instilled in him as a doctor and his sharp observation as a businessman, he decided to venture into the field of cosmetic dentistry. He felt that Egyptian dentists are more than capable of providing that service and that Egyptian patients deserved to receive said service in their home country. 

Doctor Emad maintained a sense of Egyptian pride as he spoke of Whity being a top tier clinic in the Middle East, not just Egypt. His loyalty to his home country and his strong desire to help his people pushed us to ask him if there are any additional hardships to being a dentist in Egypt as opposed to anywhere else in the world. “Dentistry is a very competitive field and unfortunately in Egypt, we have a very wrong understanding of healthy competition,” he noted. According to Doctor Emad, people in Egypt think competing means breaking your opponent down rather than working on building your own self up. While he doesn’t mind a bit of competition, as it keeps things interesting and pushes dentists to better themselves which ultimately benefits the patients, he wishes people would do it in a healthy manner. In continuation with analyzing the demographic that Doctor Emad has to deal with, we also questioned him regarding Egyptian patients and what it is like dealing with them. He insisted that he wouldn’t call Egyptian patients difficult as others tend to do, but he would say that they have a “flawed understanding of what a doctor-patient relationship should be like”. He thinks that, generally, we have a communication problem in Egypt and that it’s magnified in the medical field because some patients are very entitled and think that all of a doctor’s time and effort belong to them. He assures us, however, that these are the exceptions and that most of his patients are “very appreciative and cooperative”. 

 With his level of fame and success, Doctor Mohamed Emad doesn’t deal with just any Egyptian patients. His client list has very high-profile names amongst it. And whilst one might think that celebrities and movie stars are harder to deal with than regular patients, Doctor Emad begs to differ. He seems to think that dealing with celebrity patients is actually easier than dealing with regular ones because there’s common grounds that he can build a dialogue on. With the stakes riding on his work on a celebrity being high, he ensures that the best possible outcome is reached and that makes clients put all their trust in him. He allows the patient to have some input while putting a treatment plan together, but because of their unconditional trust in him, he ultimately has the final say. “The level of trust my high-profile patients have in me and my taste gives me a certain level of freedom that I don’t always have with my other patients that tend to modify everything I have to say and argue a lot,” he also added. 

Celebrities that frequent Whity and other dental clinics usually do it for aesthetic and cosmetic purposes, but is it also the case with the general population? Do people nowadays go to dentists more out of necessity or luxury? Doctor Mohamed Emad seems to think that all Egyptian clientele go to dentists more for cosmetic purposes than anything else. With whitening, veneers, and the “Hollywood Smile” being all the hype on TV and on social media, that came as no surprise. But does Doctor Mohamed Emad prefer cosmetic dentistry like the rest of Egypt? He does! “I think I prefer working in the field of cosmetic dentistry because it requires more hand skills and talent. I find a lot of peace of mind when I use my hands to work,” he commented. 

The saying goes “it takes a village” and in Whity’s case, it is no different. Doctor Mohamed Emad birthed the idea of the clinic but for it to be running so smoothly, serving a huge number of patients so professionally and flawlessly, a huge team had to come on board. There is a great number of dentists working for Whity and since most patients leave the clinic more than satisfied, we couldn’t help but wonder how Doctor Emad ensures that all his patients receive the same quality of care if he’s not always the one personally attending to them. “I pick my crew with the utmost care, and as a result I have all the trust in the world in them. I know that each and every one of them will treat my patients the same way I would have, if not even better,” he stated, silencing all our doubts. His face lights up and he smiles fondly whenever his team is brought up in conversation, referring to them as his “second family”. When asked what the qualities are that he cares about the most when picking out members of his crew, he quickly and firmly answered, “Loyalty, experience, and hard-work.”

After sitting down with Doctor Emad for a lengthy and intimate chat about his job and his personal life, it is easy to see why he is one of the most reputable names in dentistry in the Middle East nowadays. Humble, passionate, warm, and smart are just some of the qualities that spring to mind when he’s mentioned. His charisma, sharp wit, and constant desire to evolve leave no room to wonder why he’s a favorite with patients. In wrapping up the interview, we asked him where he sees himself in five years, and in accordance with his aforementioned humility and ambition, he answered, “Happy, at peace, and running several branches of Whity all over the Middle East.”