Anecdotes – Page 6

Worst Tasting Top Ten

August 30, 2010 By Trish Walraven 8 Comments

The next time your patient makes a yuck face at you with the accusation that the stuff that just hit their tongue has the most awful flavor EVER, you need to be sure and come back to this blog to share your experience so that your offending dental material can be rated accordingly.

For now, you’ll have to settle for this Top Ten, which was created by someone who is so meticulous about isolation that they never (!) get complaints about the taste of the following products:

The Top Ten Worst-Tasting Dental Materials

10. Air polishing powder

Some people like the taste of baking soda, which is why this is at the high end of the list. Others, you’d think that you’d hit them with the entire Pacific Ocean with the way they wretch from the spray. Young Dental has one of the better products in this category. And most patients actually do prefer it to the grit of pumice prophy paste if an operator is good at managing an air polisher.

9. Impregum Penta impression material

Fortunately the second generation flavor is much better than the first. But what is with the aftertaste? It’s not like you can use a rubber dam when taking a full mouth impression.

8. Vizilite rinse

Sour flavors seem to go over worse than salty ones. And because this cancer-screening pre-rinse is essentially vinegar, you may get a dirty look right before you start checking for the dirty bombs that are cancer cells.

7. Jeltrate Plus

Yum. Unflavored alginate with a splash of antimicrobial quaternary ammonium compounds to give it a little bit of awkward je ne sais quoi.

6. Compounded tricaine topicals

This is like benzocaine on steroids. Because it is not available in a commercial formulation, you’ll have to have a pharmacy compound the gel for you. John Hollis Pharmacy whips up a pretty mean cocktail of lidocaine, prilocaine and tetracaine at a decent price. It tastes pretty bad, but when patients rave about your painless injections afterwards, you’ll want a tube of it in every operatory.

5. Parkell Mucohard relining material

Not only does it taste foul, it gets bonus points for heating up while it’s curing in your patient’s mouth. This PDF from Parkell even cautions against leaving the patient alone for fear of spontaneous combustion.

4. Septocaine

Even a few drops of the local anesthetic inadvertently dripped onto the back of the tongue will make your patient want to chew through the stainless steel of your syringe. Be careful or else you will be switching back to lidocaine.

3. Viscostat hemostasis gel

Great for getting a lot of bleeding under control. Unless that bleeding is on the tongue. Then, not so great. Ultradent has addressed this notoriety by bathing their latest Viscostat with mint flavor ribbons. But I’m sure you can still taste the caustic astringency that would make bleeding to death not seem so bad.

2. The goo under a loose crown that you just removed

Can we all gross out at this one for a moment? And hahahahaha, they can’t blame this flavor on you. Which brings us to:

1. RelyX Unicem cement

Stag-nasty payback for that loose crown you just had to smell. RelyX gives you the ultimate in sourness and bitterness that lasts and lasts (but so does the bond).

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Why more dental product manufacturers don’t try to mask the noxious flavors inherent in their materials is a question that can’t be easily answered with chemistry or economics. If you’re not one to wait on this development, let your patients choose the flavor of their next crown seat or impression tray instead by carefully slipping them a few drops of one of these flavoring agents that are especially created for that purpose.

Pearson Dental Supply Flavorings

Practicon Flavorings for Alginates

Dental A to Z Flavor Set

jazidental Flavor Drops

American Dental Supply Flavor Kit

And when you ask your patient how everything tasted, they can honestly tell you it was just peachy. Or grapey, their choice.

Now it’s your turn. Which materials taste the worst to your patients? Leave a comment below to cast your vote.

What music goes with teeth whitening?

May 20, 2010 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

LiteWhite

This company knows better than to show what a person looks like wearing cheek retractors. But the bald dude in the tradeshow booth just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and so has inadvertently revealed the eerie side of DIY whitening treatments.

If the silly little LED lights aren’t bad enough, the company has solved the apparent problem of “what to do” for the hour-long treatment process: built-in music headphones for your MP3 player.

Ahh, the fringes of the ZOOM-persuaded target audience make one smile and wince at the same time. Thanks to Engadget for the help with next year’s Halloween costume.

Empowering patients to ditch Dental Bling

May 2, 2010 By Trish Walraven Leave a Comment

Goldteeth There’s nothing worse in the fashion world than being stuck in an outdated trend. Five years ago you would have thought that all the reception rooms of dental offices were filled to capacity because of all the patients demanding that their teeth reflect the times with grills of gold teeth.

But that’s not the case today.

The economy has since tanked and the price of gold is higher than ever (currently over $1,100 per ounce). The only one glinting a smile of 14 karats these days is Lady Gaga, and she safely skirts the hip-hop genre by going all Team Edward with vampire fangs.

So when dental gold is out (literally), you can impress your patients with a small token of your appreciation. Take out their gold crowns, inlays, bridges, and then give it to the patient along with a postage-paid envelope.

What’s cool about this deal is where the envelope goes. Not to some shady “Cash4Gold” operation. It goes to a reputable company that will pay your patients back a fair price.

And here comes the best part: Garfield Refining Company is so generous, they’ll give you ten percent for the referral. Don’t be afraid to let your patients know that you’re getting a kickback. They’ll just be happy that you’re not keeping all the dental gold for yourself.

So click this Garfield box on the left to enroll in the Patient Bling Program and get a few envelopes for your office. Nevermind that they still call it the Scrap Program; they just haven’t seen this review yet.

You also might want to look through Dental Products Report’s list of gold refining companies. And in case you were wondering, this is not a paid advertisement. Garfield Refining simply has a great idea that spreads goodwill and makes money for everyone.

Gleekology – How to Gleek Back

March 8, 2010 By Trish Walraven 3 Comments

Are you tired of getting gleeked on while you’re treating a patient? Did you ever want to fight back with something other than the air/water syringe?

For those not clear with the term, this 30 second video is a great example of a controlled gleek:

Fortunately for dental professionals, gleek saliva is essentially sterile when it sprays straight out of the submandibular gland. That doesn’t mean you should shoot back at your patients though – heavens no! we would never suggest such a thing – when they gleek onto your loupes while you’re fighting their tongue with a mouth mirror.

But what about after hours when you don’t have to act professionally? As a wise resource for all things oral, you should be knowledgeable about proper gleeking form. And if you practice these techniques, you’ll soon be able to impress just about everyone under the age of fifteen.

Step One: Concentrating the Saliva

Yawn a couple of times to stimulate saliva production under your tongue. Another way to try and build pressure is to rub the tip or side of your tongue along the sharp cusp tips of your lower teeth. Or you can always try a little something sour in your mouth as a last resort.

Step Two: Visualization

Don’t imagine yourself gleeking, silly! Just get in front of a mirror to see if you’re having any luck.

Step Three: Gleek Technique

Since everyone’s made differently, you’ll need to experiment with these methods to see which one elicits the best response from your little squirt machine.

1. Stick out your mandible as far as you can and press your tongue HARD on the roof of your mouth just behind your central incisors.

2. As you’re flexing your tongue, push your lower jaw out, bring it back and down, breathe in slightly, and bring it hard against the palate. A thin stream will probably come out.

3. Try sucking air under your tongue first before flexing and pressing the roof of your mouth.

It may take you a while to train your submandibular gland to fire at will, so don’t give up. But if you do give up, remember the adage that says: those who cannot do, teach.

And then share your gleekology with the world!

I got a potty mouth

July 21, 2008 By Trish Walraven 4 Comments

Hi. I’m a very sad American Indian. I am crying because I just learned that my children have Bisphenol-A in their dental sealants. BPA is bad. It means my boys might end up with man-boobs.

This is about dental pollution, people. It may be ignored by mainstream science, but this problem is real enough to sell newspapers, magazines, and make you read online articles.

What I’ve Heard About Dental Pollution

Everywhere I go I hear about how it’s not fair that the citizens of cities have no choice about the fluoride in their drinking water. Sure, it makes teeth stronger, but there’s a conspiracy of pollution! And it’s the people who are so poor that they can’t even afford cups, they have to tilt their heads sideways to drink under the sink faucet, they are the ones who get the most fluoride in their bodies.

Does fluoride save lives like chlorine does? Wait, I didn’t say that, because it’s going to sound like I am in favor of putting poisons in the water.

You dentists also are protecting the right to fix the holes in people’s mouths with evil substances. If you drill a tooth and put in a silver filling, you have to make the filling soft with toxic mercury. Why can’t you just heat up the silver and pour it in the cavity?

The high road dentists are no better, with their lady-man BPA-leaching plastic composites. I’d rather gnaw on a Nalgene bottle and take my chances with it than have an oil-slick wedged between my teeth 24/7. The recent petroleum price increases are nothing compared to the cost in human lives.

The other thing that’s polluting our mouths is lead. There’s been lead found in ceramic/metal crowns. They say these crowns come from China. We like to blame everything on China. But the real reason that there’s lead coming from the dental labs is because the cheap dentists have forced lab technicians to scavenge for scrap metal by secretly dumpster-diving for X-ray film packets.

My shaman tells me that all the metal he sees in people’s mouths is creating imbalance in their meridians. This pollution is caused by all the various metals sending out galvanic currents, which turns our mouths into electrolyte-driven batteries. It scares me even today when I see that trick with the guy who sticks the end of a lightbulb in his mouth and it turns on. I know he’s dying from galvanic currents just for a laugh.

One more pollutant that is caused by the well-meaning but unenlightened dentists of the world is when they leave a dead tooth in a living mouth. Would you leave a cadaver just laying around with living people? Well, this is just what is done when a dentist fills the root canal of a tooth and just leaves the dead shell of a tooth in place.

I’m no Navajo with my sand art, but I sketched out this modern flow chart to help us understand where all this pollution is leading:

The pollutants are circled in red. Only one treatment is circled in green because it doesn’t involve dental pollution.

With only two choices in life if we find that we need a dentist – a polluted mouth or the totally toothless gums of a baby – all we can do is pray to our ancestors to give us naturally strong, healthy teeth.

My life has been one of ignorance until now. I have been going to the dentist regularly, and have had various pollutants placed in my mouth. I still have all of my teeth and have no ill symptoms from the poisons. Should I be grateful, or should I be worried? Are teeth worth it, in the end?

Six Degrees Of Dental Pollution

Here are various tests that you can either do in your office or send home with patients to make sure that you aren’t polluting their mouths:

Fluoride: http://www.hach.com

Bisphenol-A: http://www.biosense.com

Mercury: http://www.heavymetalstest.com/_hgkit.php

Lead: http://www.zefon.com/store/leadcheck-swabs.html

Galvanic Currents: http://www.biomeridian.com/devices.htm

Root Canal Therapy: http://www.holisticdentist.com/articles/root-canal-treatment.html

I know that this isn’t Keep America Beautiful or any other grand public service announcement, but it’s important for dentists to understand the consequences of their actions. And sorry about the waterworks; you know how pollution is a touchy subject for me.

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