• Archives
  • Products
  • Operative Dentistry
  • Dental Team Communication
  • Practice Management
  • News
  • Research
  • Dental Debates

DentalBuzz: a jolt of current

trends, innovations, and quirks of dentistry

  • Home – Latest Buzz
  • Bloglist
  • Indie Dental Showcase
  • Free Dental Timer
  • Practice printables
  • Podcasts

A virtual care package from worried dental hygienists

April 2, 2020 By Trish Walraven 3 Comments

COVID-19 restrictions limit dental visits to all but emergency care, which means that millions of patients are overdue to have their teeth cleaned.

And because preventive services are not critical in the short term, all dental hygienists affected by the shut down are now out of work. However, the jobs will come back. What’s more concerning is the damage that may be happening in our patients’ mouths without a little extra intervention.

A few years back, do you remember the guidance that hygienists and dentists shared with you whenever we discovered that blue plastic bits were getting stuck under our patients’ gums? That was the dental community banding together here to get the word out, and we were able to convince manufacturers to stop adding plastic to toothpaste.

We’re coming together again in the same place, this time to pack a few personal items into your phone, tablet, computer, or whatever you’re looking at right now. This is the delivery we’re shipping to our patients, to take care of you with our thoughts and our hearts, and to share our best tips to make sure that you’re as healthy as possible at your next dental visit.

You want me to put my toothbrush where?

Care Package Item #1: Brushing your teeth with your other hand for the first minute, then switching hands.

This is all about about getting re-introduced to friction and tapping into novelty to help you learn something about yourself. When you pick up your toothbrush, you normally do so with your dominant hand. Instead (and this is THE KEY) you will grab your toothbrush with your other hand. If you’re a righty, then put your toothbrush in your left hand. Add toothpaste if you’d like and start brushing. Pay attention to how your gums feel when the bristles touch them. Most people don’t realize this, but they avoid touching their gums properly when they brush.

If it hurts to brush with your non-dominant hand, this is a sign that your toothbrush may be too hard, because soft brushes should feel pretty normal at this point. Keep brushing with your other hand, all around, then try to make the bristle contact feel the same when you place the toothbrush back in your dominant hand. It was surprising the first time I did this, because I realized I didn’t brush as well in areas that I thought I did. Even though I’m a hygienist, this helped me uncover weaknesses in my own brushing technique. Just watch out how you spit, because your other hand may now be in your trajectory field and end up all slobbery.

What’s your best flossing hack?

Care Package Item #2: Curved 3D flossers

As products go, this is a very specific one! There’s no substitute for using a string under your gumline, and if you have a tool that angles the string perfectly every time, you’re more likely to floss frequently and effectively. Make sure that your flosser is curved in 3D, not just flat:

With your 3D curved flosser, click the string between each place that your teeth make contact and floss deep under the gum tissue, once for each side, just like this:

I’ve demonstrated this on a front tooth for convenience, but the payoff of using these 3D flossers is when you get to really tight spaces in the back. My favorite brand is the Dentek Complete Clean Back Teeth, but there are others. Just make sure you purchase the curved flossers and not the flat ones.

Whoa, what should I do about blood or braces?

Care Package Item # 3: Soft Toothpicks

If you’re bleeding when you brush or floss, or can’t clean effectively with either of those items because of metalwork in your mouth, you’ve got to dig deeper. Remember, the stuff you’re trying to clean off of your teeth isn’t necessarily food; instead it grew there like a layer of pond scum, so you need to disrupt it as often as you clean your armpits.

Try gently poking deep into the areas that tend to bleed easily, like the gum pockets you’ve been told you have (that’s mine up there), or create some friction up in the gumline next to an orthodontic bracket or retainer wire. As long as you don’t feel any pain, you should be able to sweep away the germs that contribute to tooth loss with interdental cleaners like the Gum brand Soft Pick.

No toothpaste? Are you kidding?

Care Package Item #4: Brushing without toothpaste first

Hear me out – I am addicted to the feeling of mouth freshness. This is what the detergent industry has turned me into, a little mint whore. However, the foamy nature of toothpaste tends to obscure exactly what it is that I’m brushing, so periodically, I’ll spend the first 30 seconds of my brushing ritual without toothpaste. After that, it’s like an exciting reward, a delayed gratification of sorts. Hey, when you have to stay isolated from the rest of society for a while, the little joys start adding up.

Will overeating contribute to cavities?

Care Package Item #5: Swishing with water all day

A side effect of sheltering in place is boredom eating, which means excess carbohydrates fermenting in our mouths leading to a rapid increase in dental decay. To combat this, each time you eat, be sure to swish with a mouthful of water immediately afterwards. This will help you rinse away excess particles and acid. Remember – dentists are discouraged from filling cavities at the moment – they are more likely to be put in a position to pull an otherwise good tooth to get you out of immediate pain and danger of having a life-threatening dental abscess.

We’ve shared this article with you because we’re worried! Priorities are going to change in the coming months, and our careers are built on the foundation that patients should be able to keep their teeth for a lifetime with minimal professional care. Stay healthy, friends, and we look forward to seeing you back in the office as soon as possible.

Trish Walraven, RDH BS is a dental hygienist in the Dallas/Fort Worth area who is sad for so many of her colleagues that have lost their livelihoods. She would like to inspire her fellow hygienists and dentists to feel brave enough to share their concerns and best home care ideas so that we can begin the work of reconnection.

Filed Under: Featured, News, Preventive Care Tagged With: cavity prevention, dental hygiene, flossing, home care, toothbrushing

Amabrush (and all other mouthpiece toothbrushes) do NOT clean your teeth in ten seconds

June 27, 2017 By DentalBuzz Staff 22 Comments

Update 10/22/2021: Don’t buy mouthpiece toothbrushes. Not only do they not work, most of them don’t even turn on. It’s an easy way to get people to send money for scammy things. Need more proof? Go to Electric Teeth at the link below – they have much more current information than you’ll find here.

Mouthpiece Toothbrushes: Think Twice Before You Buy

IMPORTANT UPDATE 6/5/19: The Amabrush is extinct. This article is useless. Scroll to the bottom to learn why.


What do you get when you start with a silicone sports mouthguard, embed it with hundreds of tiny bristles, and magnetize a rechargable toothpaste ball that vibrates and cleans all of your teeth at the same time? DentalBuzz recently sat down with the inventor of the new Amabrush to find out where this thing came from, where it’s going, and how to get one.

____

DentalBuzz:  Hi Marvin. Thanks for joining us here at DentalBuzz. What’s the story? Tell us about yourself and your company, how you got into the business of toothbrushing, where the name Amabrush came from.

Marvin Musialek: Thank you for having me! Well, my name is Marvin and I’m the founder of Amabrush, a completely redefined toothbrush. I came up with this idea 6 years ago. I brush my teeth twice a day, not because I want to, but because I have to, and this is every dentist’s advice.

Six years ago I stood in front of the bathroom-mirror as usual, and asked myself, “Why are we on the edge of self-driving cars, but we all still have to stand in front of the mirror and put a stick with nylon-bristles into our mouth, in order to clean our teeth?” Since then I thought about an autonomous cleaning-robot-thingy everyday. Three years later there was still no product like this on the market, and I simply decided to “do it on my own.” I did a lot of research and put a strong team together from many disciplines: dentists, biomedical engineers, physics engineers, electronic engineers and even a psychologist. We had to clarify even the simplest questions with a scientific approach. Why are we brushing our teeth? How should we do it correctly? How much toothpaste? What angle should the bristles have? And so forth. We have been developing Amabrush for the last 3 years and have also received grants from the Austrian Government and the European Commission. With our own money and these grants we were able to finance the cost-intensive development of numerous different prototypes, test-units, pre-production-devices and expert-consultations. Our redefined toothbrush should be seen as a stable and good friend, who takes over an annoying and time-intensive task (toothbrushing) for everyone. So we decided to call it Amabrush, so people who ask “what’s that?” will get their answer: “I’m a brush.”

DB:  Since it doesn’t look like a typical brush, that’s perfect! And endearing. Kind of like the name talks back to you when you say it.

Now, you’re in Austria but also have offices in San Francisco? Before everyone in the United States gets addicted to using your brush, we want to make sure that replacements will be easily available. What percentage of your sales do you see coming to the US once you’re in the retail market?

MM:  Yes that’s right. We estimate that 50% of our sales will take place in Europe, especially in German-speaking Europe (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) and the other 50% will take place in North America, especially in the United States. This coincides with our research and as well with our current subscribers, who are also equally distributed between these two regions. Because of that we want to produce Amabrush in these two different regions in the long run.

DB:  You have subscribers already? For a product that they can’t even get yet?  Okay, so we haven’t even talked about the toothbrush. You’re estimating that its retail price is going to be around $200. While you can’t put a price on good dental health, there have been regular electric toothbrushes in this range for years that have proven not to work any better than the $60 version of the same brand (yes, we’re talking about you, Sonicare). Explain what it is about the Amabrush that puts it far ahead of its competition, and why it is a value at $200.

MM:  Yes indeed. We already got 7000 subscribers within a month, which is really, really great. That proves to us that our community is as excited as we are about a toothbrush that takes over the task of toothbrushing. There are many low-priced electric toothbrushes available, but also many high-priced ones. The cost of Amabrush is more to the mid- and high-range, but the brush itself is really high-end. We had to develop everything from scratch, like the micro-pump that foams the toothpaste, the specially formulated toothpaste itself, and the mouthpiece, which was one of the most complicated parts. Not only because we use an uncommon material (anti-bacterial silicone) with a specific toughness, but also because of the integrated, carefully arranged bristles and the micro-channels that deliver the toothpaste directly to the customers’ teeth.

DB:  This has the potential to change everything we think we have to do to take care of our teeth. A silicone mouthpiece instead of a handle that you hold as you move a small brush around your mouth, brushing every tooth at the same time, Bass method bristle alignment, self-contained toothpaste, sonic vibrations. If this brush is capable of consistent and thorough plaque removal, then you may have just created the holy grail of preventive dentistry. When and where will customers get the Amabrush once they’re available to the general public?

MM:  We have to explain this completely new concept of toothbrushing to people a lot. Amabrush is currently “online-only.”  The simplest way for people to inform themselves about Amabrush is over the internet with our online-shop and our website. But in the long run we definitely want to bring Amabrush into grocery stores and drug stores, because the majority of people still buy personal care products “offline.”

DB:  Do you see an application for people whose hand dexterity is limited?

MM:  Amabrush is definitely also for people with hand disabilities. We developed Amabrush on purpose as a hands-free device, not only that it is as convenient and automatically as possible, but also that there is no barrier in order to use it.

DB:  What does it feel like to use?

MM:  It feels like if someone else brushes your teeth with a soft bristled toothbrush paired with the feeling of a gingival massage.

DB:  So it’s sort of like having your teeth cleaned by a professional? We would imagine that would be pretty effective. What kinds of plaque index scores are you getting; in other words, how well does the Amabrush actually clean compared to manual or other electric toothbrushes?

MM:  That’s true, it does a pretty good job at cleaning your teeth! We’ve had plaque index scores calculated by an independent clinical institution and have been pleased with the results. What’s worth knowing is that Amabrush is not necessarily better than a regular manual or electric toothbrush, because common toothbrushes work good enough if they are used properly. The thing is, Amabrush is way more convenient. You can do so many things wrong with a regular toothbrush, as you have to be highly concentrated for at least 120 seconds each time you brush your teeth. And while brushing, you should use different methods like the Bass method paired with the red-white technique. This is not only time-consuming, but also annoying for most people. Because of this, people usually tend to do something else while brushing their teeth. Furthermore, they put too much pressure on the toothbrush which can damage their gum. What’s more, most of the people don’t brush their teeth long enough. Amabrush cleans your teeth the same every time, with the right technique, and does not depend on your concentration.

DB:  What it sounds like you’re saying is that the problem with electric toothbrushes is that manual ones are just that – they have to be moved around with your hand, so even if they’re the best at what they do, they’ll still miss areas because the human being attached to the hand doesn’t apply the brush properly. The Amabrush provides hands-free brushing at a fraction of the time? Very novel.

Back to your subscribers, then. How can subscribers order the Amabrush? How can I get one as a consumer? What do I need to do?

MM:  Interested customers can subscribe to our newsletter right now on our website. We created a landing-page that explains all relevant information and details about Amabrush and the upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Speaking of which, this will be the first opportunity for our customers to get Amabrush. We will start our crowdfunding-campaign on Kickstarter next week (end of June 2017). Customers have the ability to support our project, and as a return, get Amabrush at a strongly discounted price ($69 instead of $199)!

Regarding your question what the customer needs to do: simply sign up for our newsletter on our website (www.amabrush.com). We will send a reminder with the exact date of our Kickstarter-campaign to all subscribers. When the campaign is live, simply choose a package that suits best for you. All of them are strongly discounted, as this is our way to say “Thank you” to all of our supporters and the community!

DB:  Dentists and dental hygienists are particularly interested in finding new ways like yours to pass on to our patients that help them keep their mouths healthy. Do you have anything more you’d like to say to us?

MM: Our pre-production units are already in the making, in order to be shipped around the globe to various dentists. We highly appreciate feedback and input from every professional expert in order to make Amabrush as perfect as it can be. We are really looking forward to the support of our community!

DB:  Thanks again, Marvin for sharing your story with us, and we sincerely hope that you get all the attention that this Kickstarter campaign deserves.

MM:  We hope that too. Thank you very much for the interview and the great time!

 

UPDATE 6/28/2017: Amabrush announced today that the launch date for their Kickstarter campaign is next week – July 5, 2017.

UPDATE 7/5/2017: The campaign is now live, with the Amabrush expected to begin shipments in December 2017. This video shows close-up vibrations of the prototype. We imagine that the production version will be even more refined.

 

 

UPDATE 8/31/2018: It’s taken quite a bit longer than expected, but today Amabrush announced that they will start to ship brushes very soon. The best part? Their testing suggests that all the hard work means that this is a true 10-second toothbrush and not a gimmick. Here’s what came in the mail:

 

Many patients took part in our dental studies, which took place on 3 different dates with a minimum interval of 24 hours. The tests were performed and evaluated by independent dentists. Amabrush was tested simultaneously with two different institutions and two different sets of patients.

The TQHPI (Turesky modified Quigley Hein Plaque Index) which we used as the method determines how much plaque was present on the teeth – the lower the value, the less plaque on the teeth.

Test procedure

1.) 24 hours before the test, participants were not allowed to brush their teeth. For the plaque test, the patients chewed plaque disclosing tablets so that the dentist could then determine the initial plaque values (tablet is used to make plaque visible).

2.) Patients had to brush their teeth with a regular manual toothbrush for at least two minutes. The remaining plaque values were determined afterwards.

 

3.) The same process was repeated for the second appointment one week later, but this time with using the Amabrush instead of the manual toothbrush. Teeth were cleaned for just 10 seconds and the dentist determined the plaque values again.

 

Results

The plaque index decreased statistically significant and there was no statistically significant difference between Amabrush (with 10 seconds brushing time) compared to a regular manual toothbrush (with roughly 3 minutes brushing time on average).

These results make us truly proud and show us that hard work, clever engineering and patience pays off for all of us. We hope that you also like those results, which we would have never reached without your support, help, and feedback!

 

Images courtesy of Amabrush™ All rights reserved. This article has been written with no bias towards compensation or commissions. DentalBuzz stories run on ideas, not pay-per-clicks.

Want to know when we post a detailed review of the Amabrush once it’s available and we’ve had a chance to chomp on it? Be sure to subscribe to DentalBuzz by adding your email address and you’ll automatically get notifications each time we add a new article.

 

FINAL UPDATE 6/5/19: Nevermind.  Amabrush is officially done. No surprise there, unfortunately, because they’ve been propping up their company with delays for the last two years. Here at DentalBuzz, we never even received our super early bird Amabrush. What’s worse though, is our role in this for convincing our readers to invest in the Kickstarter campaign.  At this point, we feel sort of like everyone who invested in Theranos, with their fake blood testing.  Great ideas still depend on that which is physically possible, but Marvin still doesn’t seem to get this! You can read the litany of excuses here from Amabrush: https://www.amabrush.at/blogs/news/important-information-regarding-amabrush-company. Bottom line? We’re sorry, and you still have to brush your teeth for two minutes.

Filed Under: Preventive Care, Products, Technology Tagged With: Amabrush, Amabrush review, dental hygiene, Electric toothbrushes, new health products, oral hygiene, preventive dentistry

A hygienist’s answer to “what do you do?”

March 11, 2015 By DentalBuzz Staff 8 Comments

If you read Dentaltown Magazine, you may have received the edited, paper version of this article today in your snail mail box. But because I don’t have to make room for saliva ejector advertisements in the sidebar (seriously, this article helps sell SALIVA EJECTORS!) you can enjoy the original here in its more raw form.

shakehands

A hygienist’s answer to “What do you do?”

by Trish Walraven RDH, BS

You’re at a gathering of acquaintances, a general hob-nobbery of casual conversing, one of those social obligations that you love/hate because you’re really more of an outgoing introvert, someone who plays well with others but enjoys their quiet, navel-gazing world too. Sooner or later you know that the question will be asked.

“So, what do you do?”

No hesitation here. You know what your profession is. You have a title, a position, a calling.

Then that inner part of your thinking begins to twitch.

You weren’t asked about your job title, actually. You were asked a direct question: What do you do?

The typical reaction of hearing that you’re a dentist or hygienist involves a full disregard of the art and compassion that you put into your profession. People want to tell you about their bad experiences as a child, or how much they hate you (but don’t take it personally!). They just nod, warily, quietly, at your response and quickly think of a way to change the subject.

Instead of giving away the conversation and letting it slide into other people’s thought bubbles, then, you can steer the dialogue back to the original question, and the feel-good answer you’ve prepared instead.

“I take care of people’s teeth.”

You’re a regular Mother Theresa now, aren’t you? The way you dedicate your life’s work to helping others, it’s so freaking noble. This response elicits a smile of comfort and familiarity from your obligatory small-talk partner. The conversation can move forward now that your profession has been deemed socially acceptable.

An hour later, driving home, you’re blissfully alone with your thoughts, rewinding your earlier social interactivity, musing over the highlights, and you really, deeply, ask yourself in hindsight, “what do I do?”

I can’t speak for dentists, but if you’re a dental hygienist, you do some pretty strange things, actually.

First of all, perfection to you is wave-shaped. It’s the curve of a thin scallop of attached pinkness that anoints each interproximal space with a coral-tipped point of the healthiest gingiva imaginable. Anything less than this in your patients’ mouths is limbo. Chaos is the reason your job exists, but you always hunger for order and balance. To achieve this imagined perfection in a mouth that is not optimal, then, means that you often resort to some diversions along the way. It’s about the journey, not the destination, right?

How do you handle the patient whose lower anterior linguals are piled with a couple of grams of Grade A calcium phosphate? Sure, you could just chunk the calculus off. But sometimes, when you’re feeling a little dastardly, you carve out the top and the bottom of the tartar evenly, so that you’ve left a neat chalky white mustache, complete with curlicues. With artistic satisfaction, you turn your attention back to your duty and politely erase the Banksy-esque dental graffiti from your patient’s teeth.

This is not something you tell people that you do.

You also tell no one that your deepest fear is running into anything artificial while you’re cleaning someone’s teeth. Your ultrasonic scaler turns into a fierce lead pencil in those situations, which means not only that you are wearing down your precious metal antennae into useless nubs, but also that you’re leaving dark lines where there was once only whiteness. Every last bit of old orthodontic cement has now been revealed like a charcoal rubbing, thanks to you. And you would never admit to leaving a grey streak on a brand new porcelain crown. How could you slip like that? You hope like heck that the prophy paste will get that scary line off before anyone notices.

When it comes to things that you enjoy, then, there’s a bit of hesitation about sharing those stories as well. Like hovering around the periapical abcess that’s begging to be relieved? Or when you’re spraying baking soda slurry under a bridge and the patient becomes aware that its odor speaks more than the thousand words that you could ever say about superfloss? To you the stink is like scoring a point. Or why your trophy at the end of a particularly difficult appointment is a 2×2 gauze loaded with something that looks like buckshot, but is really your patient’s carefully extracted calculus? Fun times.

Probably the most difficult part of your career, though, has to do with patient management. Unless you’re regularly disengaging people from their mouths via nitrous oxide, there are forceful tongues, and lip pulls, and saliva ropes, and people who forget that it’s safe to swallow their own spit. Suck. Suck. Suck. Ten times a minute. At least this way they’re remembering to breathe. When they forget to breathe they feel like they are drowning. It’s not the water; they’re just suffocating because you’re blocking any chance of mouth breathing. Never mind that noses are much more optimal for breathing but whatever. Not everyone has learned how to snorkel either. And how do you convince patients that unless they just ate a handful of almonds, brushing immediately before their dental appointment won’t make your task any easier?

Then there are the patients themselves. Not just their mouths, but the whole person. Patients whose embarrassment about their teeth are the reason they haven’t been to a dentist in a while. People who not only open their mouths but open up to you, tell you their secrets, their fears, their wishes and hopes. People who trust you to take care of them, to love them, to nurture them towards health. They see something special in your eyes, and they open wide.

So go ahead and make it known out there in the big world that you’re hygienist. Or a dentist. You scale teeth. You drill teeth. No biggie. That’s what you do.

What really matters, though, are the reasons why.

 

trishmouth  Trish Walraven RDH, BSDH is a mom and practicing dental hygienist in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. She is a bit of an an introvert when she’s writing dental articles, but you get her together with her best friend from high school and Irish festival beer and she begins to make faces like this. She also makes faces like this under her mask if her patients aren’t paying attention to her flossing instructions.

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Featured, Humor, Operative Dentistry, Preventive Care Tagged With: "i hate dentists", dental humor, dental hygiene, dental hygiene therapy, outgoing introvert, ultrasonic scalers

Patients: Floss Your $%#*^@# Teeth!

October 17, 2012 By Eva Watson 10 Comments

Now… don’t let the title of this piece make you cower into your stinky underpants drawer.

My intention is to simply explain the importance of why you lovely patients must floss your teeth.  After seven years of clinical experience and seeing the outcome of a non-flossing lifestyle, my hope is that those reading this highly important dental topic will gain the vital understanding of flossing and how gum disease will affect your life.

Let’s start by me asking for your full attention by you getting your crusty, Starbucks-stained teeth out of your $8.00 latte you really can’t afford but feel the urge to economically consume every, single morning before you go to your soon-to-be outsourced job that just increased your dental insurance premium for a minute because here’s what I have to tell you.

Are you ready?  Good.

If you don’t floss your gums will become a festering, disease-ridden, smorgasbord of unrelenting bacteria that will ultimately make your gingivae bleed in buckets every, single day of your life.  If you don’t floss your gums you will spend thousands (I’m not kidding) of dollars to simply control the incurable disease (and it is a disease) that you have let build up over years and years of utter neglect.

Exudate will ooze out from underneath your gums and after questioning by the clinical professional (How YOU doin’?) the finding(s) will be defined as ‘asymptomatic’.  That is, you will feel no pain.  What you will feel is the false sense of dental health with the perpetual lie you keep telling yourself when you think, “It doesn’t hurt,” while the blood-filled pus continues to bubble and percolate underneath your gums.

Allow me to continue.

Your social life will remain that of the lonely-lived bachelor/bachelorette whose breath completely, I mean, completely reeks so intensely, you will have no realistic chance of any dating prospects.  You will continue to waste money on the premium whitening kits at your local store to give off the illusion of a healthy mouth in the hopes of attracting a mate.  Your highly offensive, (Not  joking. It’s awful.) metallic-smelling breath from your lack of flossing is so oppressive no one will want to kiss you nor come within five feet of you.  (Yes.  The odor is that strong.)  And we can still smell it through the masks we wear.  Sorry.

Once your teeth become mobile, or loose, from the lack of flossing and the prolific bacteria eating away at your bone that supports your teeth, then, and only then, will you notice and mention the finding to your dentist and/or dental hygienist. (Hey, that’s me!)  You will hear the word ‘unsalvageable’.  You may even hear the word ‘hopeless’.  That means your loose tooth/teeth will have to be pulled out from your rotting mouth because you were lazy and didn’t floss.

You’ve just lost your tooth… which could have been prevented if you only had used that little piece of string.

Sleep tight.

 

Filed Under: Humor, Preventive Care Tagged With: dental humor, dental hygiene

The gum whisperer

October 13, 2012 By Trish Walraven 4 Comments

First things first: yes, this “whispering” phenomenon has invaded every niche of our well-being. It all started in a novel with just this one guy, he whispered to horses, then Cesar Millan got famous shushing dogs on TV. There are book whisperers, baby whisperers, ghost whisperers. OMG, there’s even a Bra Whisperer if you need someone to speak quietly with you or your wife’s upper anatomy.

So I just realized the other day that, I am, in fact, the gum whisperer.

Is it because I’m the world’s utmost authority on periodontal disease? Do I have such a kingdom of knowledge that it only makes sense to become an intellectual philanthropist to my patients and can cure them of every infirmity that sits just inside their lip line? Do my mad hand skills mean that I can strip only the glue off of a postage stamp with a Gracey 13/14 while it’s still stuck to an envelope behind my back as PROOF of my superior subgingival scaling abilities?

No.

I am the gum whisperer because… I actually whisper to people’s gums.

“Hang in there, interproximal gingiva! Give that #5 an extra squeeze for me today because that class II mobility is making my probe shake.”

When you’ve given up trying to convince the lifelong smoker that nicotine is his enemy, sometimes it’s just time to try a new approach. Maybe the person attached to those gums will think you’ve gone a little cray-cray, or maybe, just maybe, they might realize that you’ve started digging into your bag of desperation because they just don’t want to hear what you have to say. They’d like to give you their problem instead of dealing with it themselves.

Years ago, I took care of a patient that was into visualization, in a new-agey kind of way. She asked me to paint pictures and describe what healing needed to take place in her gums, so that she could create a pathway for sending her healing energy into the periodontium. I dunno, it was kind of soothing for me, too.

So occasionally I’ll speak softly to a patient as I’m nudging their gums, kind of like scratching a dog’s belly, “You like that, yes you do, yes you do!” Well, not that silly — definitely more clinical-minded because really, I don’t want people to start asking me to read their auras or anything like that.

Please let me know if you’ve found yourself talking to teeth, tongues, whatever body parts have engaged your healing linguistics, so that I don’t feel so all alone in this situation. And if I really am crazy, then it’s probably best not to let me in on the truth.

 

 

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Operative Dentistry, Preventive Care Tagged With: dental hygiene, gum whisperer, periodontal disease

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • Next Page »

About

DentalBuzz explores rising trends in dentistry with its own slant. The speed at which new products and ideas enter the dental field can often outpace our ability to understand just exactly the direction in which we are heading. But somehow, by being a little less serious about dentistry and dental care, we might get closer to making sense of it all.

So yeah, a tongue-in-cheek pun would fit really nicely here, but that would be in bad taste. Never mind, it just happened anyways. Stop reading sidebars already and click on some content instead.

Email Subscription

Still in the sidebar, huh? You must be really bored. Or a fan, which is awesome! Please fill out the form below to know whenever DentalBuzz is updated. We'll send out new posts as they happen, directly to your mailbox.
Loading

Recent Posts

  • It’s not OK for your dental practice to use free cloud-based communication
  • Patients ask, “Is it safe to go back to the dentist?”
  • Free “return to work guide” from the American Dental Association
  • Why COVID-19 increases your need for contactless payments
  • A virtual care package from worried dental hygienists
  • Lead Aprons feel so good! Here’s why.
  • What is this $&!% on my toothbrush?
  • The Prophy Jet Challenge
  • How to trick kids into brushing their teeth
  • These identical twins can both be your dentist
  • Why dental insurance makes good people do bad things
  • Amabrush (and all other mouthpiece toothbrushes) do NOT clean your teeth in ten seconds

Article Archives

Contact Us

Guest columnists are welcome to submit edgy stories that cover new ground (no regurgitations, please!) , or if there's a topic that you'd like to see explored please punch in your best stuff here and see if it ends up sticking to the website.

Follow DentalBuzz on Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

DentalBuzz Copyright ©2008-2021 • bluenotesoftware.com • All Rights Reserved