Save Your Teeth and Save Your Life
This goes back to my periodontal residency that I had, and the type of training that I got was basically deep cleaning, surgery, then the bite guard, and the periodontal maintenance. Well, we now know that there are several species of bacteria that are severe pathogens in the mouth that do not respond well to deep cleaning alone. And therefore, what we do is we like to know our enemy before we go into battle. So, we take a salivary analysis. We determine the levels of the bad bacteria, pathogens as we call them. And then we have a specific treatment plan directed to that patient. Maybe not every patient’s treatment plan is the same because the level and the volume of pathogens or bad bacteria may change. And this may include doing some laser-assisted treatment. It may include having specific trays made with predicaments in the trays that the patients wear. These trays are constructed such that it causes the medications to go down between the tooth and gum where the bacteria are. Sometimes we can use hydrogen peroxide solution. Sometimes we use an antibiotic. There are other adjuncts that we do have available to us to be able to reduce the bad bacteria, but more importantly to bring up the good bacteria to replace the bad bacteria. This is why we like the HR5s and direct diagnostics, so we can see our enemy before we go into battle. And also, principle of medicine 101, don’t treat an infected wound. And if we’ve got periodontal disease where we’ve got a big infection, it doesn’t make sense to do periodontal surgery in the area if the pathogens are still present.