Dental Therapist

• Get the children off to a great start, so they can enjoy their smile for life
• Educate your patients about the bacterial infection that causes cavities
• Help your patients move from a reparative model to one of wellness
• Why focus on remineralizing when I can now treat the entire infection that caused it
• A non-invasive approach helps to breakdown barriers and encourage more frequent dental visits

As a dental therapist you have the opportunity to give the children the best start they can have. Education can be a big part of your day, so having a simple and effective systematic approach can be of great benefit.

Taking a preventative approach incorporating CaMBRA is an effective way to quantify individual risk factors whilst encouraging more frequent dental visits. The other paradigm shift taking place is the wide-spread understanding that drilling and filling cavities is not sufficient in treating the caries disease. Chair-side co-diagnosis bacterial screening can be an effective way to help communicate with a child and family members; and is a positive way to reinforce your recommended treatment plan.

The latest caries research has identified a number of key concepts:

• The caries infection is not pathogen specific, it is a biofilm disease and currently there are more than 30 identified bacterial species implicated in the disease process.
• pH is the strongest “selection pressure” that determines whether these cariogenic strains are present at pathogenic levels.
• Key risk factors can determine a patients’ susceptibility to this infection or bacterial imbalance.

A new level of understanding:

Dr. John Kois states that “caries risk assessment identifies patients at risk for dental caries even before they have expressed the disease and best targets treatment for those patients that have already expressed the disease. We need to find ways, like CariFree, to help our patients move from the repair model to the wellness model.”

Solutions for your practice

• Establish a simple evidence based risk assessment protocol that can be easily incorporated within your examination process.
• You already identify patients who are susceptible to the caries disease, those patients who have cavities. Determine what recommendation can be made in addition to the restorative work to treat and correct the underlying bacterial imbalance.
• Take a look at the products you currently recommend and confirm if they treat the underlying infection or just repair or remineralize the damaged site.
• Consider the pH of any oral healthcare products that the patient may use and its effect on the oral environment.