Dental Hygiene

• Educate your patients about the bacterial infection that causes cavities
• Patients appreciate that they can now play a major role in their dental health
• 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

As a dental hygienist, you form the diagnostic and preventative centre for the entire practice. You have spent the time to build a trusting relationship with your patients and they count on you to help maintain their oral health. CaMBRA and bacterial screening can help you to streamline your day, saving valuable time.

The evidence based research of CaMBRA and a proven risk assessment format can provide you with a simpler structured approach that can often help you to win back some of that lost time.

Your patients count on you to identify any disease risk factors and make homecare, diet and product recommendations specific to their individual situation.

Beyond the commitment to manage periodontal disease is the growing understanding of the responsibility to manage dental caries as the infectious disease that it is.

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.