with straight smile solutions straightsmilesolutions.com and
today we're going to talk a little bit about the my phase 1 smile index which is a screening form
that i developed a few years ago it had been kind of a brain child of mine for over a decade
and now it's readily available on our website straightsmilesolutions.com you can find it
under store under documents it's also free for anyone that becomes a straight smile
solutions client be it a vip or concierge just let us know if you want a copy of it
um but we're always doing giveaways on podcasts and things for it so just listen for it and um
listen for the keywords how to get one for free but in any case i wanted to tell you a little
bit about why we developed it and how to use it so part of the reason why i developed this forum
was just out of frustration um a couple fold and by the way the comments i'm going to say here are
only the opinions of myself and of straight smile solutions they are not the opinions of the
any of the united states orthodontic community uh besides myself there may be other people that have
this opinion but i'm just going to tell you my own opinions um i get some hate mail a lot so i just
want to make sure i clarify their my opinions and no one else's but i i got frustrated when i was
practicing i got frustrated i got frustrated at seeing teenagers coming in who are done growing
you know and if you haven't listened to a lot of my other 6500 videos that are out there i have a
huge playlist just on phase one interceptive airway over i think almost 200 videos just on
that everything you could think of and by the way if i'm forgetting something let me know
because i'll make that video i'm constantly taking suggestions and i add like several videos a week
um by the way if you want to access those that entire playlist the easiest way to find it is to
go to my website straightsmilesolutions.com look for educational videos but if you go to youtube
you can just go to straight smile solutions and the playlists are all on the homepage
but in any case um i got frustrated because i would see these teenagers coming in you know
and you know the the way that dentists are trained they're supposed to send all patients to ortho at
age seven right there's little pamphlets that are in every office that say that the aio says that
does it happen no rarely why well because the general and pediatric dentists don't always
know why you know they just say you need to go because you're seven they don't say why
what's gonna happen if you don't go and unless we are educating every single primary care dentist
that's out there in the whole world on the why behind it each particular situation which
is basically teaching them orthodontics you know phase one orthodontics they're not going
to explain the why so it's very difficult to get that patient in their busy schedule or they might
be they might be afraid that it's going to cost a lot of money they just can't afford it they don't
even want the information they don't want to know they don't want to take the time they think it's
expensive to go usually the consoles are free um so they don't go and they wait until the child
has all their teeth in or until it looks like there's a problem which is often too late once
you get to that point we can't always fix things properly we have to fix things compromise or
maybe we wouldn't have had to pull out teeth but now we have to pull out teeth because you
waited too long you know we could have done something super easy and and low cost and
simple and not painful when they were younger but now it's too late right because the child is done
growing so and and just to get back on my soapbox about the three different ages let's talk about
the three different ages we've every child that's out there and the whole world has three different
ages you're like what no they have one age no they have three ages they have their age their age on
their birth certificate they are eight years two months you know that's what their birth passport
says that's when they were born great that's their age that's a chronological age but they
have two more ages they also have a dental age okay and the dental age very much might line
up with their chronological age you know if we read you know orthodontic textbooks or pediatric
dental textbooks it says what you're expecting at age eight edge seven which teeth come in when
so you know we have people who are more developed dentally and less developed dentally i mean i was
hecka slow with my teeth i don't think i lost my first tooth till i was almost eight i might have
been eight um it might have been eight and a half it was really slow isn't their grade when i lost
my first tooth i don't think they all came until i was almost four i was in high school when they
all came in that's how slow i was so my dental age was really slow really behind my chronological age
there are definitely kids i remember in my daughter's class she had third graders
who were eight who had lost all of their teeth and then there were eight-year-olds who'd lost
no teeth yet okay that's what i mean by dental age we have a dental age we have a chronological age
then we have a skeletal age skeletal age is the physical maturity of our bones and our bodies
there are eight-year-old girls who are done growing and there are eight-year-old boys
who are nowhere near growing they may not finish growing till they're 20 or 19. you know they're
still hitting their growth spurt in college they're definitely kids like that you know it's
all over the spectrum and if you have kids or if you're a teacher or you know a physician you know
this so it gets complicated with ortho because we have to take all three of those ages into account
when we create a treatment plan it's actually not complicated but it is okay because if you
misguide and the patient does not go at the right time the timing all comes into play all those
three ages comes into play when you're developing the timing for orthodontics and when to start
um you may not have a positive outcome or an idea outcome or it's a compromise
outcome or it's not going to look as good or it's not going to function as good
or it's more painful and more complicated we have to do surgeries we have to pull out teeth
you know nobody wants to do any of that if we don't have to right but this all comes down to
educating the primary care dentist i mean i think there's something close to a million primary care
dentists in the world last i heard a lot how much do they actually learn in dental school about
phase one orthodontic screening non-zero zilch nothing they know nothing they know nothing you
have to go to residency to learn that you either have to go to orthodontics residency or pediatric
dentistry residency that's when you're gonna learn it and it's highly unfortunate so for that reason
i got frustrated and created this system which i'm going to get to a little bit more later because
it's a take-home system where you can make a score be it a score of 1 or a score of 80 that talks
about how severely they need phase 1 orthodontics it was designed for a six to nine year old but
you know if they have any permanent teeth in go ahead if they have you know they baby taping go
ahead you know take the screening form you can send it home with the parent and the patient
they see their score they know how urgent it is and now it's something that tangible
that that's quantified that they can take um and show the other parent show the aunties and uncles
you know um and they understand the urgency of why they need to get started and that's why i created
it so in any case it is something that we do teach and we'll be glad to teach any dentist that's out
there our sessions you can become a concierge client for just a month and we'll teach you
um you could also just book you know hour-long sessions with us um and we'll be glad to teach
you it and and we're glad you know to do webinars to teach it if you have a large group of dentists
that can get together for a study club if it's enough to make it worthwhile you know we often
can do these for free because it is so critically important to me to teach this to as many primary
care dentists as possible to help as many kids as possible and i know you guys think that's nuts
but that's part of my mission statement in life then i have really decided to focus on there's
a lot of orthodontists out there helping general dennis with their invisalign treatment plans but
there's pretty much nobody doing this so um that's that's my goal and i'll be really honest i'm going
to tell you a couple secrets orthodontic secrets and again this gets into the whole
um these are my opinions and only my opinions and i don't want hate mail kind of thing but i've been
to a lot of ales which is american association of orthodontics um and i hear a lot of stuff
you know it's it's a real old boys network you know um highly underrepresented in minorities
was initially highly underrepresented females and some of the stuff you hear is just disgusting but
in any case um some of the stuff makes me so mad that i hear and one of the things that i heard
um was you know you should never teach a primary care dentist or a gp or a pediatric dentist how
to screen for phase one because uh what's gonna happen is then they're gonna wanna do it yeah
they're gonna wanna do it because it's heck of fun to do phase one it's the best ortho out there
i mean listen to my 200 videos on phase one treatment and interceptive treatment and growth
modification and growing jaws and expanding pellets and how fun it is it's so super fun
i can talk about it for hours but this is how disgusting it gets they're going to want to do
it and if they do it they're going gonna realize how easy it is and and we're really the smartest
or we're the smartest dentists that are out there we're the orthodontists we're the ones that had
to get the best grades we studied the most so we earned this you know um we earned this
we we have the right to take these patients and it's like what you own these patients since when
do do should we stop people from learning and it gets even worse this is stuff i've heard okay
like i said my opinion only things i've heard it's probably not all orthodontists that are out there
but the reason why we don't want to teach primary care dentists how to do phase one treatment not
only because they think that they own the patient since they're right because it's their specialty
um but because they're going to realize how easy it is they're going to want to do it and
then we're going to lose that referral better to just wait and and this is even worse this even
blows my mind sometimes i am there's one dent or orthodontist i heard say this sometimes i
choose not to do phase one treatment and tell the parents it's not needed when it kind of is
because i know i could handle this in comprehensive treatment if they wait a few years
and if i do the phase one now i'm only gonna get two or three thousand dollars for the case and
i could get seven thousand dollars later okay that's disgusting oh it gets better
and then i know that if i only get two or three thousand dollars for doing the phase one then now
the patient may not even need phase two bing bing i just said something you don't know quite often
if you do the phase one i cannot make any promises but remember what is phase one treatment right
phase one treatment is the fixing of the bite the airway and as needed aligning the front teeth for
me the aligning the front teeth can be cosmetic or it could be related to function if we needed
to say do a two by four or a phase one aligner to close seven through ten upper two to two max two
to two so so that the canines aren't impacted or something like that okay that's related to
function so that's phase one treatment we fixed the byte we fixed the transverse we fixed the
vertical we fixed the ap right over bytes under bytes overjets negative over jets deep bites open
bites habits um airways transverse tissues narrow pallets that's phase one right super fun stuff so
if i do the phase one now i'm only getting two or three thousand dollars now they might not
even need phase two which is totally true many many times i've done phase one and they didn't
need phase two sometimes it was just perfect you know if you build it at all sometimes you have
teeth coming straight and they're perfect right you just need a new retainer sometimes you don't
sometimes something there's some little twists and turns i can't predict we've got 12 more teeth well
not even 12 go um 12 plus 4. so we got 16 more teeth coming in right three's fours
fives threes four fives and all four quadrants plus sevens so those are the teeth we're still
waiting to come in 16 more teeth to come in you know usually when you fix the bite and you expand
the arches if you do it properly usually those 16 teeth come in properly can't promise you know
i did phase one of my daughter looked pretty darn perfect at age eight what happened there was an
impact to canine plenty of space for it to come in still was impacting that's just how it is okay
so can't promise i did phase one on my son didn't need phase two
upper right to number seven is probably rotated five to six degrees i mean i see it
he doesn't care he doesn't want it he's almost an adult his choice i don't really care
so yeah so then we're only getting two or three thousand dollars instead of seven thousand dollars
or six thousand dollars for the treatment and or the general dentist might notice it's a
really easy invisalign light or go case and they might do the phase two so essentially we're only
getting half the money and that's gonna ruin our profession and we're going to be losing a lot of
income so for that reason not only should we as a profession not do phase one unless absolutely
necessary which i think is disgusting even if the parent asks for it telling them they don't need it
but we also shouldn't teach anyone else how to do it or just explain what it is
that when when i heard that and i don't remember which ao this was at
i don't remember who it was but i've heard this on more than one occasion
i even heard it in my own residency by one somebody and i'm not going to say who it was so
i was flabbergasted i mean that's just wrong on so many levels it is disgusting it's embarrassing
and for that reason i said forget this i'm going to create a form and i'm going to give it to as
many people as i can as many dentists as i can i'm afraid if consumers want to have it great you can
probably google it and find it okay bring it to your dentist and tell them to use it i want you to
because i want as many patients as possible who are under age 10 to get the treatment that they
need so that we don't have to pull that so that we don't have to do surgeries later so that we don't
have adults with osa you know i can't promise it's going to happen but it's certainly going to make
it better it is the best way to help that help the health of your patient as general dentists we get
adults who have periodontal disease they have this they have that and a vast majority of a lot of the
restorative imperial issues is due to malocclusion why don't instead of just fixing the malocclusion
let's prevent the malocclusion let's start early early and fact you know what you can start even
earlier than six there is so much stuff you can do at age two three four five and it's fun and easy
i mean from habit elimination to different types of appliances just to help you know get rid of
oral habits um tongue issues there's just so much you can do so anyways i'll get off my soapbox but
now you understand the why of why i created this document and why i want every dentist to know how
to use it and happy to talk to you if you have a big enough group to create a big enough webinar i
will indeed do it for free so just give me a buzz it's worth an ask right all right thanks so much