(smooth music)
- What's going on guys?
This is Dr. O.
Hope you had an awesome day.
It was a great, beautiful day, as you can tell.
The sun is shining in Springfield, Missouri.
Man, I love the sun.
I don't know about you guys,
but we've had some rough weather.
It's not been seasonably warm,
it's been seasonably, unseasonably,
I don't know what the word is, seasonably cold,
something like that, I don't know.
Unseasonably cold, that's what I'm going for.
So today on The Dental Drive, this is episode three,
so we're just trucking along.
This is three days in a row.
Anybody liking it?
I don't know.
I don't know, I'm enjoying it.
It's a little bit of fun.
So we're gonna talk about something
that I think is pretty cool.
It's the main person you want to be in
good relationship with at your dental practice,
and that is your hygienist.
They change the world, right?
So all you hygienists that watch this,
big thumbs up to you.
A matter of fact, if you have a channel let me know,
I'll thumb-up your hygiene channel.
But hygienists are rockstars.
They make a huge difference
for the health of our patient's mouth, probably,
golly, probably more so than than dentists really.
I mean, we come in and we reconstruct and maybe fix things,
but hygienists prevent so much.
So why is it so important and mandatory
for you to visit your hygienist?
And that's kind of the topic of this video.
So we all want to brush and floss
and hopefully you're doing that a couple times a day
and at least for a few minutes,
making sure you keep your teeth clean,
but even if you do this and you're a rockstar at it,
it's still not going to prevent
something that's gonna build up in your teeth
and that's called tartar.
Tartar is like that calcified plaque,
it's hardened onto your teeth,
you can't get it off with a toothbrush,
and so there comes in the need for you to go to a hygienist.
And you might be going, "Man, I haven't been in a while.
"I don't have any problems."
The reason I decided to talk about this today
is we had a patient today, no pain,
the only reason she came in
is her gums are starting to bleed.
She's a previous smoker, so she quit smoking.
Hats off to her, that's awesome,
I know that's not easy to quit smoking,
but the smoking was preventing her gums from bleeding
and if your gums don't bleed
you wouldn't know that they're infected
and that's what kind of smoking kind of masks that.
But her gums were severely infected from the tartar buildup
and even worse, she was suffering from periodontal disease
and didn't even know it.
And this is kind of the big deal.
Periodontal disease causes so many things.
That's a whole other discussion,
probably at least 10-15 minutes
of kind of laying out the groundwork
of why periodontal disease can be so damaging.
But long story short,
it causes bone loss and can do it silently.
You'll have no clue it's even going on
and before you know it,
half your bone is missing around your teeth
and that's what the story was for this lady.
Beautiful teeth, fortunately not a ton of decay,
but half of the bone is gone on her teeth.
So now we gotta do what?
We gotta get those hygienists who are,
by the way, they're expertly trained.
They go to two years of extra training
just to learn how to clean teeth.
You can imagine how good they are,
if that's what they focus on,
is cleaning teeth for two years.
So that's why you got to trust them, take their advice.
They're gonna be able to really guide you on the right path
to really maintaining your teeth
and keeping you from spending
a lot of wasted money on your oral health.
So that's important to kind of listen to them.
Think of them as your first defense
to prevent you from having to see
and get shots from from a dentist like myself
who has to maybe come in
and fix things that are gone a little too far.
But anyway, so this patient had this problem
and we were able to let her know that,
"Hey, we got to get you healthy and clean that up."
So what does that look like?
So let's say you've lost
quite a bit of bone from periodontal disease
or you know you've been suffering from it,
we can't really just reverse and grow the bone back,
but we can at least halt it.
And so what we want to do
is do what's called a scaling and root planing.
it's a specialized type of cleaning
that's just a deep clean.
It goes below the gum line
and specially removes all the tartar around your teeth
and because it's so kind of skilled,
it takes quite a bit of time
and there's obviously a lot of tooth structure
to go around and clean this all off
and so it takes at least,
maybe about an hour and a half to two hours
per half of the mouth, if you have that type of disease.
Now you may just maybe have tartar buildup
and aren't susceptible to periodontal disease,
don't have the bone loss that comes from the tartar buildup
and that's why just going in every six months to,
at least once a year, to make sure that your hygienist
can help knock off that tartar.
So that's why they're awesome,
that's why I titled this hug your hygienist,
because they're awesome, they're really valuable.
Make sure you appreciate them,
they work really hard doing kind of the,
that's a tedious task to go around each tooth
and kind of remove that tartar.
Also, I want you to know that there's
a lot of people who have asked about,
maybe they have some condition
or some issues that they'd like to be addressed and fixed
and they might want to travel
or maybe they don't have any financial way to do it,
we've got something pretty cool coming up
that you'll be able to submit some information.
We might be doing, I don't know, some sort of giveaway.
I don't want to spill the beans on all the details,
but it's gonna be awesome, it's gonna be really cool.
It may cost you next to nothing or actually nothing.
See, I get so excited.
I want to fill you all in,
but you're gonna just have to wait and be patient.
I'm not very patient.
I don't know if you guys struggle with patience,
I definitely do.
And then I'm gonna give you a little prelude to tomorrow.
So tomorrow we're gonna have a good discussion on,
I keep getting asked, "What in the world are you doing
"giving cookies and cappuccinos
"and sugar at a dental office?"
It's a valid question.
I've got a really good answer for it.
I'll talk about it tomorrow.
But if you enjoyed this video,
learned a little bit about tartar buildup,
learned about loving your hygienist,
giving them a hug, high-five.
My hygienists, when I told I was gonna do this,
they're like, "Don't tell everybody to give us a hug."
I'm like, "Okay, well it's a play on words, right?"
Hug your hygienist.
Alright, but I hope you guys enjoyed it.
You guys have an awesome evening, awesome day tomorrow.
Thanks for watching and give the video a thumbs up,
subscribe if you haven't already.
I hate saying all that stuff,
but you gotta say it, otherwise you forget, right?
So if you've watch to now, please that courtesy.
Hit that little thing like that
and you guys have an awesome one.
Keep smiling.