Week 7 - Preventative Dentistry Flashcards
What are the duties as a healthcare professional
- Achieve health for our patient - maintain function and quality of life
- Ensure continued health of our patients
- Prevent disease
- Eliminate disease
- Manage or stabilize disease state/stop disease progression
- Repair damage caused by disease and restore as much function and health as possible within our scope of practice
What are the responsibilities as a Healthcare professional
- Remember that your patient is a person
- the mouth and teeth are part of a myriad of body systems that work together to maintain health
- Focus on the dentistry, but consider all the factors which affect the oral cavity
Define prevention
the act of anticipating or forestalling; an anticipation; provision made in advance
What is the aim of preventative dentistry
to maintain oral health throughout a person’s life and prevent initiation or propagation of disease process
What is primary prevention
Avoid disease or aims to prevent disease before it even occurs. It includes preventing exposures to hazards that cause disease.
It is something you do before signs and symptoms appear
Examples of primary prevention
- immunization,
- tobacco cessation programs,
- patient education,
- recalls for patients to come back to the dentist.
- oral hygiene - TB, floss, routine
- toothbrushing
- interproximal cleaning
- tongue cleaning
- quality dentistry
- smoking cessation
What is secondary prevention
Evidence of disease process is already underway but is subclinical with no obvious symptoms. The aim of secondary prevention is to reverse disease initiation and prevent disease progression/stabilize the disease process
There are signs of the disease but no symptoms.
At this stage you undertake all measure to reverse the progression of the disease
Examples of things which require secondary prevention
white spot lesions but no sensitivity,
hypomyelination of incipient caries lesions,
gingivitis from poor oral hygiene,
dysplasia
Example of secondary prevention methods
- Early identification and intervention (products/habits)
- Regular scaling and cleaning to remove plaque and calculus
- all parts of primary prevention
What are tertiary prevention
When both signs and symptoms are apparent, and the disease has already initiated. The aim of this prevention is to reduce the impact of the ongoing illness that has lasting effects, and to reduce the severity of the disease and any associated sequelae
Examples of disease which require tertiary prevention
Periodontitis
Caries
Examples of tertiary prevention
- Subgingival debridement (removal of subgingival plaque and calculus and sometimes some toxin saturated cementum)
- Escalation of oral health products —> CHX, FL, TM
- Education, reinforcement, recall
- Referral of disease progression is beyond your scope of experience e.g. periodontist, oral surgeon, prosthodontist
What is the wholistic view of health in terms of dentistry
to always address the cause of the disease
What does supervised neglect mean
repairing damage without addressing the cause of the damage e.g. doing a filling but not educating the patient on how to prevent caries and how they form
What does neglect mean
to ignore the cause
