Hinman Dental Meeting 2023

It’s Not You. It’s Your Saliva.

Course Code: Th312
CE Credits: 2

It can be highly discouraging when patients continue to have cavities despite improvements in their oral health. This can disrupt their oral health philosophy and create the belief that “cavities are normal for me” or even “I just have soft teeth.”  Dental hygienists have the unique opportunity to identify each patient’s specific risks and provide treatment recommendations accordingly. The best way to do this is through salivary pH testing, specifically because the pH of our patient’s saliva plays a vital role in their oral cavity’s hard and soft tissue health status.

Course objectives:

• Review how the pH of the mouth influences soft and hard tissue oral diseases
• Discover powerful communication skills to increase the patient’s ownership of their current oral health
• Evaluate pH testing for your office and how to implement it into a patient’s preventive visits, and compare salivary tests to test periodontal pathogens
• Determine how the oral microbiome is trained for optimal health
• Identify the link between an imbalanced oral microbiome and systemic health