Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2017-03-17, 13:11:17 | version 1.38.0
| industry news effective home care Have fun, will brush: Improving orthodontic outcomes with effective home care Author: Dr Dana Van Elslande, Canada Getting braces is a time of both excitement and dread. For kids and teens, braces can be a rite of passage. For adults, it is an opportunity to invest in an improved ap- pearance and more attractive smile. With this excite- ment comes a bit of worry for patients (and parents) though—how will I (or how will my child) manage oral hygiene with all this apparatus in the way? The orthodontic provider feels the same concern. Once the braces go on, brushing becomes much more challenging, and poor brushing leaves patients at risk for gingivitis, white scars and tooth decay.1 Ensuring adequate home care is one of the biggest challenges in most orthodontic offi ces: unless patients adopt some of the oral hygiene practices we recommend, they are not going to attain the incredible results that are possible. rought to you by Your clean routine check-up EXCELLENT Awesome! You should be seeing clean teeth and healthy gums. Keep doing what you’re doing. GOOD You’re almost acing it. You might see redness or swelling of your gums around a few teeth. Keep doing what you’re doing to get even better. AVERAGE You’re getting there. You might see some redness or swollen gums. Keep on brushing, flossing, and rinsing. NOT SO GOOD Could make your treatment take longer. You might see plaque, chalky white spots on your teeth, or swollen gums. Be sure to brush twice a day, floss at least once a day, and use your rinse. POOR Alert! You probably see plaque; chalky white spots on your teeth; or swollen, bleeding gums. Review the correct way to brush, floss, and rinse. 5 4 3 2 1 Poor Clean Routine Swollen gums, white spots on teeth Excellent Clean Routine Healthy gums and teeth Like many practices, we are seeing more adult pa- tients every year—currently about 25 % of our pa- tients are adults. Often, they are parents of our younger patients; through their child’s experience, parents can see how the technology has changed since they were kids. Braces are gentler, easier to man- age, and often have shorter treatment time. Contem- porary oral hygiene products also make it easier to get from ‘braces on’ to the end goal of ‘beautiful smile’. A comprehensive programme Our practice adopted Crest + Oral-B OrthoEssentials because we wanted a comprehensive programme to help encourage and motivate patients with their oral hygiene. Programme elements include an offi ce oral hygiene visual analogue chairside (Fig. 1), commit- ment letter, communication letters for patients and parents, a ‘how to care for your braces at home’ video, and a regimen of advanced home care products: an oscillating-rotating power toothbrush; stannous fl u- oride toothpaste; fl uoride mouth rinse; and an ortho- dontic-specifi c dental fl oss. These four products work together to help reduce plaque buildup and protect teeth from gingivitis, white scars and cavities. One unique aspect of this programme is that the offi ce oral hygiene visual analogue chairside scale interacts with our management software, allowing us to graph patients’ hygiene over time so we can show our patients (or mom and dad) how well they are do- ing with self-care. Together with patients, at each ap- pointment we score their oral hygiene on a scale from 1–5. A score of ‘1’ indicates very poor oral care, whereas ‘5’ indicates excellent care. These scores are entered into our software programme, which has the ability to generate a graph where we can monitor how the oral care is progressing throughout the patient’s treatment. It is a wonderful tool to use with children and adults alike, as it provides us with a visual rep- resentation of how performance has either improved Fig. 1: Example of offi ce oral hygiene visual analogue scale. 38 ortho 1 2017