Sarah Luetke, founder and CEO Sound Dental Care, joins Suzanne to talk about breakthroughs in geriatric dental care.

Sarah shares a story: “I saw a couple - husband and wife's spouse - for years at the private practice. I was their hygienist at the dental office, and both had excellent teeth, lots of crowns in their mouth. Anytime they needed work done, they financially did it, they could afford it, they believed in it, and they just had beautiful mouths, healthy mouths. The husband came in one day, and I hadn't seen his wife in a few years, and he said, ‘I haven't had her in because she now lives in a nursing home, and I'm really worried about her. She has 10 to 15 teeth that have broken off to the gum line since you guys saw her last.’ So the dentist said, ‘Sarah, you're starting your your mobile company, why don't you go to the nursing home and see her?’ I saw her, and I sent photos to the dentist, and nd he said, ‘There is no way I'm extracting all those teeth — some dentists may extract all of those, but he said on an Alzheimer's patient they would need general sedation, it's not in her best interest. He said, “why don't you go do that thing you do?” And that thing the thing I do is a palliative care or an alternative treatment with silver diamine fluoride, an antimicrobial prescription topical. You apply it with a Q-tip, you apply it to a cavity, you can apply it to root tips. I've applied it to abscesses where a patient isn't healthy enough for an extraction. What can we do? The medical doctor will put the patient on a systemic antibiotic and I will treat it with silver diamine from a clinical point, and together we will try to do everything we can to keep the patient healthy. So this is what I did for my patient, and I continued to care for her for five years. She had quit eating a lot of her favorite foods before the silver treatment. Those teeth did turn black, as it arrested the cavities. If that's a concern to the patient or the family, you can always have tooth-colored fillings put on top of them. But you don't have to. Her husband said, no, just leave it. She started eating bacon again. She she lived for five more years. And the cost is so much less than doing a filling. As a matter of fact, in our practice, we charge no extra for our private pay patients. And if we bill insurance and they don't pay for it, we write it off because we feel that it is the best thing, better than a cleaning. It's the best thing we can do for a patient.”

Learn more at https://www.sounddentalcare.com/ or call 206-745-3808.

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