Who do you want to be for your patients

Part 4 - Implants

Instructors:

Ms. Rachel Smith, RDH

Ms. Rachel Smith, RDH

Rachel Smith has been a peridontal therapist and passionate dental hygienist for over 20 years.  She currently works in Plano, TX with Dr. Marcus Whitmore. Rachel was one of the first hygienists in the state of TX to incorporate diode lasers in her practice.

Rachel discusses how to care for implants

I do want to share with you I asked a few periodontists that I know so this is not an official kind of study but most periodontists that I know if there's tartar on an implant or any kind of calculus, they would rather have you take a metal instrument and take off the tartar than worry about scratching the implant. They all laughed at me and said you know, our hygienists in our practice are more concerned about what they're using on the implants than we are. So I will say obviously we do want to be as careful as we can around implants but one thing is we need to really make sure our patients are very aware on what to do to take care of their implants when they go home. So we'll go over that first I wanted ñ for those people who have a Piezo or have a Cavitron, Cavitron has got a great tip that actually has a plastic edge on it that is safe around an implant. So I'm going to go ahead and show you how to that right now because you really want to interrupt biofilm which is what we start with a laser to go ahead and reduce that bacteria. Then we really want to make sure that the biofilm is really interrupted around an implant. So I want to show you how to use that but you're going to go around the circumference a little different than you are around a natural tooth.
As you're going around this implant, you really want to make sure that you are interrupting all that biofilm and just really concentrating on the color of the tooth. This plastic tip is really helpful. Now Piezo does actually make a titanium tip and the ultrasonic actually around the implant is really the best thing to make sure that they stay nice and clean.

The other thing that I talked about or touched on a little bit on the slide show is really making sure to use lightweight instruments when you're cleaning around an implant or actually when you're cleaning around any teeth at all. You want to make sure that you're really taking care of yourself ergonomically and using lightweight instruments. When you are cleaning around those, most like PDT and American Eagle and most scaler manufacturers actually have a metal or titanium scaler. Now I know that the plastic ones were the only ones that were available to us years ago but certainly the metal ones or the titanium ones are very, very useful and very patient friendly and also have some metal on them. So if you really need to get in and scale around an implant, you can feel free to do so.

Now as far as proper care for the patient, you know, most of the time when we ask patients to floss around their teeth, we ask them ñ You have a little bit of water on your chin there. Sorry, I need to get that a minute ago. We ask our patients to use a C around their teeth. So you know, when we're asking them to floss, we ask them to floss like this, you know, go around those areas so we want to make sure that they're doing this. But actually around an implant, you really want to make sure that you are telling them to go like this like in this C this way. So you want to make sure that they're getting around that implant and going back and forth. So that way, they're way down on that collar of that implant. I think that that is something we need to reinforce to the patient every time they're in here. Because if they have made such a big investment in taking care of their implants or investing in their implants, you need to help them make sure that they are doing the best that they can to take care of those. In this situation, we have an implant retained bridge so we're going to use ñyou know, make sure that this patient knows to get in here like a C and really make sure that we are interrupting that biofilm because you know that's where all that dangerous bacteria grows.