Episode 1 - Delaying Dental Visits

Live episode from February 28, 2022

Dr. Michelle DeFelice Hucke discusses delaying dental visits and other oral-health topics live on WSOS radio.

Learn more at:  https://jacksonvillebeachdentist.com/

Transcript

Kevin (00:05):
It's time for Dr. Michelle's smile cast where we talk about your smile and other interesting dental topics, and now here's Dr. Michelle DeFelice Hucke of Jax Beaches Family Dentistry.

Kevin (00:36):
And who doesn't like Abba? Right? Got to love Abba, Dr. Michelle DeFelice Hucke. Do you like Abba?

Dr. Michelle (00:43):
I do. I like all things seventies and eighties.

Kevin (00:45):
Yes. There's a never ending ABBA show in London now. Have you heard about this?

Dr. Michelle (00:52):
Yeah, and I thought there was a

Kevin (00:55):
It's done with show.

Dr. Michelle (00:57):
Yeah,

Kevin (00:57):
It's done with artificial intelligence and holograms of the

Dr. Michelle (01:01):
Actual thought

Kevin (01:01):
Performers thought it was a

Dr. Michelle (01:02):
Theater

Kevin (01:03):
Thing. Oh yeah. Well, there's always that. I'm sure there's always like a Mama Mia show somewhere. No, no, no. This is where they actually did these three dimensional images of them in concert, and then they did so many variations of it that you could go five nights in a row and never see the exact same ABBA concert. But they're not real humans. They're really three dimensional

Dr. Michelle (01:24):
Holograms. That's awesome. We never have to have real bands again.

Kevin (01:27):
Yeah, that's not good. You can't have that, right?

Dr. Michelle (01:31):
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.

Kevin (01:32):
Yeah, it'd be like going to the dentist and it'd be the dentist just being a hologram. We wouldn't want that. Right.

Dr. Michelle (01:38):
That really won't work.

Kevin (01:39):
That won't work. No. Dr. Michelle is with us, and she's going to join us each and every month, and we're going to talk a little bit about your pretty smile and your ability to eat without effort and enjoy your food and have that smile that gives you some confidence, right? Absolutely. Yeah. We're going to talk about a different issue each and every month. And this month we're going to talk about something that has impacted a lot of folks, not just here in St. John's County in northeast Florida, but throughout the country. Delaying dental procedures, really delaying any sort of elective procedure in terms of medicine, but especially delaying those dental visits. It's been a real problem, right?

Dr. Michelle (02:15):
Yeah, it really has. I had an interesting conversation when I was playing golf yesterday. I was talking to the woman that was in my cart, my cart mate, and she was talking about the fact that she ended up delaying her regular dental care. And what was awesome, because I believe in the mouth being the window to your overall health, is that she said to me that delaying the cleanings, because I'm not sure everybody out there knows this, but during the 2020 shutdown as a dentist, we were only allowed to do emergency visits, which meant that we were not doing regular wellness visits, including a cleaning and an exam. So that was making her very anxious and she said she knows how important the health of her gums is because she's a cardiac patient and the practice that she was going to, and we're all struggling with this as dentists, was struggling to find a hygienist after the covid shutdown. And so they ended up having to keep pushing her appointment out, and by the time she got seen, she had pretty severe gum issues and she had a couple of teeth that needed crowns, and she really attributes it all to the delay and she's not alone. There's a lot of people like that, and then some people, because gotten out of the habit of it after all of that have delayed it just because it got off their calendar and you lose, life gets in the way, right? You lose track of time.

Kevin (03:54):
Yeah. There's a study that just came out that was published in one of these clinical journals in the last couple of weeks that says nearly half of US adults have reported delaying dental care during the whole covid epidemic going back to 2020. So for the almost really, well, really two years now, people have delayed their dental procedures. I would think we'll see the results of that for years moving forward, right?

Dr. Michelle (04:21):
Yes. We have a lot of people that are just finally coming in and it's been two full years, which means they have two years and sometimes two and a half years up to three years with no x-rays and no thorough exams. So we're finding a lot of things, including unfortunately aggressive cancer as a result of not getting those X-rays because the thing with dental disease, unfortunately, of course I, I've gotten public criticism about saying this especially on the radio, but there are no symptoms, so you don't have any early warning sign. So to me, it would be helpful if even minor decay had a little bit of a symptom, then you would know you had something wrong. Right.

Kevin (05:08):
As Dr. Michelle once again, and she is with Jax Beaches Family Dentistry, you can go to jacksonvillebeachdentist.com for more information. We're going to put all of her contact information up on our Facebook page and up on Instagram too at WSOS radio, and this is the time that we spend with her each and every month talking about your dental health. So help us understand. So if somebody out there listening has not had their teeth cleaned since February of 2020, just a few weeks before covid started, what's going on in their mouth right now?

Dr. Michelle (05:38):
Well, the main, excuse me, I got to cough. The main reason to get your teeth cleaned is to have a dental exam. So one thing that will have happened in two years time is it's possible that you have something that could have been small two years ago, is now more significant and often completely asymptomatic. So dental disease is generally an asymptomatic disease, and then once you are an adult, meaning 16 or 18 dentally, if you aren't getting your teeth cleaned every six months, you then have gum disease. If you have a history of having gum disease in the past, that may mean that you need a deep cleaning again, because everything has lapsed. If you have, and this just me pleading with everyone listening, if you have underlying conditions like cardiac issues or diabetes, please just run to the nearest dentist because the bacteria that's been building up in your mouth is impacting those systemic issues,

Kevin (06:38):
And that is what's critical, the bacteria that builds over time, right?

Dr. Michelle (06:43):
Yeah. It ends up directly going into your bloodstream and on a daily basis

Kevin (06:49):
In this study that found that over half of Americans have delayed going to the dentist during this covid period of time, they also indicate that one of the most troubling concerns is what they think will be a rise in oral cancers because they obviously won't be detected like Dr. Michelle just indicated, because a trained professional, a doctor or dentist is not looking in your mouth

Dr. Michelle (07:09):
Or taking X-rays. I mean, the one cancer that we found was really aggressive was just purely and simply because he wasn't getting his annual, and so it would've been caught a lot earlier. But yeah, we also do a special dental, special oral cancer screening when we do our exam with a light that allows us to detect oral cancer early. The problem with you seeing something in your mouth and that being the first way that you detect it is that once you can see oral cancer, it's usually already at stage four

Kevin (07:43):
Too late in some ways, not too late, but certainly much more problematic. Dr. Michelle is with us, and we're talking about your dental health and the issues with delaying going to see the dentist. We touched on it briefly, but the notion of gum disease. So help us understand as layman, what's going on with our gums, so when they're not cleaned or if we're not flossing or whatever, the average person is going to experience gum disease, what's that going to look like and feel like?

Dr. Michelle (08:13):
Well, again, the problem with dental disease, especially gum disease, is many times that's completely asymptomatic. Sometimes what you will notice if you're actually flossing assertively enough is that you'll notice that your gums bleed, or you might have a vague awareness in an area, and if you poke at it with a toothpick, it bleeds. Now, it's not bad to make your gums bleed, but that is a symptom of a disease called gum disease. Well, it's called a fancier word, but

Kevin (08:47):
Hit us with the fancy word. Well,

Dr. Michelle (08:48):
It's either gingivitis, which is the early form of gum disease or periodontitis where you have inflammation just like you do in gingivitis, except that you also have bone loss and there's no way for you to perceive the bone loss. So as a layman, you wouldn't know which disease you have until you have X-rays, and we can see the bone on the X-ray.

Kevin (09:12):
A lot of quiet troubling issues going on in our mouth and we don't even know about it. Right?

Dr. Michelle (09:17):
Yeah, it's not really, yeah, not the greatest design. Yeah.

Kevin (09:20):
Every time Dr. Michelle mentioned something that's bad, she goes, oh, and that'll be asymptomatic early on. In other words, we don't feel any of this stuff.

Dr. Michelle (09:28):
No, you don't. Yeah, bomb. It is funny though, when you get your gums healthy, especially if you use, we are blessed in that we offer gum treatment trays that you put peroxide in so that you can do some pretty aggressive treatment of the gums at home yourself. In between wellness visits, when people start to use them and then they come back in, they're like, I can't believe how great my mouth feels. But they can't really describe what wasn't great before because it wasn't really symptomatic. They just know it feels better now.

Kevin (10:03):
And when you use these trays, what's going on?

Dr. Michelle (10:07):
Well, the problem with gum disease is that the bacteria is out of balance, and so what you end up with is more of the anaerobic bacteria, which are the bad bacteria. The great thing about utilizing a low dose peroxide is that it oxygenates the mouth and the bad bacteria do not like that, so they're not happy with the new environment. And then the other thing is just that peroxide obviously kills bacteria, but it definitely turns the environment in your mouth to basically a good neighborhood instead of a bad neighborhood.

Kevin (10:45):
Right. There you go. That's a good way to explain it. And all these things that you're talking about all seem to point back to that one key issue, which is to visit a dentist regularly,

Dr. Michelle (10:57):
Right? Yeah. Because there's no way on your own for you to know. I mean, I have people all the time that I'm just kind of chatting with, right? Socially, they go, oh yeah, I haven't been in a long time, but I'm good. But there's just no way to know. And a lot of times with the bacteria too, we end up, if someone has persistently gotten lots of deep cleanings and they've tried this and tried that and everything, it just keeps coming back. We now also have the ability to do testing of your saliva so that we can specifically see exactly which bad bacteria overgrowth that you have, and then sometimes we have to target that with interesting different antibiotics.

Kevin (11:34):
That's an interesting test. I'll have to have that the next time I come to your office. I mean, that's just fun all's in my saliva.

Dr. Michelle (11:41):
Exactly. Well, we just do, we test the top 11.

Kevin (11:43):
Oh, really? Okay. Alright. Did that recently with my dog. Blue did. Yeah. Put his saliva in a tube and sent it off to see what sort of breeds are around.

Dr. Michelle (11:51):
Oh yeah.

Kevin (11:53):
Just like the ancestry for humans.

Dr. Michelle (11:55):
Yeah. Well, the company's called oral DNA.

Kevin (11:57):
Oh, okay. Alright. Just FYI. In case you ever do it on a pet. We've had a couple of veterinarians in here, Dr. Grace, who's here in town, she says, total waste of money laughed at me for having this done. Blue who weighs almost 50 pounds, came back as majority chihuahua, and she said that ironically, just about all the reports that come back from whatever one you're using, there's four or five of 'em, they all come back. Majority Chihuahua. Even if you're like a great Dane,

Dr. Michelle (12:26):
Even if it looks exactly like a pit

Kevin (12:27):
Bull. Yeah. It doesn't matter. They just come back majority chihuahuas. So it's a great racket. I have this vision in my mind of somebody in their garage is getting all this bail and just sending out the same results. Casting checks, same checks, same report. Yeah, same report. Dr. Michelle is here with us. I'll tell you what, we're going to play a song or two when we come back. We're going to talk about some other issues associated with delaying that dental visit, which by the way should be at least every six months, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Learn more by checking us out on Facebook. We're going to have a photograph of Dr. Michelle and also ways that you can get in touch with her by just checking us out at WSOS radio, both on Facebook and Instagram, and we'll be right back. Dr. Michelle, you like bands that have horn sections in them, right? Absolutely. That's a real rock and roll band. I

Dr. Michelle (13:23):
Like a saxophone.

Kevin (13:24):
Yeah, Chicago. Make me smile. Get it. Wink, wink. And then the song before that that we were playing was from Bad English, which I engage in every day when I see you smile.

Dr. Michelle (13:37):
Oh, I didn't even catch that.

Kevin (13:39):
You are slick. When we have Dr. Michelle and she spends time, of course with you, with us, we're going to figure out a way to do smile themed songs. Wow. I saw some data recently that people, when they first look at you, one of the very first things they look at is your mouth.

Dr. Michelle (13:57):
Yeah. Well, it's right there in the middle of your face.

Kevin (13:59):
Well, but they kind of look at your mouth because they expect you to start speaking. Then they glance up towards your eyes and then they check out your hair and sort of in that order. So that's why a smile or your teeth, whatever current state they are in, is pretty darn important to how we engage with others.

Dr. Michelle (14:17):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. My dad's a dentist. He and I were partners for 12 years when I first got out of school, and that was one of the first things he taught me, which I thought was interesting. He's like, a lot of times people don't care for their mouths because they never liked their teeth, and he wanted me, especially as a young dentist, to not automatically assume or make assumptions about why someone is avoiding the dentist or about why they're not taking care of their teeth.

Kevin (14:45):
I've had people here on the radio that we've done different shows and things with who are very self-conscious of their mouth to the point that they will speak almost with some sort of a speech impediment because of that,

Dr. Michelle (14:59):
They're trying to cover over their mouth.

Kevin (15:01):
And it's sad. And I think what a lot of folks don't fully realize too is that with modern dentistry today, some of these things that may require some major effort, but they can be done and it's not going to be incredibly painful.

Dr. Michelle (15:13):
No, dentistry has come a really long way. So that is, we were talking before the break about delaying dentistry because of Covid, but over my entire career, one of, there's multiple main reasons I think why people avoid it, but some of it is that they had a really bad past experience before the improvements in dentistry and that past experience just keeps playing in their minds and usually generally the anticipatory stress of what's going to actually happen far out seeds, what actually does happen, right?

Kevin (15:53):
Then it becomes worse over time,

Dr. Michelle (15:55):
And we also can use nitrous oxide, do some sedation. There's all different things that you can do to make it more comfortable, but mainly the reason it's more comfortable now is that the anesthetics are way better.

Kevin (16:08):
Yeah. Yeah. It's Dr. Michelle. We were talking about delaying dental procedures, and in our last segment or earlier we were talking about all the impacts that it has all of them pretty bad. And of course, usually if you have issues going on in your mouth, they're getting progressively worse. And if you don't want to deal with it from a health perspective, at least deal with it pragmatically from a wallet perspective. Right. Because the more you delay the need for a dental procedure, the more costly it's going to be down the road.

Dr. Michelle (16:35):
Yeah. I mean, that's the other main reason to me for wellness visits is that you are automatically getting your teeth checked by a dentist and examined and x-rayed every six months, and a lot of our patients over the age of 40 come in every three months. So it guarantees that if something is in progress or is going to happen in your mouth, that it's not going to be as big of a deal as if you only come as needed.

Kevin (17:06):
That's right. That's right. And so that's interesting. So people after the age of 40 should perhaps get their teeth cleaned three times a year instead of twice a year

Dr. Michelle (17:14):
When you have a tendency to have gum disease. And again, like we were discussing earlier, it's a bacterial disease. So if you have that tendency, it's a very good idea to come more often. Sometimes we'll start with every four months, but a lot of our chronic periodontal patients come in every three months.

Kevin (17:34):
If you have any questions at all, obviously Dr. Michelle is our resource here and we would encourage you to learn more about what she's about. You can learn about her bio and what Jax Beaches Family Dentistry is all about by going to the website, which is

Dr. Michelle (17:48):
Jacksonvillebeachdentist.com.

Kevin (17:50):
Sounds a lot better when you say it sounds a lot more legit. We were looking earlier on though, if you're just tuning in or catching us in the middle of this particular broadcast, there's a lot of data out there that says so many people have delayed going to a dental visit that they should have had because of Covid. And yes, like Dr. Michelle mentioned, there's been all kinds of reasons for not doing it in the past, just general procrastination probably being one. But Covid really, really has expedited this has made this into a big deal

Dr. Michelle (18:20):
For multiple reasons. Obviously we weren't doing wellness visits for a couple of months, and that causes us to have that whole batch of people lose momentum and lose their place. The best thing I would recommend for people out there is when you go get your teeth cleaned and you have your wellness visit, make your next one because just like all of us, life gets in the way and we get busy, and so you get out of the habit of it. Once you're out of the habit of it, then all of a sudden two years go by. So that was one of the biggest interruptions. And then we all know from what we've been going through with Covid, we've had a lot of people that get back on the schedule and then they have a fever or they have a this, so then they cancel again and it just goes on and on. And also, I mean, just want to be truthful about it, a lot of people aren't super excited skipping and hopping to the dentist. Yeah. So any excuse, they have to not go. They're like, they feel validated.

Kevin (19:27):
These are people that clearly are not going to family dentistry, whereas a nonstop party.

Dr. Michelle (19:33):
Yeah. So yeah, it's a mixture of all of that. But like I say, I think I do believe one thing that I hate the phrase, some sort of good that has come out of that's horrible, but we are definitely more wellness focused as a society now, and you really can't be completely well if you have disease in your mouth. So definitely I'm hearing that back from patients like the lady that I was playing golf with who was telling me that if you have gum disease, it's not good for your heart. I was like, amen.

Kevin (20:14):
Yeah. She was sick of the corner.

Dr. Michelle (20:15):
Had she? I know. And at first I thought, is she like schmoozing me? Does she know I wanted to hear that?

Kevin (20:21):
Did somebody tell her about

Dr. Michelle (20:22):
Me? Michelle's having a hard day. Can you tell her that gum disease is bad for your heart? Then

Kevin (20:27):
After you stop hugging on her? Yeah, that's right. That's funny. Well, when it comes to dental health matters, obviously we highly recommend Dr. Michelle and her team. You can learn more of course by checking out the website, which is

Dr. Michelle (20:41):
Jacksonville beach dentist.com.

Kevin (20:42):
Dr. Michelle, thank you for stopping by. Absolutely.