Hi, I’m Marny with Richardson Dentistry, and I’m a hygienist with our dental team.
For decades in dentistry, we have focused on everything we can see in the mouth, including radiolucencies and radiographs. We use tools to probe, and that’s how we determine decay and gum disease. Those are measurable things that we’ve been able to use in years past to determine the amount of disease in a patient’s mouth.
But we now know, because there is so much connected between the mouth and the body, that they’re highly connected. We are now able to do salivary testing. The microbiome, our spit in our mouth, is very valuable, and it tells us the rest of the picture, the rest of the puzzle in the mouth.
It’s a simple, non-invasive test. You just swish with a little solution, and then you spit it into a little tube like this, and we send it off to a lab. The lab sends us back a profile.
It’s a pathogen profile of the patient’s saliva. It tells us bacteria. It tells us viruses. It tells us fungus. It tells us immune resistance and immune resilience.
It even helps us put together protocols and tools to shift that bacterial load. That’s probably the most exciting thing in dentistry right now. We can actually take those measurements from a patient’s pathogen profile, shift the bacterial load in your mouth, and get measurable results.
It allows us to go from reactive dentistry to proactive, preventive dentistry, which is huge when it comes to disease in the mouth.
The pathogen profile that comes out of salivary diagnostics is what allows us to provide an individual, proactive, preventive care program for our patients for the long term.
