Sleep dentistry is becoming more and more popular in professional discourse. Read on to get Dr. Lee Ann Brady’s perspective on thinking bigger and using a knowledge of sleep to improve your patient care.
One of the hot topics in dentistry today revolves around the issue of sleep. We all struggle to get a healthy amount of rest, but some people are affected by genuine disorders that impact their healing abilities or other aspects of their health.
These problems are often insidious and take years to diagnose, though they can have far reaching consequences.
To Treat or Not to Treat Sleep: That is the Dental Question
Many dentists are taking classes to learn how to make oral appliances that help people who have apnea breathe. They are hyper focused on learning how to treat sleep, yet primarily concerned with a single drowsiness condition.
Then there are those dentists who don’t have any desire to get into this realm of treatment. I’m here to tell you that you should still implement investigations into patients’ sleep in your practice.
We have to take every opportunity to improve the likelihood of success when it comes to our cases and patient satisfaction.
The Value of Well-Rounded Diagnostics
Even if you don’t treat these types of patients, knowing about whether or not your patient is getting good sleep is important to your diagnostics. Also, not all issues are airway disorders like apnea. People can have other conditions that can’t be treated by a dentist but will still affect you as their provider.
Simply put, these patients are not going to respond to your treatment as well as people who are getting proper rest. Learning about their rest beforehand is necessary despite your desire to treat it.
Dr. Brady will return soon with Part 2 in this series: her guide to implementing sleep considerations into your diagnostics.
What’s your perspective on this topic? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!