3. The Team Concept To Treating Periodontal Disease

In topic #2, what it means to treat peri­odon­tal dis­ease and gin­givi­tis in terms of achiev­ing goals was dis­cussed. Now we will begin to dis­cuss how the goals of peri­odon­tal treat­ment are achieved. Can the den­tal office alone suc­cess­fully treat peri­odon­tal dis­ease for the long term?

In den­tistry as an exam­ple, a den­tist can not undo what a patient will not do for them­selves. What this state­ment mean is that a den­tist can not undo the unde­sir­able effects of dis­ease in the long term with­out the patient doing their part to look after them­selves. There­fore one of the most impor­tant con­cepts for any­one who has peri­odon­tal dis­ease or gin­givi­tis and wants to have these con­di­tions suc­cess­fully treated for the long term to under­stand is the “Team Con­cept”. Treat­ing peri­odon­tal dis­ease or gin­givi­tis is truly about teamwork.

Before goals of treat­ment can be dis­cussed, a look at the mem­bers of the team and their roles in achiev­ing these goals is needed. The team mem­bers are the patient, hygien­ist, gen­eral den­tist and spe­cial­ist or peri­odon­tist, as needed. With­out all the team mem­bers doing their part, no long term goals can be achieved.

All mem­bers of the team are impor­tant, but none more so than the patient. Often in the long term, it is what the patient does or does not do that deter­mines the suc­cess or fail­ure of peri­odon­tal treat­ment per­formed by the other mem­bers of the team. It is very impor­tant that from the begin­ning, the patient under­stands this fact.

It is the patient that has the most dif­fi­cult tasks to per­form because it is the patient that has to develop new habits or in other words, make per­ma­nent new lifestyle changes. Mak­ing long term lifestyle changes is not easy to do as it tests that person’s com­mit­ment to those changes every day. Some­times only small changes are needed. Those habits or per­ma­nent lifestyle changes will be dis­cussed in a later article.

Con­sider the per­son who wants to lose weight. Regard­less of the method to ini­tially lose the weight, it is keep­ing the weight off for the rest of a person’s life­time that is the dif­fi­cult part and the chal­lenge because of the per­ma­nent lifestyle changes needed. Many peo­ple make the needed changes, then after a num­ber of years slip back for var­i­ous rea­sons to their old lifestyle habits that con­tributed to their weight prob­lem in the first place.

In topic # 4, we will dis­cuss the other impor­tant mem­bers of the team needed to treat peri­odon­tal dis­ease and gingivitis.