Sound Dental Care, Part 3

*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Welcome to the Answers for Elders Radio show. Meet the trusted experts who will give you straight answers and will help guide you on the path of later life care. Now here’s your host, founder, caregiver and CEO, Susanne Newman, -And welcome back, everyone, to Answers for Elders Radio Network, and I am here with Sarah Luetke, who is the founder and CEO of Sound Dental Care. And Sarah, I’m so glad we’ve been talking about seniors and dental health, all different types of situations where um, we may be neglecting ourselves and and certainly being in a situation where we’re concerned about a loved one.  You shared with me, Sarah, a story that I would love to have you repeat to start off this first segment about the gentleman that used to be clients of yours UM and then you treated his wife. Would you kind of reiterate that story to start off the segment with our listeners. – Yes. I saw a couple – husband and wife’s spouse – for years at the private practice. I was their hygienist at the dental office, and both had excellent teeth, lots of crowns in their mouth. Anytime they needed work done, they financially did it, they could afford it, they believed in it, and they just had beautiful mouths, healthy mouths. And the husband came in one day and I haven’t seen his wife in a few years, and sometimes you just don’t know if it’s appropriate to ask. And so he mentioned her and it brought up the topic, and he said, I haven’t had her end because she now lives in a nursing home, and I’m really worried about her, Sarah.” And he got tears in his eyes and he said, she has 10 to 15 teeth that have broken off to the gum line since you guys saw her last. And her mouth was immaculate when I last saw her. So the dentist came in and we told him this story, and he said, Sarah, you’re starting your your mobile company, why don’t you go to the nursing home and see her? And I said, okay. So I went to the nursing home and saw her, and I took photos and I sent them to my dentist that I was working for, and he said, this patient has Alzheimer’s now, And he said, there is no way I’m extracting all those teeth on her, and you would have a different opinion from a different dynis. Some dentist may extract all of those, but he said, on an Alzheimer’s patient, it’s going to be general sedation – and she’s not going to tolerate it without general sedation. And he said, it’s not in her best interest. He said, “why don’t you go do that thing you do?” And that thing the thing I do is silver diamine fluoride and that is a palliative care or an alternative treatment. And the silver diamine is an antimicrobial, a prescription topical, and you apply it with a Q-tip, you apply it to a cavity, you can apply it to root tips. I’ve applied it to abscesses where a patient where the medical doctor at a nursing almost say this patient isn’t healthy enough for an extraction, and I said, well, we can’t do nothing. What can we do? And the medical doctor will put the patient on a systemic antibiotic and I will treat it with silver diamine from a clinical point, and together we will try to do everything we can to keep the patient healthy. So this is what I did for my patient, and I continued to care for her for five years. She had quit eating a lot of her favorite foods before the silver treatment. Those teeth did turn black, as it arrested the cavities. If that’s a concern to the patient or the family, you can always have tooth-colored fillings put on top of them. But you don’t have to. Her husband said, no, just leave it. She started eating bacon again. She she lived for five more years, and I cared for her three months. And the cost, the cost is so much less than doing a filling. And, as a matter of fact, in our practice, we charge no extra for our private pay patients. And if we build insurance and they don’t pay for it, we write it off because we feel that it is the best thing, better than a cleaning. It’s the best thing we can do for a patient. – Sure, sure, And you know that’s the thing that a lot of us don’t realize that there are alternatives. And we go to a dentist and we think, oh, you know, I’m just fearful of what I’m gonna face when I get in there. And I know that last time I went to a dentist and my teeth clean and they took X rays of my mouth. They turned around and told me that it was going to be three thousand dollars just to get me to ground zero. Well, most of us don’t have three thousand dollars laying around to do stuff like that. Um, you know, it’s an it’s a really huge situation, or they don’t have the you know, the income t even be able to finance something like that. You know, So having these options when you’re a senior and if you’re in a situation where you’re in assisted living, UM, this might be a wonderful opportunity. So you work primarily through like you said, through assisted living, senior living communities, you know, senior centers or community centers is that correct? Correct? – Yes, and disability homes, adult family homes. – Okay, okay, So you could go into an adult family home and do everything you know, you know, do everyone obviously together. And so I want to talk a little bit about when you talked about the lady with dementia.  Dementia is a huge issue because, again, you don’t necessarily know if  , they’re not in their right mind to lay there and be still. So how do you handle that? – Great questions. My practice began because of my three family members, actually there’s four of them. But one of them, my grandfather had a stroke and was in a nursing home. Then my mother in law, she has had Alzheimer’s since she was 52 years old. Bless her heart, she’s still alive 21 years Alzheimer’s. – That is amazing. – We pray every day that that she gets to go to Heaven soon because, it’s just very it’s a very challenging thing. But her and then I had an uncle and also my grandmother and they’ve both passed. They both had Alzheimer’s as well. And what I saw is, all four of my family members had lifetime dental care and had traditional genteral care every three to six months and really took care of their mouths. They all went into nursing homes and all of a sudden, the care just fell off. It is not because the nursing homes are trying to neglect it. It’s that nursing homes have so much on their plate. They are not trained in the mouth. Just like I’m not trained to shower someone, I wouldn’t know how to shower another person it’s not my training, and every single care home part of the national group. I’m part of National and Mobile and Teldentistry Alliance. There’s a lot of independent practitioners like myself, and our goal is that every single nursing home has a dental hygienist in their building at some point. It does not have to be a staff member, but it needs to be there. And state auditors are starting to look at this at facilities, and so facilities are loving that our company is willing to come in and see their patients and say, hey, it doesn’t have to be this, this whole treatment plan in this scary situation for an Alzheimer’s patient. Our approach is more we meet each patient where they are. If they are in their bed and they can’t get out and it’s a wire lift, and the facility says it’s just not possible. You know what. Our team members are amazing and they’re gonna say, you know what, I’ll go see them in bed and I’ll do everything I can for them. It may not be the same exact cleaning they would get at a dental office, but I’m doing something. Absolutely are Alzheimer’s patients you asked about do they allow it. I’ve had so many family members and guardians over the years say I just we’re going to sign them up, but I just don’t think it’s going to be successful. And you see someone in their own home study, their nursing home study, and you approach them in a non – we have to do this. I’m on a schedule, I have my next patient sit in the waiting room. You approach them in a way that we make it happen. And we rarely, rarely have a patient we do nothing that there’s always something that we can do that, you know. – And that’s the most important thing. It’s like we all do the best we can with what we’ve got, as we always say. But you know, the idea is obviously is to find ways of you know, comfort. Like we talked about you you used a very important term called palliative care. A lot of people don’t know necessarily what palliative care is,  but it is a way to to keep the patient or the individuals as comfortable as possible. And mouth pain can be debilitating and it can can also you know, affect their overall health and you know, certainly having the ability to do that is really important and I’m just so grateful that you’re on and here. So obviously you serve primarily through senior centers and community centers and senior living is your main you know, goal, or nursing homes, If you have a loved one in a nursing home, and how I guess the question is how do you find out if they if they don’t work with you, Can you go to the center and ask them to reach out? Do you reach out to them? How does that happen? – Great question. So we serve almost 200 nursing facilities throughout the state of Washington at this time, and we started with zero in 2016, so you can see the need out there. And so, family members, if you’re hearing about us on this podcast, you can reach out to us at Sound Dental Care. We – if it’s a facility that we do not serve and we have a provider in that location, we love introductions to the facilities. We reach out all the time to facilities and make calls. They have so many demands on them that oftentimes we don’t hear back or maybe in the future we do have that need. However, we have a family member pull us in and that’s   – That happens, right? It’s like absolutel.y So the the main thing I think that’s really important is that we want to make sure that you are that our families out there that have loved ones that are seniors, get the care that they need. And so we’re gonna talk a little bit in our next segment just really about you know, your vision, your mission, um the future. What we’re gonna look at is how this is gonna fall into place. And not only that, but I want to talk a little bit about, you know, just overall tele-dentistry. You know, for those that don’t live in this Puget Sound region, how can they get a similar type of a treatment things like that. And Sarah and I will be right back right after this. – We at Answers for Elders thank you for listening. Did you know that you can discover hundreds of podcasts in our library on senior care, So visit our website and discover our decision guides that will help you also navigate decision making. Find us at Answersforelders.com.