Claire Jeong is the founder of StudentRDH.com, dentaltoaster.com, smarterDA.com and now https://wakeupmemory.com/
She has also created Wake Up Memory tips to help us remember the 3 drugs that cause gingival hyperplasia. We have all seen patients struggling with this, but sometimes remembering the exact drugs isn’t so easy. Claire is here to help us.
In this episode, Claire teaches us the 9 foods to help our brain and the Wake Up Memory technique to remember those brain foods.
Check out her website, dentaltoaster.com for more info and other great CE courses, including one by Michelle!
For your viewing pleasure this TIPisode has been transcribed:
Michelle Strange: A Tale of Two Hygienists presents this week’s TIPisode: Quick and easy tips to keep you up to date, and presented by the experts in the profession. Now, get ready for your unofficial TIPisode.
Claire Jeong: Hi. This is Claire at wakeupmemory.com — a website you can find courses to double your memory today — DentalToaster CE courses, and StudentRDH dental hygiene exam prep solution.
Today, I want to talk about gingival hyperplasia. So there are certain drugs that can cause this drug-induced gingival enlargement. While the science doesn’t exactly know why this is happening, but what’s important for us dental professionals is to understand those drugs that are going to cause that so we can intelligently diagnose, we can intelligently treatment plan and explain things to the patient. So we’re going to memorize those today using the WakeUp Memory technique.
WakeUp Memory — we have an acronym for that. It is I.S.E.E. You intend to memorize it; you S — so S is for you see it, you observe it; E for edit, you heavily edit the information; and last, the E is for extra, you put some extra sprinkles of emotion on it.
So let’s try to use this together here memorizing three drugs that are more likely to cause gingival hyperplasia.
The first drug is to prevent the organs to reject what you have been transplanted, and that drug can be cyclosporine. The brand name is called Sandimmune. The second drug is going to be calcium channel blocker, so that is an anti-hypertension drug, example would be nifedipine, and the brand name is called Procardia. Now, the last drug that I want to introduce to you today is in this anti-seizure medication. It’s called phenytoin, and the brand name for that is Dilantin.
Now, you have those three drugs: cyclosporine, calcium channel blocker, and phenytoin. How are you going to memorize them being related to gingival hyperplasia? We have so much more to remember in dentistry, right? So let’s do it together.
I want you to focus here on the first drug cyclosporine, and all I want you to do is say “cycle, cycle.” Do it with me a few times. Cycle. Yes. Like the bicycle. And now, I want you to focus — zoom in on those wheels, the round wheels. Here, you take those round wheels onto the patient gingiva, and all you think is just the gingiva is round, it is swollen, and it is caused by this drug called cyclosporine. So again, cycle, cyclosporine. You focus on the bicycle and on the wheel, and you put that on the patient gingiva.
I know it doesn’t exactly make sense yet, but that’s how our brain likes to remember things. We have to tickle it. We have to give it something that it likes or not. If we just make it boring, we will never remember it.
So let’s continue. Calcium channel blocker. How am I going to remember this being related to gingival hyperplasia? This is what I do. I take the C in “calcium” and I take the C in “channel” so you have a C and a C. What I’m going to do is I’m going to flip the second C just like you had it in a mirror image so the Cs are actually facing each other. Does that make any sense? Try to picture it in your head. Now, the Cs, they come together and forms a O [sic], a big circle. Now, when you have that circle, you’re going to put that on the patient’s gingiva and think gingival hyperplasia. Again, calcium channel blocker, C-C, flip the second C, make an O, and there you go. You have gingival hyperplasia. I think you are slowly understanding this concept of WakeUp Memory now.
Let’s do one more example here. The third drug was phenytoin. Here, I say it. Phenytoin, phenytoin. I’m not actually dissecting the word by its letters, but I’m just thinking “phen.” That’s all I need to know: phen. This is phonetic. I’m saying the word “phen.” Now, if you have a fan in the summer if it’s hot, usually what shape is it? Is the fan round? I know sometimes you have a Dyson. I think they look a little more oval. Anyhow, let’s focus on the traditional fan, so let’s think about this round fan. The round fan, it’s going around, and then you put that onto the gingiva, then you just come up with gingival hyperplasia.
I know we just memorized three drugs and we said they are related to gingival hyperplasia. You might think this is really weird — Claire, I don’t follow you — but let’s just do it one more time and see if you can recall. Because if you can recall, I’ve done my job and you have memorized it forever.
So cyclosporine. What are you taking out of this? Cycle. And then you think about the bicycle. You focus on the wheel. Does that give you enough clue to think about round wheel, gingival hyperplasia?
Now, let’s do the second drug calcium channel blocker. What did you do? You took the second C — so you have two C [sic] — the second C, you flip it, you put those C together, that creates an O, and you think about the circle just like O, and you put it on the patient’s gingiva. That gives you gingival hyperplasia.
The last one was phenytoin. What do you say here? Phen, right? Fan like the hot summer. You have a fan, it’s round, and you think about gingival hyperplasia.
Now, if you have a patient that is taking, for example, calcium channel blocker such as nifedipine, you’ll be able to think, “Okay. I’m seeing some abnormality here in your gingiva.” And when you check back, actually, the drugs the patient is taking, you’ll be able to connect the dots together. Or if the patient is taking phenytoin and you see again gingival hyperplasia, you’ll be able to tell the patient what is going on, and you might advise the patient to bring this to the physician’s attention. Maybe they can switch drug categories, maybe some other things that you can do.
But all of this just makes us better clinician because we can diagnose better, we can treatment plan better, and really, by having this information ready to go in our head, we’ll [sic] just really doing a service to our patients.
So we use the WakeUp Memory technique in order to really put this information into our long-term memory. I bet you are actually going to remember this forever in you life.
When you see cyclosporine, you’re going to think about cycle, you’re going to think about gingival hyperplasia, and you’re going to be a little bit more careful with the patient. You’re going to look more carefully at the patient and see if they have such condition.
So I hope you learned a lot through this lesson today. Again, this was Claire at wakeupmemory.com, DentalToaster CE courses, and also Student RDH dental hygiene exam prep solutions.
Have a great day.
Michelle Strange: We hope you enjoyed this week’s TIPisode. Be sure to reach out to our guest experts and let them know how helpful their tips were. Follow A Tale of Two Hygienists on Facebook, Instagram, and head over to ataleoftwohygienists.com and subscribe to our newsletter. You can also email us at ataleoftwohygienists@gmail.com, and keep listening for more awesome content from your unofficial dental hygiene podcast.
