This week Dr. Odiatu is joined by Mahsa Bakhshandeh, RDH. They chat about how we can enhance our chairside conversations and help our patients make better lifestyle choices!
Dr. Odiatu is a practicing dentist, certified trainer, author, speaker, and repeat AToTH guest. He always brings us content that we can use to make us and our patients happy and healthy. Be sure to check out the many episodes with Dr. Uche and head over to our YouTube channel and watch the videos Dr. Uche and Michelle did to help you stretch and take care of your body!
Contact him!
Instagram: @fitspeakers
Book: The Miracle of Health
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.
Uche Odiatu: Hi there. I’m Doctor Uche Odiatu. I’m here with Mahsa Bakhshandeh, hygienists. We’re going to share with you some simple ideas that you can enhance your chairside conversations about lifestyle habits that are impacting your patients chairside.
So there’s four of them. We’re going to go right into them, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition. Mahsa, give me the lowdown on stress.
Mahsa Bakhshandeh: When your body’s under stress, the body puts long-term healing on hold.
Uche Odiatu: During the day, our immune systems, basically, are on hold. At nighttime, they kick themselves into high gear purging the body of free radicals and reducing the amount of stress inside. The same thing — the brain does that at nighttime also. It’s 10 times more active at removing free radicals and beta amyloid plaque from the system.
So give me the lowdown, Mahsa, on exercise.
Mahsa Bakhshandeh: When it comes to exercise, 90 percent of the population does not have a regular exercise habit.
Uche Odiatu: Which basically means 9 out of 10 patients aren’t being able to tap in to the anti-inflammatory effects of exercise. So, basically, less than 10 percent of the population is exercising on a regular basis, and that’s simply why they call sitting is the new smoking. For the first time in human history, 70 percent of our waking hours is spent sitting.
So our patients, basically, are experiencing system-wide inflammation. How does nutrition play into this, Mahsa?
Mahsa Bakhshandeh: The food we eat is the biggest inflammatory influence.
Uche Odiatu: Yeah. In 2008, the American College of Cardiology said there’s irrefutable evidence that the very food we eat, it’s macronutrients or micronutrients, either ramps up inflammation or lowers inflammation. There really is, basically, no — there’s no innocent food. Everything plays apart in either helping the body stay inflamed or dowsing the fires of inflammation.
So when it comes to sleep, Mahsa, what’s the lowdown on sleep?
Mahsa Bakhshandeh: Poor sleepers are poor healers.
Uche Odiatu: Yeah. What happens is, when you think of sleeping, think of it as the rest and relax and recuperation phase. The daytime, that two thirds of our lives, basically, depends completely as to what happening [sic] on the other two thirds. All these conversations — all these four lifestyle habits can be woven into chairside conversations.
So, Mahsa, you recently had an interaction with a patient. Tell the listeners about it.
Mahsa Bakhshandeh: I had an opportunity to see a male patient this past Saturday. He’s age 36. Looks healthy. One of the first things that he expressed to me was that he hadn’t slept well the night before, so I took the opportunity to question him further. It is something that he’s experiencing ongoing, having trouble sleeping, and he’s taking sleep medications, antianxiety medications, and also antidepressants. I did propose to him to try a sleeping mask, which he has never tried. It does help you sleep better. So I was really excited about that.
From there, we spoke a little bit more. We talked about his stress level. He’s not really happy at work. We kind of went through different things he can do to reduce his stress. He’s also suffering from idiopathic chronic hives, which is an inflammatory condition. According to the nutrition guide, we’re all not getting enough fiber, so I definitely would recommend him to increase his fiber intake. And he does not exercise. We talked about maybe making some time, two to three days a week, just for him to get into a gym and exercise a little bit.
At the end of the appointment, he did express such a joy for coming in that day. He was thinking about cancelling his appointment because it was a [sic] early Saturday appointment. He was so thankful.
I was super excited that I was helping him above and beyond scaling and prophying.
Uche Odiatu: So there you have it. As I’ve said, I’m a dentist now for almost 30 years. Serve as a trainer. Written a coupe of books. Mahsa, nine years in private practice. And many times we think we’re only involved with the mouth. However, the minute that the patient realizes that you care about them from head to toe, they feel like they’re in the right place.
So in the next several weeks or months, try and put all the information and training you have that’s within your scope of practice to work and expand your communication chairside. Over and out. Mahsa and Uche say, “Good luck with everything.”
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.
