Don't Let Dry Mouth Get Your Patients Down

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, this week brought to you by Elevate Oral Care.

Connie Simmons: Hello, everyone. This is Connie with Elevate Oral Care here to deliver this month’s TIPisode. We always hear about dry mouth in our patients. We see it frequently. Some are very severe and others more mild. As we know, dry mouth usually increases with age in our patients as they’re given more and more medications with the unfortunate side effect of dry mouth. We see advertisements for lots of dry mouth treatment products to fix the issue, but do they really fix it? Or are they just alleviating some of the symptoms?

Have you ever looked into why dry mouth can be so detrimental to oral health? Today, I want to touch on this topic, and as usual in prevention, small changes here can have a dramatic effect on our patient’s oral health.

Saliva is the body’s natural method of remineralizing after demineralization takes place as well as protecting the teeth from future demineralization. Demin happens every single day as we eat and drink. Saliva is super saturated with calcium and phosphate, the minerals that our teeth are made of. And, also, these are needed to replace lost minerals during remineralization. It also contains enzymes that help initiate the digestion of food. Thin saliva mineralizes teeth, and thick saliva coats food so that it doesn’t scratch your throat as our patients swallow.

With all of these benefits, losing any amount of saliva can have great impacts on oral health. Dry mouth can affect health in significant ways by losing or changing any of these positive benefits of the saliva as well as changing the type and the amount of food that our patients are able to eat. It even changes the way words sound as the person speaks. Sometimes, you can hear it when a dry mouth patient is speaking.

Let’s suppose a patient has dry mouth and has been sipping on water to help keep their mouth comfortable. This may help with their comfort level, but it doesn’t replace all of the beneficial things that saliva does. This is usually the patient’s first step in reducing the effects of dry mouth. When patients present with this issue, it’s time to locate the cause of the dry mouth by first reviewing their medication, then maybe even taking a look at their habit and, if possible, eliminate or reduce the cause. Although, as we know, changing a medication isn’t always the primary physician’s first choice.

If this mitigation isn’t effective, it’s time to look for dry mouth products that can provide relief and supplement them with products that will meet the patient’s need to remineralize. Many dry mouth products are artificial saliva or viscous liquids to help replace the feeling of saliva. They’re sticky and make the mouth feel good, but for most, that’s the end of relief. Again, many products don’t have the needed calcium, phosphate, or enzyme to help maintain oral health in the patient, and they may need more. For this reason, always consider a calcium phosphate source and a fluoride source to supplement the lost saliva. Think of calcium and phosphate as the building blocks of your teeth, and think of the fluoride as the mortar that holds them together.

Another way to accomplish improvement in dry mouth patients is to include xylitol when possible into their daily routine. Xylitol will not only be a nice sweetener for your patient, it can reduce cariogenic bacteria levels, and it works to hold calcium for a longer time in the mouth. If the patient is using hard candies or maybe even cough drops to stimulate saliva flow, just swap them out with a xylitol product, and you’ll see good improvements.

Two important products to help can be our Allday Mouth Spray and FluoriMax 5000. Allday Mouth Spray has a neutral pH and a patented mucoadhesive that helps retain 25 percent more moisture than many of the common brands. Additionally, Allday is 44 percent xylitol. FluoriMax 5000 and Just Right 5000 provide high fluoride uptake and are packaged for your patient into a 6-month supply. In addition to dental office dispensing, they’re also available by prescription from HealthWarehouse.com at about half the price of brick-and-mortar pharmacies.

To learn more about various dry mouth treatments, protocols, and programs for your patients, contact us at Elevate Oral Care to schedule a free, live, in-person, or virtual CE course for the whole office team. You can reach us at 877-866-9113, you can shoot us an email at info@elevateoralcare.com, or you can simply log on to www.elevateoralcare.com and click on the button to request a staff meeting. We can’t wait to educate you and your team on all of these important dry mouth protocols as well as other prevention protocols.

Thanks for listening to this month’s TIPisode.

Michelle Strange: Thanks for listening to another TIPisode, and thank you to Elevate Oral Care for sponsoring this week’s episode. You can find out more about their great products at elevateoralcare.com.

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