Periodontal Therapy Case

In undergraduate clinic we were introduced to the periodontal probe and learned how to position it, how much pressure to apply and how to read it. By the time we completed charting a few patients, the personal interest over bleeding gums had left us and was replaced by the realization that this measurement process is boring. For many dental students, periodontal probing or at least assessing a bleeding index, were some of the activities they vowed they would delegate to hygienists as soon as they possibly could. As for the hygienists, usually working alone, they would seek shortcuts themselves because, no matter how you slice it, periodontal charting is tedious stuff.

What we didn’t learn, at least in school, was how to utilize the bleeding index in patient care. This is because the focus at that point was not on patient care, but on tooth care and mouth care. The complexities on how to manage patients would not be refined in dental and dental hygiene schools. This would have to wait for later and is likely why we call what we do a practice. People aren’t things on an assembly line, and even though we shoot for efficiency, the human elements of practice (there’s that word again) seem to make things messy.

So what I want to do here is …show more content…
If you explain this to patients up front (and I will get to the initial explanation of periodontal disease later after we have finished this discussion on supportive care) then the numbers will make sense to them. I tell patients that based on two numbers I obtain from the periodontal examination I can tell them whether they are healthy and stable or back on the side of disease progression. The first of these two numbers, and the one we are discussing today, is the bleeding