Dethroning Heart Attacks and Strokes

00: 00 The 4 Areas of Testing
02:50 Collaboration is Crucial to Healing
04:12 The Clarity Blueprint

There are 4 areas of testing in particular that unite us in the dental office and in the non dental medical office. It starts with blood work. If we focus on Myeloperoxidase and plaque, these are 2 markers very specific for inflammation in the wall of the artery. If those are inflamed, we have to talk to each other from the dental office to the non dental office in order to resolve this inflammation.

hs-CRP is a global marker of inflammation. It may or may not indicate that the inflammation is occurring in the oral cavity. It could be due to a whole host of things, but hs-CRP is being measured more in the conventional practices and is being recognized. We ought to start looking at inflammation as it plays a role in cardiovascular disease and in heart attack and stroke.

Microalbumin/Creatinine ratio is a urinary test that can help us determine if there's vascular disease in the renal arteries. When we look at arterial wall health, this is just one way to do it. Is there inflammation and infection festering on the wall of the artery in the form of plaque? We can find that by using ultrasound of the carotid arteries: CIMT. We want to know if that intima-media looks healthy, or if it's starting to show evidence that there's plaque formation.

Thirdly: the sleep test. Most of the things that we see, whether it's, upper airway resistance, or it's a sleep disordered breathing of any kind or even classic sleep apnea requires the dental team and the non dental team to work together to get the right diagnosis or diagnoses and then treat that appropriately.

And then lastly, our saliva test, where we identify these five dangerous bacteria that have, undoubtedly, numerous studies tell us clearly that these are not just contributory, but causal of heart attacks and strokes and other vascular diseases.

There's no way that I can resolve these in the medical office alone. It takes this collaborative effort.

These are four objective ways to look at a patient. Together we're creating healthier patients and healthier practices. We want to talk about working together to keep people out of the cath lab, to keep them out of the emergency room, to keep them healthy and create health for them rather than setting them up for this future that no one wants requires integrating medicine and dentistry.

And so we've created the Clarity Blueprint to take not only ourselves and our practices from a healthcare standpoint, from confusion to to collaboration, but to take our patients through this same process. The way that Lora and I came up with this is the fact that we kept seeing patient after patient that was confused about either why they had the heart attack or confused about whether or not they were protected from having their first heart attack or stroke.

For example, an individual, let's say in their 40s, and they start to think about, "could I have a heart attack lurking in my future? The way my father started down this path at age 50 or 55?” People, before they've ever had a problem, begin to think about these things and they either think they've had a thorough evaluation or that they're standing on good data, that they are protected or they're confused because they just say, "Well, if it happened to my father, it's going to happen to me."

They think there's nothing that can be done and nothing's further than, for them, from the truth. There's health care confusion because we're still relying on old data, on old measures. We're not using very precise ways to determine, "Is this individual looking at us today in the operatory, in the dental office, or in the clinical exam room, in the medical office... what's going on inside of them at the cellular level? Are they headed towards a heart attack or are they protected?"

And we can know that today with these measures. And then we have to collaborate on the topic, so we have to get clarity around that, which is understanding what's been missing. And then we start to work together to get some competence after your first 5, 10, 20 cases.

And then fifthly, then we bring all of that to the collaboration and there's where the power team occurs, is when there's a dental team and a non-dental team working together with this confident approach and collaborating together.

That's how we're going to take heart attack and stroke off the number one killer spot and help people have the longevity, the health span for their many, many years to come that they want.

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