by Greg Kamyszek, President, BioRESEARCH, Inc.
As a reader of Dental Sleep Practice, your practice focuses on identifying and treating sleep issues like the silent killer, sleep apnea. What about the silent killer of your sleep practice? TMD, Temporomandibular Dysfunction, or TMJ as most people refer to it.
When you insert any snoring or OSA appliance, you are changing the maxilla/mandible relationship each night for the rest of the patient’s life, or at least the life of the appliance. Most patients who stop wearing appliances do so due to TMJ or muscular pain. How does that happen and equally important, what can you do to prevent it?
When first evaluating a patient, are you acquiring enough data? A JVA Quick Test takes 10 seconds to record and one minute to read. This test can tell you what you don’t know about joint function before treatment and also at your OAT position. Most dental professionals just ignore joint and muscle function and simply treat the present snoring and OSA. When you don’t take the next step, you’re losing a huge opportunity to positively impact the patient’s overall wellness and your practice’s bottom line.
The deployment of objective biometric data on stomatognathic and airway function will help you see more and increase the likelihood of positive treatment outcomes. The JVA Quick Test requires so little in terms of increased cost and provides insight regarding the interplay between airway improvement and the limits of stomatognathic function. With this data, you will likely improve results when managing the dual issues of oxygen deprivation and loss of comfort. You may even find that your OSA patient is also someone that can be treated in your office for TMD or orthodontics. If you select not to treat TMD, a referral goes a long way to build relationships within your local market.
The tools in your measurement toolbox determine your depth of vision into your patients’ needs and your ability to satisfy them. You’re not going to lose by adding to your armamentarium. Instead, you’re going to begin recognizing and potentially treating myriad issues or you may opt to refer them to a local colleague. You can lose if you choose to ignore or otherwise fail to gather sufficient data. The JVA, EMG, and Rhinomanometry are all tools that do one thing, and only one thing – provide objective data. Get the data to make the best practice decisions possible; for the patients, for your team, and for your bottom line. It’s really that simple.
My team has helped thousands of dentists around the world successfully implement these technologies, and would love to help you bring a higher level of care to your community.
Let us share these experiences with you at our annual conference in June. Visit https://www.bioresearchinc.com/ac2020
