Reasons to Choose a Dentist Who Focuses on Integrated Health
By Ronan Freyne | Published on December 21, 2010 | 0 Comments
Throughout the medical and dental communities, an awareness of the benefits of integrated health has been growing for the past few years, explains Dr. Ronan Freyne. A dentist in Chevy Chase, MD, Dr. Freyne says that new research showing how oral health impacts the rest of the body is being published in medical journals on a regular basis.
As a dentist who has been focusing on integrated health and wellness for years, Dr. Freyne is ahead of the game in this regard. He sees oral health as a key component to overall physical wellness, especially when it comes to heart health and diabetes.
Whether the treating physician is a psychiatrist, an ophthalmologist, or a dentist shouldn’t matter. According to Dr. Freyne, all of the parts of the body are interrelated, and any doctor who is treating one part of the body without looking at the others is doing his patients a disservice. Recently published research articles have shown that it is impossible to touch or make a change in one part of the body without having it affect another part of the body, or the system as a whole.
With that in mind, Dr. Freyne believes it is very important that dentists like himself look at their patients’ entire health histories. Additionally, dentists should be looking at each patient individually, rather than in some kind of cookie cutter fashion. This is important, explains Dr. Freyne, because patients with similar complaints and concerns about their teeth could have very different underlying factors coming into play.
In order to really get to the bottom of any dental problem and to really make a proper diagnosis, a dentist needs to look at each patient’s individual needs and check on what is going on with his or her overall health. If a dentist does an overall wellness checkup and determines that his patient may also have a concurrent medical concern such as diabetes, for example, then he cannot look at his own diagnosis without also taking the other medical concern into account. A person who has a number of cavities but is otherwise healthy could be suffering from a very different problem than a patient who has a number of cavities and is also suffering from Type 2 diabetes.
Within the past 10 to 15 years, there has been a much more intensive push toward looking at the big picture for dentists and seeing the connections between the health of the mouth and the overall physical health of patients. Extensive links have already been shown between periodontal health and serious medical conditions such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and even pre-term births with women.
These are all reasons why it’s important that patients work with dentists who offer an integrated approach to health. No longer is a patient’s mouth the only area of concern for dentists, and Dr. Freyne says that dentists cannot expect to open their patients’ mouths and think they are seeing the whole story. Rather, good dentists know that the mouth itself is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
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