A dentist explains why sleep health matters in the dental chair. They screen for sleep apnea, check tongue position and soft palate, and use home sleep tests because oxygen levels during sleep are as critical as teeth.
I've heard you mention sleep a couple of times.
Is that something that you're talking to patients about? And why? Because you're just a dentist.
I love when you said we're just a dentist. No, we actually, the oral physicians, the expert of the upstream versus downstream. So we not only talk about sleep, we also screen for sleep apnea with the home sleep test. We're also looking at the tongue positions and the soft palate and the swallowing and the nasal breathing, the sinus health. And we want to make sure that if the patient's going to get better, they got to have enough oxygen. You know, we know we can survive without food and water if we have to for a few days. But if you don't have oxygen, No one's going to make it past a few minutes, right? So we got to make sure that our patients have oxygen when they awake and also have oxygen, adequate oxygen when they sleep.
