Gentle Dental Cleanings: Guided Biofilm Therapy

My name is Kassie Anderson. I am a dental hygienist. I have been for 11 years now.

I graduated in 2015 and started working for Dr. Kennedy in 2021. We became a guided biofilm therapy certified office after his training at the Kois, where we learned about the benefits of airflow technology. Afterwards, I decided I would like to be a trainer and teach other offices, so I became a trainer and have been doing that for the last four years.

I believe that everybody benefits from a cleaning with guided biofilm therapy. It is more thorough. You receive a different level of education that you don't get in a traditional hygiene appointment.

We're actually showing you where the root cause of your disease is. If you have inflammation along the gum line, a lot of times it's because you're leaving biofilm at the gum line. So we're including the patient and their opportunity for the best health.

I would say GBT helps patients who just don't like the scraping because you're doing the most minimal amount of it possible. You save that until the very end, and you're actually trying to reduce the amount of hand instrumentation for the patient. So people who dread scraping would love guided biofilm therapy.

Biofilm is the sticky plaque matrix that forms on your teeth, and it's beneficial to have it 100% removed because then your teeth have a fresh start. You have the best opportunity to keep them as clean as possible, and you're leaving the dentist without any anything left, so you're getting the most thorough cleaning possible. We were the first office in Oregon to adopt guided biofilm therapy, and I think everybody should know that it exists, and it should be available to every patient if they want to.

I think it is great that more people are finding out about it, and the more offices that can have it available is great, but we do pride ourselves in being the first in Oregon. With guided biofilm therapy, the appointment sequence would be assessing your patient as step one, disclosing their teeth as step two, motivating them as step three, using the airflow technology, which is water, erythritol powder, and air to remove biofilm supra and subgingively up to four millimeters, perioflow technology, which is for your diseased teeth and implants, and then we have our Piezon technology, which is going to be hard deposit removal, so similar to your cavitron ultrasonic, but in a way more comfortable manner removal for the patient. It's going to be 104 degree warm water, so the patient gets a much better perception of the vibrating tool, as you would say, and then our last step would be checking yourself, checking your work.

That's where the hand instrumentation comes in, so it's really just a last final step after you've been as thorough as you possibly can, and then schedule your patients what you see most appropriate. If they have a lot of inflammation or bleeding, then they're going to have the recommendation to come more often for this super cool, comfortable cleaning. I would say it almost feels like nothing, and so you have to tell your patient, or more importantly, you have to show your patient the plaque, which is what the disclosing agent is for, and so they can see the before and after.

They know how much work has already been done, so even though it feels like nothing, they can see all the work that you have done already. After a GBT cleaning, patients say, I feel good, my teeth feel great, they feel so smooth. They've never felt this smooth before, and I would credit that to the fact that we are actually removing 100% of the biofilm off their teeth, and they've never had that experience before with traditional cleaning.

It's when you know what you were missing, you won't continue to miss it anymore, and you'll do better. Patients that commit to frequent biofilm disruption, I see great improvement in their home care. They're motivated to come back and show me what they've done.

They want to see the purple dye again and see their improvements, and so they're less inflamed, they're happier, they're often healthier, and the dentist is no longer a dread. They're excited to come get their teeth cleaned. For patients that have been avoiding the dentist for a long time, I think coming to get a GBT cleaning is the best thing that you can do.

They often leave feeling like they weren't judged, but motivated to do better, and that their cleaning didn't hurt. It was actually very comfortable, and if we recommend, hey, you should come more often because you see the improvements that we want to make, and let's come instead of six months, maybe three, and your patients are more willing to come back because you met their expectations of being somebody who cared and also didn't hurt them.