“Why do I have to update my medical history” is a question that we hear frequently, and often with a tone of resistance. We at Origin Dental Wellness are healthcare providers, after all. We are not just tooth mechanics. We feel that it is important for patients to understand why we ask about your health, why we will discuss your health with you, and why it is important to recognize the connection between your overall health and the health of your mouth.
Our philosophy at Origin Dental Wellness is to focus on not only the health of the mouth, but also on how the mouth affects the health of the overall body and vice versa. For this reason, we not only examine the mouth, but also have discussions with our patients about overall health. Some are very surprised to discover the connections between oral health and overall health.
For example, a bacteria imbalance in the mouth will always lead to a bacteria imbalance in the gut. After all, a person swallows approximately 900 times a day, leading to about 1.5 liters of saliva being swallowed daily. With every swallow, the bacteria from the mouth is going down into the digestive tract. With the discovery of the immune system really being in the gut microbiome, then the microbiome in the mouth has a drastic effect on the immune system.
Did you know that if the mouth has the presence of disease causing bacteria, this leads to increased risk of many systemic diseases? Illnesses and adverse events such as cardiovascular disease (high blood pressure and heart attacks), strokes, premature births and low birthweight babies, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and a myriad of autoimmune diseases, are all related to the health of the mouth.
Because of this intimate connection of overall health with health of the mouth, we will always ask patients to update their medical histories annually. We will always have conversations about medical histories and the effects of oral health on the overall health condition. We will take your blood pressure and discuss the connection of the results to what might be happening in your mouth. This is the foundation of what we do in order to take great care of our patients as a whole, not just their mouth.
