Dr. Nammy talks about what her Green Dentistry practice is doing to prepare for COVID-19, including ionic air filtration, only seeing one patient at a time, wiping down surfaces in between patients, sterilizing instruments, and more.
Transcript
We’re doing a lot of things for COVID-19. Green Dentistry is actually the best place to be for your dental work, especially now. The number one thing I say is get your teeth cleaned, mainly because getting your teeth cleaned is going to help actually boost your immune system, because in your gums there’s a lot of good bacteria, bad bacteria. Once you get rid of them, you let the good bacteria survive, which actually takes a load off of your immune system to fight that. So it gives reserves to be able to fight something like COVID-19 or anything else that’s out there.
In my practice, we’re an eco-friendly, holistic practice of course. So we have ionic filtration, so that way the air is…it’s almost like a HEPA filter in the office, so it just sucks out any bug that might be there. Also we’re making sure that we’re only seeing one person at a time. Everything is wiped down in between patients.
We do EPA products that kills anything. All of our instruments are sterilized. And before we actually see the patients, we actually make them rinse with peroxide. We do 1% peroxide and water. And after that, we actually use a dental laser to disinfect the mouth before we start cleaning it, just to make sure that there is nothing in the mouth that’s going to create any aerosol or get on the walls or anything along those lines. So we’re taking those precautions in order to make sure that we’re going to treat our patients safely.
I myself, of course, always follow universal precautions, and so do my staff. We always use hand sanitizers and hand-wash, also gloves and masks with our patients, to make sure that we are being very, very responsible. The other thing that we’re doing is also making sure that we’re asking all of our patients, we’re screening them, “Have you been in contact with anybody who has COVID-19? Have you also traveled in the last 14 days? Have you had any symptoms?” So that we’re actually doing our part in educating the community as well.