Hello everyone!

Ah… yesterday I did my first comprehensive exam on a classmate. How nerve-wrecking!!! If you don’t know what a complete comprehensive dental exam is- it includes:

1. a review of the patient’s medical history about past surgeries, systemic problems, medications, allergies, and so on.

2. an extra-oral exam – this is where we take a look at your physical features and we check all your head and neck lymph nodes – this is a huge part of oral cancer screening — seeing if you have abnormal size lymph nodes

3. we then proceed into an intra-oral exam – where we look at the inside of your oral cavity: are your salivary glands working, do you have any indications of habitually chewing your cheek, grinding your teeth, do you brush your tongue, do you have your tonsils, etc…

4. Then we take a look at your radiographs for bone loss and see the overall status of your teeth

5. Then we measure your periodontal depths of your teeth to see if you have good pockets between your teeth and your gingiva…

and man – that’s a lot!! Well, despite how slow I was and how nervous I was- I did well and now I’m excited to do it again.

Yesterday- the American Student Dental Association ASDOH Chapter did its first all-chapter community service event – we packed shoe boxes with school supplies, oral & general hygiene products, and small toys for underprivileged children. We also made a guide with images on how to properly brush and floss teeth!

And now… we are on Thanksgiving break. This break was very much needed. After break- we will be learning how to make dentures! I’m super excited. In less than 6 months we are going to be in clinic working on patients…. making dentures, doing root canals, restoring teeth, doing cleanings… how exciting!!!

Well, happy thanksgiving everyone!

Hello Everyone,

It’s been a while since my last post. I’m sorry. School has definitely been busy. Hmm… Where to start?

Well, Radiology was a lot of fun. Took my radiology competency exam and did well. Made a couple boo boos. But the important thing is that you are able to identify where/what those boo boos are bc then you can go back and look at how you are placing the films in a patient’s mouth to identify how you can do it next time to achieve the ideal radiographs.

Endodontics has been the module of interest in the past 2 weeks. Some people may think root canals are boring, but for me – it was a lot of fun. I started with a molar with 3 canals… it was very exciting when I completed all 3 canals! It was a very relaxing environment. All we did was root canals for 8 days… it was fun. Every tooth I did had a different canal or different set of canals… I even found a fourth canal in a molar!

We started fixed partial dentures earlier this week. It has been a while since we have done any crown preps (this is where we cut/shape a tooth with a handpiece (drill) to the right dimensions so that it can ideally hold a crown without fracturing or falling out. It was fun to do crown preps again.

We started our Lasers module yesterday. It’s amazing how the advancement of technology is benefiting the field of dentistry so rapidly. The purpose of laser dentistry is using lasers to do things such as remove soft tissue in the mouth without bleeding, removal of lesions without bleedings, etc. It’s really cool.

My class social chairs organized a Thxgiving Potluck tonight. I really like how our class spends the holidays together and we have fun together. I’m excited for all the food!!!

This is just a brief overview of what I’ve been up to, but maybe I’ll have some time to write more – especially about our clinic orientation module- now that’s a course with lots of stories! I’ll write more.

Have an awesome day!