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!