547 Beyond the Dental Chair: Oral Health in Hospital and Medical Settings

They, of course, you know, decrease the patient's quality of life, increase their length of stay.

So it's in everybody's best interest to try to avoid getting an additional infection when you're in the hospital getting treated for something else.

And so unfortunately, I mean, it's not unfortunately, it's just kind of the way it is, but, you know, our mouth, we have bacteria, good and bad, that live there no matter what.

Um, the mouth is not sterile, so if you have patients like mine that are immunosuppressed, they can't fight off anything.

So even the bacteria that we consider good, if they enter the bloodstream, they're bad.

So even that was something that, you know, from med- the medical side, they were trying all of these rinses to just eradicate all of the bacteria, but I'm like, "You can't.

You have to have, you know, a balance." And then the, the vision from the...

or not the vision, the view from the dental side was like, "Oh, these patients are such a, at high risk for cavities." But when you have patients that are going through chemotherapy, like our, our main concern is keeping their mouth healthy so that they don't get a bloodstream infection.

So and then, I mean, of course, we don't want them to get cavities, but-

Yeah

... that takes the back burner to them, you know, staying safe and making it through their, their therapy.

So I'm not sure.

I, uh, kind of lost my train of thought there.

[laughs]

[laughs] No, you kept on going.

You have a, a-

Forgot what your question was.

[laughs]

Yeah.

What I pulled from that is often the barriers are policy.

After, uh, often the bel- barriers are understanding.

Mm-hmm.

Often the barriers are application.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, I'm hearing that they just try to rinse to kill all the bacteria.