Episode 040 | January 23, 2023 | 29:35
Guest: Susanne & Nina
Published: January 23, 2023
Duration: 29:35
Description
Hear the story about how the Sustainable Dentistry working group came to be and what work the zealots of the group are working to make dentistry greener in Denmark.
In the studio today we have Nina and Susanne, a sustainable design engineer and a dentist, who are working on exactly this.
Among other things, they are talking about how and if systematic oral care has an impact on infections after surgery, how to think about waste in materials used by a dentist, and much more.
Enjoy!
Full transcript
About this transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain inaccuracies, typos, or mistranslations. Episodes recorded before 2024 were transcribed by an on-site model and may have a higher error rate. The content reflects the original conversation to the best of our ability. For the authoritative version, please listen to the audio episode.
Note: the opening minutes of this auto-transcript were rendered as garbled Danish by the transcription model (the conversation was in English). The transcript switches to clean English from the middle of the conversation onwards.
So that’s kind of the dentist view on it. But you, Nina, as an environmental engineer, when you’re looking at this problem, what do you see? What do you see? Why is this an important problem? I think it is an important problem. Sustainability is the current answer to how can we reduce global warming and all these weird reactions that we see on our nature at the moment. And I think you should be very, I don’t know, living in a cave away from everything without having noticed that we need to take this serious.
And we read the IPCC reports and we currently know the COP 27 edition is going on. And they have announced that actually we are already beyond reaching the levels, the 1.5 degree goals from the Paris Agreement. So of course all industries should become more sustainable and therefore it’s equally important that the dentistry also becomes sustainable. Like any other field should become sustainable, of course it’s also important in dentistry. We talked about the more environmental impact from all the single use products that is used. But another aspect of the sustainability is of course also the social aspect, the social sustainability related to dentistry.
If you have bad teeth, everyone knows that it has an impact on your social life. There’s a social element to it as well. And also the health relation between good oral health and the health of the rest of your body is much more closely connected than what there haven’t been a lot of focus on that until recently. How much it actually impacts that you have good oral health. And if you have good oral health you can maybe reduce the risk of getting diabetes or other vascular diseases that are very heavy duty for society to treat both economically but also environmentally.
We often times talk about what’s the dollar cost, what’s the carbon cost of something. And of course if you have someone developing a chronic disease, the implication is just a massive cost, both on dollars and on CO2, but also on patient life quality. So those are actually three levels of expense that, those accounts are already maxed out.
What has really sort of sparked my curiosity in this is the first thing that occurs to me also as I’m an anthropologist by training myself. So the first thing I would ask is when we’re looking at that connection between good oral health that is associated to general good health in the rest of the body. Does that have to do with the patient group we’re looking at? Or can we actually say that if you improve your oral health and do preventive measures you’re also going to improve your general health? We are not in hypothesis land, not anymore. There’s a lot of evidence of the connections between oral health and general health. That is, if you have periodontal disease, then you have a connection with a lot of other diseases.
And what is periodontal disease? That’s an infection in the tissue around your teeth. It’s a low grade infection. It breaks down the bone. So in the end if you do nothing you will end up losing your teeth or one tooth or more if you do nothing. But the important thing to understand is that it’s an infection caused by a lot of microorganisms. And this low grade infection has an impact or is the same cause of other diseases.
There’s a comorbidity between periodontal diseases and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, psoriasis. All of that connected. And then there’s also in the literature described some associations with non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases. And liver cirrhosis. And then some cancers. And the thing called nosocomial diseases — the respiratory infection that you get in the hospital.
I think who should understand that is the politicians. They should understand it. So they should bring more money to prevent these things. For example in Denmark, it’s for free to go to the doctor. But you have to pay to go to the dentist. And it’s like that in many countries. But I at least know a lot of people who is then not going to the dentist. And they wait until they become sick. And then they will go to the doctor.
It’s so strange for us dentists. It has always been very strange that the mouth is like taken out of the body. And then treated, isolated. And you don’t do that with the rest of the body. In Denmark it’s still subsidized. But the user is paying and have out of pocket expenses. And it’s less and less subsidized. It has gone down from I think it was around 45-50% in the 70s. And now it’s 16-18% subsidized. So it’s relatively small chunk.
I work at Plandent, where I’ve also been for the past three years as a student. And I work there as a sustainability engineer. And we go out and investigate or help dentists. What can you do in your clinic? We go out to teach. What is sustainability? What does it mean? Because before you can actually act on it, you will have to know what it means. We are calculating the impact of different products, comparing them to see what is the better choice. Should I choose a plastic cup or a cardboard cup? Even though it’s on small things, then we believe that everything counts.
Plandent is a wholesaler of dental equipment and supplies. So basically you can buy anything you need for your dental clinic. They also make courses. So you can buy both all the supplies — the chair, the toilet paper, the suction machine, the scanners, software, journal systems. They have technicians that will come when something breaks down. And they have courses to teach the persons working at the dental clinics. Both dentists but also the clinic assistants about everything new stuff.
In Green Innovation Group, we work with the whole spectrum of the healthcare sector. And one problem we’ve been exposed to that is the amount of waste we see in hospitals, particularly both on medical devices and on drugs, because they reach the expiry date. Is this a problem in dentistry as well? Yes. But mainly for the people who are not really keeping track on what is in their stock. Because then maybe you forget that you have these things behind on the shelf or in some drawer somewhere. And now it’s run out. You have to throw it out.
For medicine it’s not a problem. We don’t have medicine, not much at least. Maybe some painkillers. So that’s not a problem. But there are some other materials, plastic and so on, that can run out of date. We have many different colors for the plastic filling material, for example. There are some colors that you don’t use very often. So it’s almost impossible to use all of them. It comes in many different shades. So it will match the color of the teeth you put in. Because our teeth sets will not have the same color.
What’s the general advice now — for how long should parents assist their kids in brushing their teeth? We say until they are at least 10 years old. The actual motor skills are not quite there until then. Please stay tuned for another episode with Nina and Susanne, where we continue diving into the matter of green dentistry.