Communicating with a Bruxist – PDP011

Published: Sept. 4, 2019, 6:01 p.m.

Have you ever encountered the patient with all the signs of bruxism/parafunction, yet they deny this passionately? I see this daily. Patients are in denial that they parafunction – how can we communicate better with these patients? I am joined on this Protrusive Dental Podcast episode by Dr Barry Oulton to help us communicate better with bruxers! Need to Read it? Check out the Full Episode Transcript below! In this episode, which has a brilliant Protrusive Dental Pearl about ‘colouring in your dental splints’, we discuss: How to get patients to accept accountability of their parafunction and how it may attribute to restoration failureAre you looking for the signs of parafunction in your patients?Travell and Simon pain chart for referred pain Muscle examination video (linked below)The role of your team in communicating BruxismHow to show patients their wear facetsWhat if your patient declines a splint? (They are allowed to!) How to communicate with them the consequencesHave you ever restored an incisal edge that keeps chipping?Use analogies and stories to communicate – here we share the Fence Post analogySci splints and B splintsHow to PROVE to your patients with a splint that they have actively been grinding on it! Dr Barry Oulton B.Ch.D DPDS MNLP, Owner, The Confident Dentist Academy Dr Barry Oulton owned Haslemere Dental Centre in Surrey for 20 years, turning it into an award-winning practice with a reputation for outstanding customer service before joining the Portman Dental Care Group in 2018.  In 2017, he founded The Confident Dentist Academy to help dental professionals learn effective communication skills and sell with integrity so they can have more impact and make a bigger difference, both professionally and personally. His 2 day course ‘Influencing Smiles’ course teaches Dentists and their teams how to communicate and sell  that translates into happy patients, a great working environment and, ultimately, sees profit increase.  He also offer in-house training programming and coaching for practices and dental companies and also online training products. He is on the editorial board for The Probe and lectures for companies such as Septodont, Cerezen, S4S, Practice Plan, Henry Schein and Wisdom Toothbrushes.  His website is – www.theconfidentdentist.com Take a look at his muscle exam video which is currently on www.theconfidentdentist.com/s4s which is very helpful demonstration of how to carry out a dentally relevant muscle examination. Social media sites – Twitter – @drbarryoulton  Facebook – The Confident Dentist  Instagram – drbarryoulton  Click below for full episode transcript: Opening Snippet: I don't believe that dentistry should be done in order to treat parafunction. I think it should be done once we've protected people from parafunction so that dentistry is a choice rather than a necessity... Jaz's Introduction: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm Jaz Gulanti. And this is the protrusive Dental podcast episode 11. I'm joined today by Barry Oulton really excited to have him on because he is someone who lectures all over the country about communicating with patients. And he also lectures about parafunction and parafunction control. So what I decided to do and the reason I approached him was to marry these two together about an episode about how to communicate with Bruxists. It's a huge topic is something that's probably born out of frustration, my earlier years when I used to speak to patients and the signs of parafunction are obvious to me at one stage they weren't when I learned what I was looking for. And we'll discuss that in this episode, it becomes obvious, you know, patients that exhibit signs of parafunction. When you speak to these patients, invariably, they actually deny the fact that their parafunction, I don't know, I don't grind my teeth. And there's a there's a way you can approach this so that they can actually ta...