Dr. Richard Witty asked: “Do you mind doing one on…discussion with the patients about what food and drinks to avoid.”

We received a question from Dr. Richard Witty of the Steamboat Dental Center in Colorado. Dr. Witty said, “Love the articles! Do you mind doing one on…discussion with the patients about what food and drinks to avoid. The hardest thing for our patients is giving up drinking coffee.”

All I can say to Dr. Witty is, “OMG! What a great and pertinent question for practicing dentists!”

In fact, this topic happens to be a “pet” topic of mine.

Every dentist reading this has patients frequently saying something like, “Hey Doc. I was thinking about whitening my teeth. But you know I drink coffee/red wine/iced tea, etc. So whitening probably wouldn’t be worth it for me…right?”

So, do you see what that patient just told us? The patient just informed us that he or she would love whiter teeth…BUT…he or she isn’t willing to give up consuming a favorite food/beverage or two. PERIOD!

But what if your patients don’t need to give up anything, and can still maintain the whiteness you provide for the rest of their lives? Do you think that might just be something your patients would love?

Here are the facts: Permanent teeth erupt into the mouth, already having organic debris caught within the microstructure of the enamel. And dentin of the tooth may be various colors. Therefore, just like we each have different color eyes, the color, even of newly erupted teeth, have varying color and varying degrees of lightness from person to person.

That organic debris within the enamel darkens with time. But the fact is that day after day, year after year, you also pick up extrinsic stain, which soaks into the enamel, becoming intrinsic stain.

Over time, this original stain and absorbed intrinsic stain gets packed deeper and deeper into the microstructure of the teeth (eg: interprismatic, intraprismatic and intracrystalline spaces within the enamel prisms). Worse yet is the fact that all of these organic stain molecules have an affinity to each other and attach together. So we eventually end up with a densely packed, tightly woven mass of organic stain throughout the tooth microstructure.

This virtually “plugs up” the microscopic spaces within the tooth structure, making it difficult for the peroxide bleaching factors (eg: hydroxyl, perhydroxyl and superoxide radicals) to penetrate and whiten the teeth.

As you probably know, with the KöR Whitening system, including the KöR-Seal whitening trays, damaging peroxidase antioxidant enzymes found in saliva and sulcular fluid are sealed out of the trays. Peroxidase destroys peroxide ON CONTACT. So instead of the 20-35 minutes of active whitening shown in so many studies, KöR gels in KöR-Seal trays remain active 6+ hours, with some activity out to 10 hours.

The result is that, hour after hour, the oxygenation phase of whitening penetrates the tooth structure, breaking apart those densely packed, tightly woven stain molecules within tooth structure and removing them from the tooth structure via diffusion. This virtually reverses the process of extrinsic stain becoming an intrinsic stain. The fact is, with KöR Whitening, this occurs during nighttime whitening for a continuous 6+ hours during sleep, so the “conditioning” (internal cleansing) is absolutely exceptional.

This means that, as long as the patients perform their recommended occasional at-home maintenance, by wearing the trays just one night occasionally, the whitening gel can DIVE quickly and deeply into that cleansed microstructure of the teeth, and blast out any little bit of stain that might have been absorbed since the previous maintenance.

The result? With occasional at-home maintenance, your patients can keep that great KöR Whitening result for a lifetime…without needing to avoid their favorite foods and beverages.

But the key is that you’ve got to explain this to your patients. Otherwise, they simply won’t know, and they may assume that whitening isn’t for them.

Very best regards,

Dr. Rod Kurthy