Introducing Mixed Dentition - the official podcast for World Of Smiles Pediatric Dentistry! Hosted by Nicholas Peterka and Dr. Devin Bowyer. In this premiere episode, they discuss what this show will be about, a little background, and then Dr. Devin schools Nicholas in a bit of dental basics. Press play to listen now, read the complete transcript, or check out the video version at the bottom.
Nicholas: [inaudible 00:00:07] Three, two ...
Nicholas: Okay. Welcome to our first podcast, video podcast I suppose. My name is Nicholas. This is the World of Smiles podcast that we're officially calling Mixed Dentition. I am joined by Dr. Devin Bowyer, a family dentist, at our teen office. Now, we were joking the other night about Mixed Dentition and why it would be a good title. Can you first explain what it means in dentistry?
Dr. Devin: Yeah, definitely. Mixed dentition means when you're in between having baby teeth and then having permanent teeth. This usually occurs in between six and twelve years old.
Nicholas: Is it super hard to like see which ones are baby teeth and which ones are grownup teeth?
Dr. Devin: Not really.
Nicholas: Yeah. It'd be super hard for me.
Dr. Devin: Exactly. I guess you're trained to know that.
Nicholas: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I like it because it also is like ... Mixed Dentition, we have today as our expert, a dentist, and me who is not. I think that's fair to say. My name's Nicholas. I'm married to Dr. Michelle Stafford. She's the founder of World of Smiles. I do all the community outreach and marketing and things like that. I'm the host of this podcast, as it were. Devin, you're the family doctor at our teen office which opened last year, December 2017, and you've been with us since the summer?
Dr. Devin: Middle of July, yeah.
Nicholas: You recently graduated from?
Dr. Devin: Loma Linda Dental School down in southern California.
Nicholas: Cool.
Dr. Devin: Yeah.
Nicholas: Good school.
Dr. Devin: Yeah, I love it.
Nicholas: Good times.
Dr. Devin: Definitely.
Nicholas: All right. Now, this podcast is just gonna be about dentistry and interesting topics and things on our mind, and hopefully we're gonna get in, obviously, pediatric dentists and orthodontists and oral surgeons, just whoever's willing to take the plunge and come join for us a sit-down chat. I'm hoping for, myself, to learn more about dentistry in general. I feel like I should know more. I do a lot of community outreach for the company, as it were, but [inaudible 00:02:44] to know. That's where you come in.
Dr. Devin: I'm here.
Nicholas: I'm gonna be educated. It's gonna be so good.
Nicholas: You might not know this, but ... well, I think you do. I went to massage therapy school.
Dr. Devin: Oh yeah, I do know that.
Nicholas: If you ever talk to Dr. Stafford, my wife, she's my only current client because I don't really practice right now, but it was interesting, when I was in massage therapy school my teachers all knew that at the time I was dating a dentist. In an anatomy class, dental stuff would come out, they would always defer to me.
Dr. Devin: And you had no idea.
Nicholas: As if I knew something. I'd be like, "I date a dentist. I don't know anything about dentistry." I don't know, it was a strange thing.
Nicholas: This show is gonna evolve over time. We're just gonna figure out. Dr. Devin, would you like to tell our fine audience why you went to dental school, what inspired you to become a dentist in the first place?
Dr. Devin: Yeah. Since I was young, probably ... boy, as soon as I can really remember, I was always interested in doing something in healthcare, be a doctor, be a nurse, something like that. Just didn't know. My dad's a doctor, so I always kind of thought maybe I'd go that direction.
Nicholas: But not a dentist?
Dr. Devin: But not a dentist, correct. He's a OB/GYN.
Nicholas: Oh, okay.
Dr. Devin: Come about high school I started realizing I'm not really interested in being a doctor, or at least an OB/GYN, and so I started looking around. I went and shadowed my dentist and really liked what I saw. He had a lot of fun with the patients. The stuff that he was doing looked really interesting. Kind of from that point, probably my junior year of high school, I just knew that I wanted to be a dentist. So here I am now.
Nicholas: That's cool.
Nicholas: Okay. The path by which you came to World of Smiles is interesting and somewhat personal to me. Do you want to describe?
Dr. Devin: Sure.
Nicholas: Okay, go.
Dr. Devin: My wife, Katie [Ralston 00:04:49], who is now also a dentist, I met her in dental school. We got married about a year ago. She had previously worked here at World of Smiles, originally as the sterile tech, right, and then as an assistant?
Nicholas: Never as an assistant.
Dr. Devin: Never as an assistant, just sterile tech. Okay.
Nicholas: But she did also work as a nanny to our two kids.
Dr. Devin: Yep.
Nicholas: Yeah.
Dr. Devin: Now, my mother-in-law still nannies for your two kids.
Nicholas: Oh yeah, she does. She's the favorite over there.
Dr. Devin: Yep. That's how I came to know you and Michelle.
Nicholas: Yeah. And our boys were in your wedding.
Dr. Devin: Yeah.
Nicholas: I'm gonna throw a picture of it right now, if you're watching the video. That'll be cool. We're gonna keep this one pretty short, I think. We're gonna do a little segment here on Mixed Dentition we're gonna call Dental Detail, where Devin shares something interesting about dentistry. Anything of your choosing. Teach me something.
Dr. Devin: Okay. Well, the tooth, each and every tooth, has three layers. It has enamel, which is that outer hard layer. That's the hardest substance in the body. Under that is the dentin. That's a little bit softer. That is a lot of times where some sensitivity is because it has some nerve endings in there. Under that is the pulp, or the nerve, and that has the blood supply, the nerve, everything that keeps that tooth alive.
Nicholas: Okay. Enamel.
Dr. Devin: Enamel.
Nicholas: Dentin.
Dr. Devin: Dentin.
Nicholas: Pulp.
Dr. Devin: Pulp. Exactly.
Nicholas: Okay. When you eat poorly, and lots of sugar, it erodes the enamel?
Dr. Devin: The enamel first. Once it's into the dentin, that's when everything really goes down because it goes a lot quicker through the dentin because it's softer.
Nicholas: Okay. If you're developing a cavity, when does it start to get sensitive?
Dr. Devin: Really, it kind of depends per person.
Nicholas: Oh, I see.
Dr. Devin: Once it gets into the dentin is when it can start to become sensitive. A lot of times we don't feel something until it's all the way to the pulp though. A lot of people, when they say, "Oh, I don't feel it, I must not have a cavity," that's not necessarily true. You can definitely have that cavity, it's just it may not be felt yet because it's not all way to that pulp.
Nicholas: Oh, interesting.
Dr. Devin: Yeah.
Nicholas: Okay. The only real way to tell is with an x-ray?
Dr. Devin: With an x-ray or from a visual examination from a dentist.
Nicholas: Okay. Sometimes visually you can just look and be like, "Yeah?"
Dr. Devin: Yep.
Nicholas: Cavity. Other times, x-ray to really know what's going on?
Dr. Devin: Exactly. If it's on the top or the side that you can see, then usually you can tell by visually looking at it. If it's in between the teeth, we really need x-rays.
Nicholas: Okay. I learned something.
Dr. Devin: Yeah, there we go.
Nicholas: All right. Enamel, dentin, pulp.
Dr. Devin: Exactly.
Nicholas: I'm sure there's probably a lot more complication.
Dr. Devin: There's a lot more. Yeah, exactly.
Nicholas: We can get into that another time.
Dr. Devin: Yeah.
Nicholas: All right. Okay, so that was Dental Detail. I learned something there. Now we're gonna do the Nicholas gets schooled. I just got schooled, but I'm gonna get schooler some more because I have a because that I feel like I should know the answer to but I don't.
Nicholas: I know that dentists count teeth in certain ways. For pediatric dentistry, we always talk about ... we don't say 'exam' usually, we say, "The dentist is ... Dr. Michelle, or Dr. Stafford's gonna come in and count your teeth." What do you ... you number them in a particular way?
Dr. Devin: Yeah. We number them ... in an adult, it's numbered from this upper right part first.
Nicholas: From your right?
Dr. Devin: My right. The furthest back tooth is numbered one. And then there's 32 teeth in the mouth, in the adult mouth.
Nicholas: Not in my mouth.
Dr. Devin: Unless you've had teeth taken out.
Nicholas: Oh, I have.
Dr. Devin: It counts one to sixteen, all the way to this side. The top goes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Nicholas: So sixteen's upper left.
Dr. Devin: And then 17 is down on the lower left.
Nicholas: Oh. Oh.
Dr. Devin: It goes around, then down.
Nicholas: And then comes back.
Dr. Devin: And then comes around. Exactly.
Nicholas: 17 to 32.
Dr. Devin: Exactly.
Nicholas: Okay. But it's different for kids?
Dr. Devin: Yep. For kids, they do it by letters instead of by numbers.
Nicholas: Oh.
Dr. Devin: This top right side is A. That goes all the way around to J, which is on that top left side, then drop down to K and go all the way around to T. So A, J, K, T.
Nicholas: A, J, K, T.
Dr. Devin: Exactly.
Nicholas: Look at that. I've had my wisdom teeth out, and I had some ... up here. Some canines, I think?
Dr. Devin: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nicholas: I had really prominent canines. I looked like I had vampire teeth all my childhood. When I finally got braces as an adult, which is a whole story in and of itself, those had to come out too. If you were to count, would it be obvious to you which ones were missing and you skip those numbers?
Dr. Devin: Exactly.
Nicholas: Oh.
Dr. Devin: By position and by the look of the tooth we can kind of tell which number it should be. Sometimes people come in with only six teeth in their mouth, and they're all scattered throughout, so we have to see by the shape of the tooth, how it looks, how many cusps, which maybe we'll get into further down the road, a tooth has, will help us know which tooth it is.
Nicholas: Wow.
Dr. Devin: Yeah.
Nicholas: Look at that. I got schooled. All right.
Nicholas: I think we're just gonna keep this one short. I learned some things. I don't think we need to go on anymore.
Dr. Devin: Sounds good.
Nicholas: It was good.
Dr. Devin: Yeah, we nailed it.
Nicholas: All right. First episode over. Thank you so much for listening, watching, and we will see you next time.
Nicholas: Insert fancy graphics here.