Partners in Care
The Blende Dental Group feels deeply committed to phobic or disabled patients who finally find the courage and make the effort to locate our team to help solve their dental problems. Experience shows us that after a phobic patient surmounts their fear and embarrassment to finally seek treatment in a dental office, the biggest impediment to their successful treatment is when a dentist takes cautious baby-steps with their treatment. This dentist fails to realize that the phobic patient’s reservoir of courage is near empty and that precious supply can easily get used up in just one appointment. Consequently, the patient will likely disappear again for another decade of deterioration. This is why we developed the One-Sleep-Visit Total Dentistry Method.
If they are in proximity of our San Francisco office, we know that we can develop a treatment plan, treat the patient and achieve a predictable success. We define success as completing ALL treatment using definitive restorations, as opposed to interim treatment, which leaves them vulnerable for future failure.
When patients contact us from outside our geographic region, we link them with a Periodontist in that locale as our partner in care - a secondary contact. The Periodontist gathers the preliminary information about the patient's condition, sends us the duplicate x-rays, photographs & perio charting, and confers with us to develop a treatment plan where we work in concert to achieve complete success.
The Periodontist is our point-person in the community. They have the experience to deal with the phobic and know whether their regional dental colleagues have sufficient skills to assure a successful completion of the treatment plan without compromise or failure. We rely on their judgment to discern with us the patient's severity of condition - clinically & medically - and to bring this patient to a successful completion.
We share the Periodontists' desire to treat the periodontium first, and if that can be done by a local Periodontist, everyone benefits.
However, sometimes the patient can not tolerate even the slightest invasive procedures. For some patients, a periodontal probing alone is almost more than they can handle. Treatment will only be an option for these patients if they can be completely asleep and have all of their work done at once. If the complexity of the case or the severity of the phobia can not be dealt with locally, or if the option for unconscious sedation is not available locally, we partner with the Periodontist and arrange for the patient to travel to our office to complete the treatment plan using hospital dentistry. In that case, it falls upon our team’s Periodontist to provide that care as part of a full-mouth rehabilitation case under general anesthesia.
Our hope is that the local Periodontist shares our concern to achieve a long term success: to deliver elegant restorative dentistry which will be maintained locally through the cooperation of the patient and the Periodontist.