Recession Defects – Refer or Reassure? – Specialising in Periodontics – PDP082

Recession is one of the those diagnoses we make all the time - lots of our patients have recession. I always struggled to decide when we should be proactive with recession and suggest surgery - it is very easy to monitor recession through photos and measurements. Specialist Periodontist Dr Amit Patel discusses his decision making when it comes to recession defects. He also discusses his journey which is very encouraging as it teaches us that you DON'T have to have it all figured out from the start.... https://youtu.be/A1b0sL4rJUk Check out this  full episode on YouTube Need to Read it? Check out the Full Episode Transcript below!  Protrusive Dental Pearl: What do you do if your patient is bleeding after an extraction and you're struggling with haemostasis? You can try placing a hot tea bag on the socket (no, really!) - the tannic acid in the tea bag will aid blood clotting. So next time you have a bleeder in the chair, remember, 'time for a cup of tea!' In this episode we discussed: Knowing when to refer recession to a Periodontist for surgery vs monitoring (23:39)Communicating to patients whether to have some treatment done now or later (26:02)Miller’s classification (30:05)Why can we get 100% root coverage (32:36)Do GDPs have a role in carrying out Perio surgery (42:53)Advice for patients to prevent recession to get worse (48:30)Realistic expectations to patients about what kind of aesthetic complications to accept as a compromise (52:01) If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy the episode, Should you specialise? Click here for Full Episode Transcription: Opening Snippet: I've got to be honest the referrals that I've had, the patients don't want to have the surgery okay which is interesting because you know they've obviously been told that they've got a problem, they've got recession but they're just thinking i don't want to go through this hassle, right? So which is fine but what i have noticed during lockdown, I've had a lot more patients contacting me about their gum recession... Jaz's Introduction: Hello, Protruserati. I’m Jaz Gulati and welcome to PDP 082, all about the management of recession defects not like the crazy like you know get the scalpel out let’s all start doing root coverage. More like how to assess it as a GDP because i find that recession is one of those things right? Where it’s like tooth wear in the sense that it’s common but that doesn’t make it acceptable, that doesn’t make it something that we don’t write down as a diagnosis because i find that you know people ignore tooth wear and people ignore recession because why we see it all the time of varying degrees. Some patients will take it really seriously whereas others will have recession for years and you might be the first dentist to have that conversation with them about recession and it can obviously lead to sensitivity and aesthetic issues So it’s a huge issue and i think soft tissues as a whole is something that needs better coverage i guess if that’s a pun I’m allowed to use.  This episode, I’m joined by Amit Patel, who is a I want to say youthful like. This guy’s like got a baby face right and he’s such a good guy. He’s one of the nicest guys in dentistry very knowledgeable and he’s been on the lecture circuit for like years and years and years. Although you wouldn’t tell from his face he like i said he’s a baby face. He’s going to talk all about how he assesses as a periodontist specialist the tissues and how he manages the cases that get referred to him with the recession and it’s amazing how a lot of these cases, he’s just reassuring patients he’s not actually picking up a scalpel and it’s great to know when we can reassure patients and how far we can go that versus when we actually kind of need to intervene or refer so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand so we cover all those things including prognoses and the beginning we also cover the journey like Amit Patel’s journey and it’s anothe...